Here They Come With Their MakeUp On by Jane Savidge;

Author:Jane Savidge;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Lightning Source Inc. (Tier 1)
Published: 2022-01-25T00:00:00+00:00

SIDE B ...

11

SEX AND GLUE

“There are more drug references on ‘Beautiful Ones’ than on any other Suede song I can think of ...”

‘That is definitely not a single.’

Side B of Coming Up kicks off with ‘Beautiful Ones’, a song populated with a procession of freaks ‘based on friends’, says Brett, although he also admits his fascination with ‘beautiful losers’ is probably down to a misguided sense of romance. ‘In a song, you can actually take a bad situation and turn it into something good. It’s quite a karmic process. You can take all the shit in the world and stick it through this filter, stick it into the blender, and with the right ingredients you get something great.’

‘It’s odd how when songs become really popular you feel, as a writer, less ownership of them,’ Brett tells me. ‘“Beautiful Ones” was one of those that over the years has just taken on a life of its own. It’s like a really successful kid who grows up and becomes some sort of high-flyer: you never need to worry about them and so your attention as a parent becomes focussed on the more damaged members of your brood.’

The original title for ‘Beautiful Ones’ was ‘Dead Leg’, after Mat Osman dropped Richard Oakes at his flat with the jokey threat, ‘If you don’t write us a Top 10 single, I’m going to give you a dead leg!’ Richard had several other working titles like ‘Wedgie’ and ‘Chinese Burn’ based on childhood tortures, but, sometime later, he turned up at Brett’s flat and handed a cassette over. ‘I gave him a cup of tea whilst me and Alan were partying,’ said Brett. ‘I was swaying but I thought it was a really good riff and all I had to do was pin a melody to it.’

When he’d stopped swaying, Brett tore a few pages out of his notebook and started singing. ‘It was a funny afternoon,’ he recalls, ‘and there was a bit of insanity coming through as I was in a sweatbox of a studio with no air conditioning.’ That studio was the tiny room that he and Richard had started writing in. ‘When you build a studio,’ Brett adds, ‘you build a room within a room, so that little box room in Chesterton Road was six inches smaller than the room and contained me, Richard, and Alan and a couple of other people.’ It wasn’t long before ‘Dead Leg’ became ‘Beautiful Scum’, a song ‘about my marginal life and the insane world we live in on the edges of society and the people we know and the beautiful underbelly of London’.

The song itself, adds Richard, ‘is a weird little light piece that I wrote one evening after a rehearsal.’ He confirms that Mat did indeed give him an ultimatum that mentioned ‘dead legs’ if he didn’t write a hit, but once he’d written and demoed the song, he’d turned up at Chesterton Road in the midst of a party that suggested Brett and Alan had been up for several days.

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