Bernard Butler

Bernard Butler is not the man to turn to if you want to be reassured that rock’n’roll excess is alive and well. He’s not a pop star to put his life on a pedestal and tell you about your life like it’s noticed in passing from a lofty perch.

He could have done it of course, could have walked the walk with leather trousers squeaking on his hips and string sections pouring money down the drain. But it would be a lie, as much of a lie as if he made his words fit the moments from his past that people think they should fit. Bernard
Butler turned his back on tricks like that to get back to what music was really about. ‘Friends and Lovers’ is the album he’s made after finding it.

“Everything is so fucking precious to me when it comes to writing songs,” Butler says, in a cafe not too far from the leafy streets on North London where both the man and the album were born. “I’ve left the groups because of it, I’ve done all these mad, un-career like things in order to chase
this stupid musical dream, and I have been mis-interpreted at every step. And I’ve known the only reason is the fire.”

It’s had to burn pretty brightly at times for Bernard Butler to make it through. Through Suede and his brief collaboration with David McAlmont, Butler found enough of it to be considered one of the greatest British Songwriters of the 1990s.

And with ‘People Move On’, his debut album released at the start of 1998, he’d found enough of it to shrug off the criticisms and self-doubt that had prevented him singing his own songs. But there was still something waiting to get out…

“There’s certain things I held back all along that I was too scared to say until this record. This is the first time that I am totally happy with it. I couldn’t get everything that I wanted to in the last one. It was honest, but it was honest about half the story rather than the whole story. This is much more brutal and much more decisive. I feel I’ve got much more out on this record.”

Butler hasn’t felt the need to turn a fire into a bonfire. ‘People Move On’ washed it’s most thoughtful moments with a layered sheen and boosted it’s rumbling electricity with track and tracks and yet more tracks of guitar. But second time around it seems less is more.

Recorded in London and mixed in New York (with Nirvana and Jeff Buckley collaborator Andy Wallace) ‘Friends and Lovers’ returns to riff-driven songs that Butler temporarily put on the shelf last time.

“Everything on the last record was going towards 48 tracks nearly every song apart from a couple of acoustic ones… ‘Woman I Know’ with all its overdubs was pretty huge, and everything on this one was 24 tracks or under. That was the decision I made, we’re using one machine from start to finish, and we’re not using strings either.”

“I think this record is very guitar based, much more so than the last one, much more electric guitar based. I think I’ve been a lot more simple and direct and got back to playing riffs rather than playing acoustic with lots of lead overdubs. ‘I’d Do It Again If I Could’ and ‘Friends and Lovers’ are just good guitar riffs, and you know when you’re writing you can’t let go of stuff like that, you’ve got to do something with it.”

Musically ‘Friends and Lovers’ pulls no punches – when it’s bold, it’s not because of a string section to force a point, but because Butler’s riffs simply don’t need any embellishment. Listen to ‘You Must Go On’ and you know it’s the kind of song one with a chorus so natural it should be organically certified – that the likes of chart-topping Robbie Williams wish they had at their command. The post-punk wall of sound that Butler built for McAlmont and Butler and ‘People Move On’ had been dismantled brick by brick to leave something else, a simple approach that never sounds consciously stripped-back, trading vast string fills and massive banks of guitars with Hammond swirls and sparkling piano trills.

But music’s just one thing. As the man himself has said, it’s taken a long time for Bernard Butler to feel comfortable talking about who he is and what he feels. “No more. I love the words on this record, a lot of it is tongue in cheek, ‘Friends and Lovers’ as a title is completely tongue in cheek. I don’t know what people will make of it. Half the time with a lot of these songs I didn’t know what to make of it. On the last record I wouldn’t have done them. “cos I would have thought, ‘Is this appropriate, can I get away with this, is this OK?’. And this record I thought, ‘Fuck it, I’ll say what I want’, and if it sounded slightly unusual or odd or didn’t remind me of another lyricist then that was cool.”

There aren’t many songwriters who would bring themselves to write a song like ‘Precious’ either, a sparse, naked acoustic song that peers inside what seems to be a tortured, confessional psyche, when all the time it’s Butler looking on bemused at what some people expect him to be.

“‘Precious’ is about me as a songwriter and the predicament I feel myself in, when I’m sitting in my attic writing songs and suddenly I think ‘God I’m a wanker! Can I say that about myself. Is this me or the nutcase in the back of my head, is this my fantasy person, am I Billy Liar is this me?’”

But deep down away from the preconceptions of those who don’t really know what goes on in the life of this happily married dad of one, Bernard Butler knows that ‘Friends and Lovers’ isn’t born from a fantasy world. And he knows the decision he’s made. To take the dream this far, isn’t a light one.

“I was aware that this was a craft and it was going to be something that I would have to step into, very secretly on my own, and decide whether I was comfortable with it… Being the sole songwriter was never going to be a big problem for me, I knew I could come up with the millions of melodies. It was a case of would I be comfortable, writing words? And that was the biggest shock of all that I was really comfortable with writing, and it did it for me, right from the start.”

“It was a real serious lifetime discovery, mainly because it happened in my mid 20s rather than in my mid teens… I knew a lot of people would hate me for it, but I knew if it was good I could see it through. I knew I would never want to be an amazing technical singer. The people I admired and
the people I was into had very natural voices where there’s an X factor of emotion that can’t be placed in the quality of the voice, there was just something about it.”

“Whatever people are getting out of it, of my guitar playing, I wanted them to get out of my voice. I knew that had to be the ideal. I think I have achieved it.”

…biography by Steve Dowling