When Richard Oakes joins Suede enters the history books, it reads like a classic underdog story: a 17-year-old A-Level student on his school holidays in Dorset, playing with his own band The Electric Daffodils, spots a small ad in the music papers and ends up rescuing one of the most hyped acts in British guitar music. What followed was not just a band saved from collapse, but the creation of one of the defining British albums of the 1990s.
From Best New Band to Crisis: The Bernard Butler Departure
Suede’s trajectory up to the summer of 1994 had been extraordinary. Their self-titled debut album, released on 29 March 1993, debuted at number one on the UK albums chart and became the fastest-selling debut in the UK in almost a decade. It won the 1993 Mercury Music Prize and came to be regarded as a foundation stone for BritPop. NME and the wider music press had anointed them the future. Expectations for a second album, Dog Man Star, were enormous.
Then it fell apart. On 25 May 1994, three months into recording at Master Rock Studios, guitarist Bernard Butler took a two-day break to get married, without inviting any of his bandmates. He returned to the Kilburn facility 48 hours later, packed up his guitars, and left without a word. The band’s final release with Butler was a non-album single titled Stay Together, a title that aged badly almost immediately.
Their manager Charlie Charlton told NME at the time: ‘They were a unit, and that hasn’t been totally destroyed, one element has been lost but it will be replaced by another. It was in everybody’s best interests that Bernard left, there were no musical differences, it was all personal.’
Richard Oakes Joins Suede: The Audition That Changed Everything
Management placed adverts in Britain’s ‘inkie’ music papers that summer, asking applicants to send a picture, a fluffy toy and a demo tape. Oakes responded. The tape included a few Suede songs he had demo’d ‘when I should have been doing my homework,’ he told Guitar World, along with a couple of TED songs. He also sent what he later described as ‘a ridiculously arrogant letter,’ claiming to be ‘the greatest living guitar prodigy,’ and shaving three years off his age in the process. ‘I was 17 at the time, but there you go,’ he admitted.
The white lie did not sink his chances. In September 1994, after a three-song audition, Oakes was in the band. ‘He can play like the devil,’ Brett Anderson told fans. ‘He’s going to blow our heads off.’
His first 18 months in the group were spent replicating Bernard Butler’s guitar parts on stage, workmanlike but necessary. When it came time to write and record the third album, the pressure and the pent-up energy came out at once. ‘To be at Wessex Studios in Highbury, where some of my favourite music has been recorded, working on music of my own… that was far more of a “Wow” moment than any gig we had done up to that point,’ Oakes told Guitar World. ‘I was still only just 18, and it was difficult to take in everything that was happening to me in 1994, but that recording session sticks in my head as the first time I realized the magnitude of the opportunity that had been offered to me.’
Coming Up: The Record That Shut Everyone Up
The intention for album three was explicit. ‘We wanted a record so “pop” that it could almost be a Greatest Hits,’ Anderson told Select magazine. Bassist Mat Osman explained the dynamic to Guitar magazine: ‘Part of the sound was dictated by the way Richard plays guitar. He’s got this really economical, direct style which fitted perfectly with Brett wanting to write in a more simple way. We wanted to make this sound like a debut album. This album is distilled Suede. And if you don’t like us, you’re going to fucking hate this!’
Lead single Trash, released on 29 July 1996, arrived into an England briefly drunk on Three Lions and Euro 96 flag-waving. It couldn’t have been a more deliberate contrast. Anderson’s lyric was a celebration of outsiders, the misfits and freaks who had no place in that particular party: ‘Oh maybe, maybe it’s the clothes we wear, the tasteless bracelets and the dye in our hair… But we’re trash, you and me. We’re the litter on the breeze.’ The single peaked at number three in the UK charts and became Suede’s best-selling single ever.
Coming Up followed on 2 September 1996. The Daily Telegraph wrote: ‘Coming Up is their defiant reminder of what made Suede so special. If Dog Man Star was Diamond Dogs, then this is Suede’s Ziggy Stardust, extravagant, steeped in glam and unashamedly poppy.’ The album debuted at number one and sold 300,000 copies within four months. Singles Beautiful Ones, Saturday Night, Lazy and Filmstar all followed Trash into the UK Top 10.
Keyboardist Neil Codling put the album’s wider ambition plainly: ‘Melody is a way to burrow into people’s brains. You need an ear worm, and then you can corrupt people. And that was always part of what Brett was trying to do. He’s trying to poison the mainstream.’
Oakes, looking back, is clear-eyed about what the record meant: ‘You’re at your most creative in a band if you’ve got something to kick against and Coming Up was us doing that. It was like, “No, we’re not done. Just you watch.”‘
One high-profile admirer was already convinced. David Bowie, one of Suede’s most vocal supporters, surveyed their swaggering return and offered a verdict that would prove characteristically accurate: Suede, he said, were ‘bound to be an institution by the year 2000.’
