Bernard Butler is at pains not to be misconstrued.
As we chat, he patiently corrects any misconceptions I might have about his recent LP, Good Grief. Released on his own 355 Recordings, it’s his first recording as a solo artist since 1999’s Friends and Lovers. To my ears, it has an almost elegiac air, a remembrance of things past. But, as Butler explains, this was far from his intention.
Leading me through the sandpapery swirl of the track Camber Sands, he says: “People will always assume that anything you do or anything you say at this stage is just looking back on ‘the good old days’. That song is actually about what’s happened to me in the last five years, travelling to Camber Sands, travelling to the coast, as an escape. Camber Sands, if you don’t know it, is a beautiful, incredible beach. Most days of the week, there’ll be no one there. There’ll be a couple of people and a dog. If anything, it’s nostalgia about what we did last week.”
Bernard Butler. Photo by Eva Vermandel. Photo supplied by Bernard Butler.
This interest in (and poetic appreciation of) the bucolic is, by Butler‘s own acknowledgement, a more recent awakening; one which he describes in words which could almost be lyrics themselves.
“I don’t have a great lot of knowledge of nature, so when I go to the sea there’s a romance, and a beautiful fantasy of what would happen if we didn’t live in London. We look to the coastline, we look to the sea, because seas and horizons help us dream. We look to the horizon, and it’s the impossible and it gives us imagination. In the city, that’s very difficult, everything’s in front of you. It’s in your face all the time – the police cars, the buses, the noise.”
Perhaps his wariness of submitting to other people’s preconceptions lies in his younger days when he was first exposed to the music industry as the prodigiously gifted guitarist in Suede, a far more interesting 90s prospect than their Burnage-born near-contemporaries.
As Butler reflects, assiduously avoiding the ‘S’ word: “I was once in a rock and roll band that was in your face when I was younger. Lots of people got to know me at first because of that moment. But they find it very difficult to see that 30 years of my life have passed. I’m 54, and my life’s never been better. When I was 22, it was fucking horrible.”
One side of this was the experience of finding his background measured against other people’s yardsticks.
“There were periods I felt very branded when I was young,” says Butler. “For who I was, for lacking a certain scope that middle-class people grew up with. It sort of patronised my experience. It made me sort of hide it a lot of the time and I felt like I should try to fit in, because I felt embarrassed I didn’t know about so much stuff.”
Decades later, he no longer makes any bones about his upbringing, taking pride in how it shaped him.
“The way I grew up, and the way everyone I knew grew up, we grew up around a strict Catholic upbringing, and watching TV and Irish parents and stuff. We weren’t in touch with nature, we didn’t do things like that. We didn’t have a car, we didn’t go to the countryside. We didn’t go on foreign holidays. No one I knew did. Now I enjoy that. It’s way more interesting the way I grew up than some middle-class suburban lifestyle.”
This self-determination extends to releasing his own music, the importance of which he illustrates with a tale of how he almost went against his better judgement.
Bernard Butler. Photo by Bella Keery. Photo supplied by Bernard Butler.
“In terms of my own label, it’s just because I’ve been signed and dropped by so many labels that I just don’t give a fuck, you know? I just thought that the last thing I want to do is to take my little solo record cap in hand to a record company. Actually, I did with somebody. Somebody asked me, you know, ‘I’d really love to hear what you’re doing’, and I thought, ‘I’ll give this away to you’. And, man, after three weeks, there was no reply, and then after about four weeks, the person emailed me and said, ‘just to let you know, I’ve got your songs, I’ve been busy and, you know what, I’m going on holiday next week, I’m going to listen to it then’. And I just thought, ‘fuck that’.”
There is, of course, a postscript. “I think the person did reply finally and really liked it, but had lots of input into it. And I’m just like ‘on your bike’, you know.”
Very much his own man, Good Grief represents less a mid-life crisis, and more a mid-life consolidation. Uninterested in being pinned down by the preconceptions of others, Bernard Butler continues to make himself up as he goes along.
Main image by Victoria Wai. Photo supplied by Bernard Butler.
Bernard Butler will be appearing at the Manchester Folk Festival in March 2025. For more information, click here.
