McAlmont & Butler / The SDE Interview

This week sees the release of vinyl and CD anniversary editions of The Sound of McAlmont & Butler – the 1995 debut album by former Thieves vocalist, David McAlmont, and ex-Suede guitarist, Bernard Butler.

Featuring two hit singles, the epic and uplifting, ‘60-style powerhouse pop-soul of ‘Yes’ and the dramatic ballad, ‘You Do’, The Sound of McAlmont & Butler is essentially a compilation album made up of A-sides, B-sides and extra tracks. It’s an eclectic collection of songs, taking in Prince-like funk, dark and swampy blues, swaggering glam, ‘70s Neil Young-esque rock and stripped-back folk influences.

By the time it was released, in the late autumn of 1995, McAlmont & Butler had gone their separate ways, but they reunited in 2002 for their second album, Bring It Back. SDE speaks to both of them to get their thoughts on writing and recording The Sound of McAlmont & Butler, finds out if they’ll ever collaborate again and asks them what they’re working on in their solo careers.

SDE: The Sound of McAlmont & Butler turned 30 last year. Was the original plan for the new anniversary edition to come out in 2025 rather than this year?

Bernard Butler: That was the plan, but Universal weren’t very helpful about getting back to us. It took a year to get replies to emails. I told Ben [Stanley – head of product, marketing and licensing] at Demon [Music] that I was going to get a placard made up that said, ‘These people own my music but they won’t give it to me’ and go and stand outside the Universal building with my guitar. I’m not joking – it came that close. It’s very frustrating – they own my music, but you can’t get near it and it’s not in print. So, that’s why we missed out on the 30^th anniversary – it’s taken a long time.

SDE: There was a deluxe edition of the album that came out in 2015 for the 20^th anniversary…

Bernard: Yeah. What I say to everybody who buys records is, ‘Please don’t buy my music – you don’t have to; there’s no gun to your head – no one is forcing you to do it…’ The reason why the album is coming out is because you can’t currently buy it in any physical format because it’s not in print. We’re putting out a version once and for all that you can buy. Also, the digital version is so out of date. It’s the wrong masters and it has the wrong artwork. I think it’s a nice thing to do – to make sure it’s all correct. We’ve spent months doing this stuff.

SDE: The original vinyl edition from 1995 was on a single LP, but the new version is a 2LP set – George Shilling has remastered it for a double LP…

Bernard: Yes – when you put something on vinyl, if you can give it more space, then it sounds better – the grooves are deeper. The original album was a bit long to be squeezed onto one LP. I wanted to see if George could do something special with it, and I think it sounds brilliant. I’ve worked with George since People Move On and he’s great – I trust him.

SDE: Does it feel like 31 years since The Sound of McAlmont & Butler first came out?

Bernard: Yes, it feels like 31 years…

SDE: I think it still sounds fresh, but is there anything you would change about it?

Bernard: I wouldn’t change anything, and that’s rare for me.

SDE [To David]: How do you feel listening to it now?

David McAlmont: I’d moved on and I went back to academic studies for a while, so I wasn’t that invested in the whole thing, but one of the things that struck me over the years is people loving it. It’s robust and resilient… It’s lasted a long time and I’m grateful for that. I thought I was being quite coded in what I was saying [in the songs] at the time, but listening to it now, I realised I wasn’t. I was being raw and open, so that took me by surprise when I listened to it recently. It’s a good album, and I particularly like ‘Disappointment.’ I don’t know why, but it’s the one that gets me every time.

SDE: That’s one of my favourite songs on the record too…

David: That breakdown, with the saxophone… It was one of those lovely surprises. Bernard was in the live room with Mick [Tedder] on bass and Mako [Sakamoto] playing drums, and he was like, ‘Let’s just keep on playing…’

Bernard: When we were in the studio, I said, ‘Wouldn’t it be great to have some sax on this?’ Our bass player, Mick, said: ‘I’ve got a mate called Jimmy – I’ll give him a call’. He was there in about an hour, and he just jammed over it. It was great, and I’ve never heard of him or seen him since.

SDE: ‘You Do’ was your second hit single after ‘Yes’ – it got to number 17 in the UK. You wrote the music for it while you were in Suede, doing Dog Man Star. What was the inspiration for it?

