So…the greatest album of the nineties?
Well, duh, obviously Nevermind, no?
No.
IMHO, the greatest album of the nineties is Dog Man Star by Suede.
…and here’s why.
Between 1992 to early 1994, Suede were actually quite cool and fashionable. Nirvana had shown that ‘indie/alternative’ could get on daytime radio, which was beginning to change. And the artists previously the domain of early evening shows on Radio 1 were starting to make the daytime playlists. Suede were an intoxicating mixture of glam, the gothic and implied sexuality -Brett Anderson’s quote that ‘I’m a bisexual who’s never had a homosexual experience’ was quoted even more than the couplet from one of their b-sides (a b-side, for christ’s sake!) ‘My Insatiable One’ -‘On the escalators/you shit paracetomal.’
By September 1994, things were starting to change for Suede, and not necessarily for the best. I was in my final year of school, and starting to sense that life in a small town would not have to plague me forever. Suede’s second album was anticipated – but the Britpop scene that they were part of, whether they wanted to be or not, was starting to overtake them. Blur had released Parklife a few months previously, Oasis’ Definitely Maybe was bringing laddishness back into fashion (unfortunately) and looking effete was not so cool any more. And Pulp’s Jarvis Cocker was also proving that he could write a dark, deeply sexual lyric.
Had Dog Man Star come out in the eighties, it would probably have been described as goth. And there’s a certain amount of the gothic about the album. With its’ tales of life in suburbia, getting wrecked to ease the pain, dying young and staying pretty…this was the mood of the album. Hints of drug use crept into the album, and then into the interviews. Was ‘Heroine’ just a clever pun…or something more? What about ‘Daddy’s Speeding?’ but ‘new generation’ the final single release from the album was optimistic, and anthemic. I’d picked up the 12″ single on a trip to London, and brought it back, like a talisman.
Dog Man Star is an album out of time and all the better for it. It’s the album that ensured Suede always meant more to than Oasis ever, ever could. It’s orchestral – not because it aspired to be like the Beatles, but because it aspired to lift us out of the towns that dragged us down, and the Smiths were never, ever coming back. It was the soundtrack of outsiders who longed to escape. In my penultimate term at school my friend Duncan and I got tickets to see them in Leicester – and we were not disappointed. It was a cold night (oddly fitting, given the mood of the album) , and even with Bernard Butler having departed, Richard Oakes’ enthusiasm made up for it.
I was never going to fit in a small town. Why would I want to? There wasn’t a way out…but a way forward. Suede might be falling from grace – but the rugger buggers and townies would soon be left behind. There was…hope.