The Glamour of the Ordinary: Jane Savidge’s Here They Come With Their Make-Up On and Warren Ellis’ Nina Simone’s Gum
In the early days of the pandemic, a Facebook page appeared that consisted entirely of people around the world dressing in costumes and finery to take out their trash. The page was called Bin Isolation Outing and, at its close in December 2020, it had over 900,000 members. What began as a joke among a few Australian friends quickly spread into a worldwide phenomenon, a way of injecting some frivolity and flash into a very scary, often mundane period in time.
During those early stages of the pandemic, I thought a lot about Suede’s 1996 full-length, Coming Up (this was partially because the band were intending on performing the album in full throughout the UK that fall and I kept trying to believe the pandemic would be over by then so I could fly to one, but let’s pretend I was really just tapped into this “glamour of the everyday” strand this whole time). One of the reasons I love the band so much is because of its ability to imbue the ordinary and everyday with a sense of glamour. More simply if paradoxically put, and to echo a 1993 Vox headline, “They’re ordinary, that makes them glam.”
Sometimes concurrent with this glamour of the ordinary, is an equally compelling glamorization of escape from the drudgery of the everyday. As Jane Savidge states in Here They Come With Their Make-Up On, her 2022 book on the making of Coming Up, “...(Suede) are my best means of escape from the humdrum of the everyday, even if they do write songs about the humdrum and the everyday as if our lives depended on it.” In a time when one of the few ways of dealing with the fear and uncertainty of the pandemic was trying to approach the monotony of lockdown with a little frivolity or finding escape through other mediums, Suede provided the perfect soundtrack.
Jane Savidge served as Suede’s PR Agent throughout the band’s ‘90s heyday, and is arguably the best person to write a 33 1/3-style book on a Suede album, which Here They Come... essentially is, save with a lot of insider perspective and a droller tone. In other words, it’s the perfect music book.
I know I just stated a paragraph ago that I spent a lot of the early months of the pandemic thinking about Coming Up. Now I must confess that it’s not a favorite Suede record of mine. In spite of that, it includes the first Suede song I’d ever heard (”Beautiful Ones”), the Suede song that has empowered me the most, personally (”By the Sea”), one of the band’s most definitive songs (”Trash”) and two songs that are no brainers for my “Top 10 favorite Suede songs - these are the ones - no questions asked” list (”Picnic by the Motorway” and “The Chemistry Between Us”). But the rest of the record is either “great songs but not SUEDE GREAT” (”She”) or just OK (looking at you “Filmstar” and “Saturday Night” and begrudgingly “Lazy” although I do honestly love it. No comment on “Starcrazy”). It’s a general fan sentiment, but I genuinely prefer a lot of the b-sides and kind of view the whole thing as a great pop record but also something you can put on in the background and go about your business to. For someone who loves Suede for their high drama, there’s no falling to your knees and wailing “Have you ever tried it that way?” to the point of hoarseness -- i.e. I would never scrub the kitchen sink while listening to the debut album or Dog Man Star or Night Thoughts.
And so, like all great books about music, Savidge chronicles Coming Up in such a charming and insightful way that I couldn’t help but reevaluate the record and appreciate it anew. This is in no small part to the band and producer Ed Buller as well, who offer a lot in the way of songwriting and creativity. Several times, these insights touch on the classic pop sensibilities which buoy these songs. A quote from a Guardian interview with frontman Brett Anderson which opens the chapter on “Trash” asserts, “It’s about believing in the romance of the everyday. I really wanted to make a straight-up pop record. We were listening to a lot of ‘60s pop at the time and were very much inspired by the classic three and a half minute single.”
Elsewhere, keyboardist Neil Codling mentions, in reference to “Lazy,” mentions listening to The Beatles’ “I Feel Fine” in an effort to achieve a Beatles guitar tone and says, “It had an indie sensibility and a classic ‘60s feel as well as sounding ‘90s.” He also talks about the Suede signature being “a bit of grit in the oyster, a twist in the chords or the melodies...” and it’s perhaps one of the most concise statements on one of the reasons these songs endure.
