The landmark 1996 album reconstructed from BBC sessions and live recordings! Suede’s commercial high watermark came in 1996 with ‘Coming Up’. The 1995 addition to the line-up of lead guitarist Richard Oakes and keyboard player Neil Codling had given the band a new impetus and focus. At the very pinnacle of ‘Britpop’ – a scene they’d helped inspire but fiercely operated outside of – roared back with an adrenalin rush of new Suede classics.
The first missive from ‘Coming Up’ was the trailblazing ‘Trash’, which reached No. 3 in the UK chart – a joint career-best for the band. That was followed into the Top 10 over the next twelve months by four more hit singles from the album – ‘Beautiful Ones’, ‘Lazy’, ‘Saturday Night’, and ‘Filmstar’.
During ‘Coming Up’s’ album and singles lifespan of more than a year the band toured almost constantly – taking in the USA, Japan, Europe and right across the UK. The culmination of a year’s precision-tooling of the material in the live arena came 22nd August 1997 and a triumphant headlining slot at Reading Festival.
Collected here are selected recordings from the Reading gig, broadcast on BBC Radio 1, plus some previously unreleased studio takes of the album’s tracks recorded for the station’s Evening Session and Mark Radcliffe shows. Cherrypicked by the band as the best possible ‘Coming Up’ BBC recordings, they’ve been sequenced for ‘Coming Up At The BBC’ in the same order as the original studio album.
Note: Because no contemporary or BBC versions of the album’s penultimate song, ‘The Chemistry Between Us’ exists, Suede have kindly donated a previously unreleased 1999 live version recorded by the same line up at that year’s Roskilde Festival.
The Fat Angel Sings 