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Mr and Mr

by Toby Manning, Q Magazine
aug/sept 2002


Theirs was a rock marriage that disintegrated after one Top 10 hit. Now, "57 nervous breakdowns" laters, McAlmont & Butler have quit the bickering and reunited to make "the ultimate pop record". "we're going to set your world on fire," they warn Toby Manning.


September 1995. Mere months after scoring a Top 10 hit with their glorious Phil Spector-esque single Yes, David McAlmont and Bernard Butler had a spectecular falling out. The flamboyantly gay McAlmont, frustrated at the lack of communication from his opposite number, the former Suede guitarist, began hinting in the music press that Butler was "homophobic". Unsurprisingly, McAlmont's attempts at provoking a reaction proved a little too succesful and the partnership was dramatically severed.
Seven years on and shorn of his once trademark dreadlocks, a soberly dressed McAlmont reclined comfortably beside open-neck shirted Butler, calmly discussing their new album, Bring It Back. The atmosphere is positively pleasant. But these two didn't speak for nearly seven years. What on earth happened?
"We grew up," shrugs McAlmont.
Butler is more effusive.
"Have you ever split up with a girl and said, You fucking stupid cow, you're fat, you're ugly, you're shit in bed, I hate your friends and your mother stinks?"
McAlmont cackles in the background.
"Just because we're under the microscope, why are we any more likely to act like proper grown-ups than anyone else?" continues Butler. "He called me a smelly cunt, so what?"
"And, just for the record, I didn't call him homophobic," adds McAlmont from his regal recline. "I won't talk about this subject after this. I was just confused because he was so uncommunicative, so I said, some people in that situation might think that was the problem... I used to be big on righteous indignation, like how could I possibly be wrong? Oh, and I never accused him on racism."
In the seven years of silence that have separated this singular pair, their fortunes have fair equally unfavourably. Butler's solo career stalled when Creation Records dropped him after two poorly received albums, 1998's People Move On and 2000's Friends and Lovers. Being defrauded by his accountant didn't improve his mood much either.
"I was a mess," Butler shrugs. "I had 57 nervous breakdowns."


"Have you ever split up with a girl and said, You stupid cow, you're fat and you're shit in bed?" Bernard Butler

With McAlmont making an album unsupported by a label who couldn't understand why a black Briton wasn't making garage music, he campaigned to be dropped.
"When I was finally dropped in January this year," McAlmont explains, "I shut myself in my house for two weeks and ate pizza, just wondering what the fuck I was going to do now. I was watching The Weakest Link when the phone rang and it was Bernard and I was delighted."
Inspired by hearing Yes on a bonfire party last year, Butler had started making music at home.
"It took me six months to own up to the fact that all the songs were suggesting David's voice. I was making this beautiful music and it needed the most beautiful voice to realise it. I thought, Wouldn't it be brilliant if you could magnify that fall-out in reverse? What if you could turn the whole thing around, what an amazing thing that would be, how positive and rewarding, how much energy that would spark!"
McAlmont was immediately blown away by the CD Butler gave him. "It was like listening to an old friend."
"Yeah, but you couldn't hear the subliminal messages I'd put on there how much I hated you," chuckles Butler.
Was McAlmont never tempted, in the words of Yes, to tell Butler what he could do with what he'd got to offer?
The singer shakes his head. These days, having learned to say it through in his head first, McAlmont has stemmed his natural effusiveness. What's more, Butler, whose quiet nature so confused his partner in the past, is now the more loquacious of the two. "I feel like I'm meeting him for the first time," says McAlmont.
"All it cost was £100,000 worth of therapy and 48 nervous breakdowns," says Butler.
That number keeps getting lower.
"It shows how happy I am, I'm forgetting them already."
The happiness certainly shows in the music, McAlmont's searingly soulful vocals swooping over the welcome return of that huge wall of sound. It's all about making the ultimate pop record, they say.
"Five years ago the same number of people who voted for Pop Idol were standing in a field at Knebworth, singing along to Wonderwall," says Butler. "That moment has been lost and now there's a gap between bland, slutty music and intelligent, high-brow music - and nothing in the middle. Nobody was trying to make a great pop record because pop became a dirty word. What we're doing is unique."
In the swoop of first single Falling, the surge of Theme From.. and the crunch and drama of Make It Right, the reborn sound of McAlmont & Butler is like a blast of summer sunshine on a monochrome, wet Saturday.
Many of McAlmont's lyrics adress both the rift and the reconciliation. "The album is all about redemption, about revival," he admits. Theme From.. makes cartoon superheroes of the pair, describing "a Stratocaster kind of guy" who "turns his Marshall amp to grind."
"Bernard was sitting there, going, Ooh, this is about me, can I cope with this?" he chuckles, while Butler fidgets uneasily.
Did you ever come close to falling out again?
"David would get really fucked off at me telling him to do it again, do it again," admits Butler. "But as soon as we were in the same room together, the tenson would dissipate, and we'd start dancing around."
So in this spirit of reconciliation, are you going to make up with former Suede partner Brett Anderson as well?
"I've got nothing to make up," he says disingenuously. "But I don't have time to hold grudges." On one of the two occasions he's seen Anderson since the split, Butler almost ran him down in his car as he stumbled out of a taxi. He won't be attending the forthcoming Suede shows or buying their much-fancied new album. "I've never listened to a Suede album, I'm just not interested."
That is in the past, they insist. McAlmont & Butler are the present and, indeed, the future. "There's a chemistry about us," says McAlmont. "With any otger collaborator, it doesn't work as well. We're like Bacharach and David, Lennon and McCartney... and, yes, we do put ourselves in that bracket."
"We were a couple of old women who fucked up things completely," Butler concludes. "But we can turn that around and here's the record to prove it. We're going to set your life on fire."

In a Nutshell... Who are McAlmont & Butler? Former Thieves singer David McAlmont and one-time Suede guitarist Bernard Butler. When was their last album? The Sound of McAlmont & Butler (Hut Records, 1996). The album came out after the duo had split. When did they last have a hit? Yes went to Number 8 in May 1995. The follow-up single You Do stalled in the lower reaches of the Top 40. What's happening now? A new album, Bring It Back, is out on EMI Records. [See this issue's reviews section.]

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