Bernard Butler has popped up a couple of times in this column, but not alone – once, with two fellow songwriter-guitarists as Butler, Blake & Grant; but also writing and performing with Jessie Buckley, to sublime effect. Over 30 years Butler has become one of pop’s great enablers. He’s worked on hit records, miss records and records that were never intended to be hits. He’s played with everyone, but has seldom sought much of a spotlight himself.
Like Johnny Marr, he stepped away from a generational band – Suede – at the height of the mania for them. Like Marr – and unlike most others who step away from stardom and seek the shadows – he continued working, but always on his own terms. Also like Marr, while he may have sidestepped the clichés of rock stardom, he’s still unmistakably a rock star: hair that tousled doesn’t come cheap; the clothes were casual but not from TK Maxx; the thinness was that shared only by long-distance runners and men who throw shapes with guitars.
There are a handful of guitar players who I will pay to hear noodle – and Butler is one of them
He played at the Green Note – a tiny folk club in Camden – not because he needs to, but because he plainly loves it: doing exactly what he wants in front of an audience small enough that you can’t really shout out requests without everyone staring. If he wanted to, he could have a crack session-band and play big rooms – so long as he stuck to the Suede songs and perhaps some of the stuff that he wrote with Duffy. Absolutely no chance of that, however.
On the second of two nights at the Green Note, he was in expansive enough mood to play a Suede song, ‘The Wild Ones’. It was one of only two Suede songs he’s ever played in public since leaving the band – and it was only the 13th time in more than 30 years. (He’s played the other one only once.) One sensed the crowd rather wanted to get to their feet and cheer its opening notes, but didn’t dare lest the horse be spooked.
Watching Butler at work at close quarters was thrilling. Much as I think the electric guitar makes the most satisfying noises known to man, I’m not much inclined towards soloing. There are, however, a handful of guitar players who I will always pay to hear noodle – and Butler is one of them.
With two guitars and a pedal board – including a loop pedal that provided the rhythm – he filled the space with wildness and temperance, his guitar at a tone that had the deep auburn consistency of your nana’s sideboard. His fingers flew up and down the neck, the tousled hair flicked. The likes of ‘Camber Sands’, ‘Not Alone’, ‘People Move On’ and ‘The 90s’ were also a reminder of what a strong songwriter he is.
Butler owes his peripatetic career to having become famous young. And he became famous young through luck. Yes, Suede were good, but they existed in a time of three weekly music papers, John Peel and Top of the Pops. Nowadays a young indie band needs even more luck. And the one thing that you have to do is be on the right bills. In January, one of those bills is the Five Day Forecast, an annual week-long run of new bands.
Ain’t were the third band (of four) on the Thursday night. They are very young, audibly indebted to US college rock of the late 1980s and early 1990s, and very good at it: they were sufficiently locked in with each other to have that delightful sense of being about to fall apart but always winding everything back in. The singer danced like Stevie Nicks and Kate Bush, and looked like Sophie Thatcher. The entire front row of men filmed her constantly. I have other notes, but in short I liked Ain’t a great deal.
I also liked To the Lighthouse a great deal: a trio from Halifax playing very melodic but muscular indie rock, with a young woman lead called Oolagh Hodgson, who is both a lovely singer and undeniably gorgeous. But there was no front row of amateur photographers. There was barely anyone there. Why? Because they haven’t had the luck. They were at a half-empty Victoria in Dalston while the action was over on the Pentonville Road at the Lexington. They’ve already had to change their name and image once because they’d been ignored for too long under the old one, so now they’ve got to do it all over again and hope someone notices. Fingers crossed.
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