Psycho For Drum Machine
Britpop earworm
A quick note (and perhaps a persistent earwork).
There are some bands which aren’t necessarily guilty pleasures, but which I’d perhaps call a “tourist pleasure.” I read something that prompted me to pick up an album or collection, and listened enough to identify a couple of songs that I genuinely like, without feeling any need to go farther into the catelog. One of that bands is (The London) Suede, and their single, “Beautiful Ones.”
Part of what I love about the song is the opening guitar riff — the first 8 seconds before the drums come in are somehow perfect. The guitar sounds a little muted and catchy. Looking up the history of the song, I was amused to learn:
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. Many assumed that, without Butler at the band’s musical helm, Suede were fated to sink beneath the waters of public disinterest.
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Hailing from Poole, Dorset, the teenage Richard Oakes wowed the band further during his live audition “It was very much a case of keep your head down, play the songs.” Richard remembered in David Barnett’s Love and Poison “At the end of Metal Mickey, Brett kicked over his mic stand because he was so excited. But I still didn’t really think they’d ask me to join.”
Putting his studies and the prospect of uni to one side, Oakes promptly signed up to be the guitarist in one of the UK’s then-most important bands, going out on tour to promote the recently released Dog Man Star. “It was kind of like being eased into it – if the first thing I’d had to do was write an album it would have been a lot more difficult” Admitted Oakes in a DVD interview on a Coming Up reissue.
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The vital Beautiful Ones was centred around a seductive circular guitar hook that Oakes wrote over a jubilant C, D7, F, E chord sequence. Initially titled ‘Dead Leg’, the song was an obvious standout.
Also worth listening to this live version in which Brett Anderson really commits to the “la la la” in the outro.