“I put the cassette in, expecting to be underwhelmed, and I wasn’t,” Anderson recalled in The Insatiable Ones documentary, “I heard this very eloquent, powerful, technically proficient guitar playing. Responding to a low-key box ad that the Mercury Award-winners had placed in the Melody Maker, the young A-level student had posted in a four-track tape of his renditions of various Suede songs. Rather than opting for an established session player or a high-profile guest from another band, Suede took a monumental gamble on a 17-year old fan. The second, was the man tasked with the mountainous duty of filling that pivotal guitarist role.
The cousin of Suede’s drummer Simon Gilbert, Codling became something of a second frontman during the Coming Up era, with his natural good looks perfect for magazine photoshoots, and for taking a prominent role in the band’s videos. Firstly, there was Neil Codling on keyboards. But, as Brett Anderson remembered in his second autobiography, Afternoon With The Blinds Drawn, “ Coming Up was an album snatched against the odds from the savage jaws of failure.”Ĭentral to the re-tooled Suede sound was the addition of two new members. Spawning a staggering five UK top ten singles, the album revitalised the band’s fanbase and established a new variation of Suede’s sound. Meanwhile, the Britpop movement the band had fomented consumed the airwaves – albeit in a form near-unrecognisable to Suede’s original vision.Ī delicious victory then, when their next move, the musically rich yet widely accessible Coming Up, became the band’s biggest ever commercial success. Many assumed that, without Butler at the band’s musical helm, Suede were fated to sink beneath the waters of public disinterest. With former inventive guitarist Bernard Butler no longer in play after the fractious recording of 1994’s Dog Man Star, the vultures had been circling ominously overhead.
It doesn’t matter how many times they stamp us into the ground, because we always come back.” Regularly proclaimed Suede’s frontman Brett Anderson throughout the band’s 2019 tour, usually in prologue to the explosive opening of one of the band’s signature songs: Trash. “It doesn’t matter how many times they grind us down.
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