Bernard: I wanted [to write] a piece of music that was like ‘One’ by U2, which is still one of my favourite ever records – it’s astonishing. I loved Achtung Baby and I loved ‘One’ so much – I saw it as a gateway to great songwriting, but it also had a mood to it, and it was beautiful – the strings, the sound… everything about it was great, but, in particular, it was the guitar playing. I was just pissing about and emulating it, if I’m honest.

SDE [To David]: Did you know ‘You Do’ was inspired by ‘One?’

David: That’s a new one on me. I heard from a fan the other day that there’s a rumour going around that ‘You Do’ is ‘Yes’ slowed down.

SDE: ‘You Do’ is in the same key as ‘Yes’, isn’t it?

Bernard: They’re in the same key – that was a coincidence – but I like to think of ‘You Do’ as the noir version of ‘Yes.’ It’s slowed down – the moody, sad cousin…  Essentially, they’re the same chords.

SDE: ‘Yes’ is an uplifting song, but ‘You Do’ feels like the flipside – it’s sad; a plea for someone in a relationship to be stronger…

David: ‘Yes’ and ‘You Do’ are both very arrogant, lyrically. ‘Yes’ imagines that you’re going to become incredibly famous and that the person who ghosted you will suddenly want to get to know you, which did happen, and ‘You Do’ is assuming that you’re the strong one in a relationship and you’re telling the other person not to be so weak. As the years went by, I thought, ‘Who do you think you are to write such a thing? Be stronger?’ Because ‘You Do’ is a ballad and is quite lovely, you can see it as somebody willing somebody on, but it’s a lot more arrogant than that. I don’t know if I should say that, as the fans might not like it as much.

Bernard: Lyrically, David gets the mood of the music and that’s what I love about him. He is quite nonchalant about his own lyric writing, but he wrote things that were simple and beautiful, and he captured the mood, which was so important.

SDE [To David]: Earlier, you mentioned listening to the album again recently and being surprised by how raw and open your lyrics were – some of the songs are about being a gay man and your relationships. When the record was released, the UK was in the grip of the laddish Britpop culture, driven by Loaded magazine – did you feel out on your own?

David: I always get honest, and Bernard didn’t have anything to say when I wrote the lyrics. It was like, ‘This is what I’ve come up with’, and he was like, ‘OK, fine’, and then he would get on with whatever he was doing. It felt like, ‘Is he listening? Am I getting away with it here?’

‘How About You?’ was written about cruising. I drank a lot at a place called the City of Quebec [in London] and I often got drunk and didn’t get lucky. ‘Although’ is about a loved one passing away from HIV.

Bernard: I love ‘Although.’ It has a personal narrative of David’s – a friend of his who was ill… When my mum died a few years ago, I started singing it to myself, so I started playing it in my solo set, and I started thinking about it and saw it in a totally different way.  I love singing ‘Although’ and I always think of it from my perspective now – that’s a nice use of a song. I love interpreting it as my own story. I don’t think David knows that.

SDE: ‘What’s the Excuse This Time?’ sounds like Prince and it could easily have been a single, rather than a B-side…

David: A lot of people thought it should’ve been the third single. When I wrote it, I was concerned about the line ‘I could wait forever, stay forever, until you felt inclined,’ because it sounded so much like something Prince had written, but I don’t think he did… It’s very much the sort of line you might get in a song like ‘Raspberry Beret.’

SDE: ‘Don’t Call It Soul’ is stripped back and acoustic guitar-led, and ‘How About You?’ has a folky sound, but then becomes darker and heavier, with some great and very emotional electric guitar playing…

Bernard: ‘Don’t Call It Soul’ and ‘How About You?’ we did together at my flat. They were the first two songs we did before we got a band together. I recorded them and they were quite slapdash. There’s all this strange percussion… That’s just me adding it over the top because we didn’t have any drums. When we started working with Nigel [Godrich – engineer], he mixed them and made them sound a bit posher. I really love those two.

‘How About You?’ could’ve been a Dog Man Star song. I just think it’s so fucking cool what David does with the lyric. It’s so open, brave, honest and autobiographical – it’s very London. I love my guitar at the end – that’s one of my favourite pieces of recording I’ve done.

