Few rock & roll breakups have been as plain nasty as
Bernard Butler leaving
Suede during the final stages of recording their second album,
Dog Man Star, in 1994. The guitarist departed abruptly, leaving
Butler's co-songwriter, vocalist
Brett Anderson, to finish the epic sophomore effort;
Anderson was even forced to lay down guitar parts
Butler left unrecorded. The bad blood flowed throughout the pages of NME and Melody Maker, with
Anderson hiring youthful
Butler look-alike
Richard Oakes as his replacement guitarist right before the gothic, grandiose epic did a commercial swan dive during the height of hedonistic Britpop.
Anderson picked up the pieces by doing a deliberate 180 from
Dog Man Star with 1997's
Coming Up, a trashy, fizzy piece of neo-glam that brought
Suede to the top of the charts, just after
Butler's project with neo-soul vocalist
David McAlmont imploded and just before the guitarist launched a solo career comprised of two densely indulgent albums. As
Butler was pursuing his whims,
Anderson kept
Suede churning out explicit sequels to
Coming Up before the band collapsed in a tired heap of addiction and fatigue after the release of 2002's
New Morning. That album appeared a month after
Butler's good but roundly ignored reunion with
McAlmont, meaning that by the end of 2002, both men were free to pursue new projects -- or revive old alliances as the case may be, since
Anderson and
Butler buried the hatchet in 2004 and formed a new band,
the Tears, releasing its debut album,
Here Come the Tears, in the summer of 2005.