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BTCP: Bernard Butler

The Church, Ipswich

Information - BTCP: Bernard Butler

Bernard Butler is a Brit and Grammy Award winning musician. In 1989 he formed Suede releasing the Mercury winning debut “Suede”. The era-defining “Dog Man Star” was followed by his collaboration with David McAlmont on the anthem ”Yes”. Two solo albums on Creation yielded a Brit nomination before producing seminal releases by The Libertines, Tricky, Black Kids, Kate Nash, James Morrison, Texas, Mark Eitzel, Paloma Faith and Duffy – spawning her Grammy and Brit Award winning debut Rockferry. He has played guitar for Pet Shop Boys, Bryan Ferry, Roy Orbison, Bert Jansch, The Libertines, Neneh Cherry, Robert Plant and Ben Watt. Butler is Patron to the Bert Jansch Foundation and Generator NE and lectures in songwriting for the Abbey Road Institute.

Good Grief is Butler’s first new solo album in 25 years, where over that time Butler had ventured into the world of pop songwriting and producing, including two seminal albums with folk musician Sam Lee, a Mercury nominated project with actor Jessie Buckley as well as working with Bert Jansch and Ben Watt from Everything But The Girl, The Libertines, Tricky and an eight-million selling, Grammy-winning record with Duffy.

Speaking about ‘Pretty D’ the third tack to be taken ‘Good Grief’ following up ‘Deep Emotions’ and ‘Camber Sands’, Butler says “I like change. We are all constantly changing, shedding our skin, growing, blooming and decaying. And yet we yearn to relive a moment of love, of thrill, of fire and in doing so pull ourselves further from the possibilities of the present. Perhaps it is because in constant flux we find it hard to see ourselves in any moment. In ‘Pretty D’ I am haunted by the past and scared of the present and neither really works for anyone, but it is meant with a light heart that has seen me through my musicians’ compulsion to change.”

Of returning to solo work after two and a half decades, Butler says ‘For a good while I was scarred and I was scared. I was happily distracted and joyously involved with so much music. I realised just being there was more than I had ever hoped for. I gave a lot to other people, but realised that my story was defined but what I was, rather than what I am. I set myself a modest commercial goal, an expectant creative one: perform to 10 people without being bottled, then find 11 the next night. Thus began the undoing of my own embarrassment. I would write as I thought and sing as I wrote until the bottles fly. And so, the songs arrived.’

‘Good Grief’ finds Bernard Butler owning three decades of work, free to perform, bookended by wildly contrasting experiences of loss, joy, and bewilderment, it is a from the city to the coast and back, and between that, an entire spectrum of human emotion.