Similarly enduring and endearing is Savidge, who -- despite the aforementioned input from all members of Suede -- comes across as the biggest star, presiding over everything with wit and insight. If you’ve read either of Anderson’s two memoirs, you might notice he can get a bit florid with his words, and Savidge lovingly diffuses any threats of overseriousness here. Whether observing the “bad, bored bony” protagonist of “She” doesn’t sound very happy or reminiscing about incidents involving Elton John and a champagne cork (not as dirty as that sounds), her prose are a consistent delight. She’s also unafraid of cunningly deriding these songs that fans sometimes are a bit too precious over. In discussing “Trash,” Savidge writes that it “very much knows what it is doing -- preaching to the converted, perhaps -- but doing it with such style and grace that you couldn’t help loving it all the more.” In a way this sums up Here They Come With Their Make-Up On and Coming Up perfectly, it knows what its doing and I already love everyone involved, but its style and grace have me adoring it anew.
Perhaps nothing can be thought of as so instantly disposable as a wad of chewed gum. It’s an object that is hard to muster one thought about, but in Nina Simone’s Gum, Warren Ellis manages to rhapsodize on a piece of chewed gum for over 100 pages. Granted, this is not any old wad of gum, it once belonged to the great singer and songwriter Nina Simone, who stuck it to her piano when taking the stage at the Nick Cave-curated edition of the Meltdown Festival, which was held in London in 1999.
Ellis has a rich musical history, most famously as frontman for the Dirty Three and the most prominent Bad Seed of the 21st century, but this is his first foray into writing and hopefully not the last because his prose is eloquent and enchanting. Although a short read, I really stretched out my time with the book because I was so entranced by Ellis’ writing and, by extension, the man himself. His fascinations, his reminiscences and the occasional glimpses of his friendship with Nick Cave all made me wish that everyone had a Warren Ellis of their own.
“It’s always been other people who have brought that potential out of me. I’m the inverse of the gum somehow. It’s about connection. People who have encouraged me to be the best I can, allow me to go unrestrained. Letting ideas take flight. Letting me take flight. The wonder of playing in a band. Making music with people. I was watching something unfold in a visual way, that I sensed often as an abstract or internalised concept.”
The reverence Ellis has for those who inspired him is, well, inspiring in itself. When recounting seeing another hero, Alice Coltrane, several years after the Nina Simone gig, he writes, “Every recording I have gone into I have in my own way tried to honor her,” and “It was that moment again. Those times you think are never going to happen in your life,” and I’m sure every music lover seeing their heroes performing in the flesh can relate. I also love that, in recalling the Nina Simone Meltdown set, Ellis admits “I can’t recall much of what she played.” It’s a passing sentence but it really speaks to something about transcendence over memory, how some performances are so powerful, it’s not about what was played but rather something beyond the experience itself. In Ellis’ words, a communion.
But mostly, Nina Simone’s Gum is about collecting and the perception of objects, how something easily disposable can be charged with spiritual significance. Ellis remarks several times that, as the gum makes the rounds from a jeweler to a museum exhibition, he “became aware that the gum was bringing out the best in people.” The gum eventually finds itself on a plinth in the Hallway of Gratitude portion of Nick Cave’s “Stranger Than Kindness” exhibit at the Royal Danish Library, presented as the religious artifact it is in Ellis’ eyes. The process of managing the gum from a curatorial perspective -- from temperature control to assessing the gum’s value for insurance purposes -- is fascinating, and provokes a lot of thoughts about how settings themselves can change an object’s significance (this, paired with the overall theme of the book, reminded me many times of the New Museum’s excellent “The Keeper” exhibition from 2016).
In discussing the gum’s inclusion in the “Stranger Than Kindness” exhibition, Nick Cave writes in the book’s forward that exhibition goers will “marvel at the significance of this most ordinary and disposable of things...” Just as taking out the trash became an occasion for frivolity for some, so too can a song about the everyday become a pop anthem, and a piece of chewing gum a sacred object. The pandemic and lockdowns may have forced a lot of us to come to terms with the drudgery of the everyday, but with luck they also afforded us a few flashes of beauty amidst the mundane.
