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issue 1 june 2004

without so much as a backward glance, suede have earned themselves a place in the pantheon of great british pop groups. and, like all good things before them, they seemed to come out of nowhere. two and a half years ago they were just another low-rent-glam-rock group looking for a place to play, just another bunch of naïve hopefuls named after a fabric (felt, corduroy, denim, etc.). then, almost overnight, after a few good live reviews and the releases of their first single – a shrill declaration of independence called the “the drowners” – that music press descended upon them like a pack of rapacious bloodhounds. in just six months suede – purveyors of modern glam-rock – got the covers of the melody maker, nme, q, select and almost every other music magazine in britain. there were 20 covers in all. although the press were more than keen, with hindsight it was deemed to be a highly orchestrated campaign by the group’s publicist, john best. so successful was best’s assault thought to be that last year he won the music week award for press campaign of 1993. the judges said it “took suede from obscurity to being hailed as the best band of the year”. given their enthusiasm it is likely that the music press would have written about the band anyway.

these four skinny white boys were called the last great british pop group, the saviours of rock, the finest british pop group since the smiths… four louche young men who have, according to one particularly smitten rock journalist, “single-handedly revitalized our faith in sexy, provocative english guitar pop”. they has so much coverage that one began to suspect that very little else was happening in the british music scene. this was not altogether true. even considering the tyranny of youth, these days pop phenomena are few and far between, and suede arrived at a time when the other icons of modern cutting-edge pop – morrissey, the stone roses, primal scream, etc, - were absent from the scene.