The guitar part that starts ‘Don’t Call It Soul’ is David’s – he came up with those two chords.  The rest of it wasn’t finished and I sort of made better shapes for it. David was trying to learn guitar at the time. I don’t know how he’s coming along with that. I should check in on him.

SDE [To David]: Did you carry on with the guitar lessons?

David: No, because I went on stage with my guitar and started singing, and wondered what was going on with the sound… My hand didn’t move… I played the first chord and the introduction, which was fine, because I wasn’t singing, but when I started singing, my hand just stayed still…

SDE: ‘The Debitor’ has a glam feel and reminds me of The Stooges and Iggy Pop…

Bernard: Yeah. Everything [on the record] was done very quickly – write a tune, come up with some music, get David to put some lyrics together that night and record the song the next day. So, for each song I was thinking thematically… ‘OK, we’ve done a waltz thing… we’ve done an acoustic thing… let’s do a torch song… let’s do an Iggy thing…’  It’s not a sensible way to put a record together so it holds a shape, but I was playing around and having fun, and I think it hangs together.

SDE [To David]: Lyrically, ‘The Debitor’ could be seen as a comment on the music industry at that time…

David: Yeah – I suppose so. Maybe treating the music industry like hoods – mafiosi. ‘Name your price… You don’t sign on this here line…’ 

SDE: ‘Tonight’ is beautiful – musically, it’s a mixture of sweetness and darkness…

Bernard: I love ‘Tonight’ – it’s a lovely recording and I’m proud of that one. I think that’s my favourite song on the record.

SDE: ‘The Right Thing’ was a previously unreleased song. It is atmospheric – heavy, dark and swampy…

David: It was super-exciting to get a new track from Bernard – he wasn’t just trying to recreate ‘Yes’ or ‘You Do.’ He was using the opportunity to create something interesting and I responded to that. I heard the blues in it, and I want to say that I was enjoying ‘Superstar’ [a cover of The Carpenters song] by Sonic Youth at the time. When that came along, I thought, ‘Dark love’. My version of dark love was a couple somewhere in the Deep South, resisting Christian homophobia.

SDE: ‘You’ll Lose a Good Thing’ is a sparse cover of the Barbara Lynn R&B song from 1962, with just vocals and droning Hammond organ…

Bernard: Geoff Travis [manager and founder of Rough Trade Records] phoned me up and said, ‘Virgin won’t put the record out unless you give them something that hasn’t come out before – a bonus track.’ By that point, me and David weren’t going to write anything together again, so Geoff said: ‘Why don’t you record ‘You’ll Lose a Good Thing’? It was my favourite song while I was growing up.’

So, he sent me his vinyl copy – I’ve still got it. It was an upbeat, waltz thing with a great lyric, but the first thing I thought was, ‘I’m not going to do a straight cover of it.’ The most obvious thing was to see what would happen if we did something incredibly sparse, with just a Hammond drone – very ambient. So, we did it. We did two takes of it, with David singing live and me playing the Hammond organ, and that was it.

David: Bernard taped down the organ keys and just let it drone on.

SDE: Next year it’s the 25^th anniversary of your second album, Bring It Back. Are there any plans to reissue it?

Bernard: I’m trying to do it now – that’s not with Universal; it’s with Warner Bros. I’d like to do it – it’s underway, but I don’t know if we’ll get it done in time. I hope so.

David: I love Bring It Back– particularly the song, ‘Bring It Back,’ because it’s honest. I was at home one afternoon, feeling depressed, and the phone rang and it was Bernard. He said, ‘I’ve been doing some writing recently and yours is the only voice I can think about.’  It was like, ‘Let’s put the past behind us and reconcile’. And then I put the phone down and the sun came out. So, when I sing, ‘and the sun came out the moment you called,’ it’s referring to something that happened.

SDE: There’s an unfinished third album too, isn’t there?

David: People are always asking about it online. I’d like to rewrite some of it – we didn’t release it, so I’m quite happy to revisit it. I think we were trying something new, but the newness didn’t quite work. If it does happen, I’d like to do a lot of rewriting.

Bernard: I still dream of finishing it. I kick the can down the road with it a bit, but I want it to come out one day. It’s a whole album – all demoed. We just need to finish it – do a lot of recording and put it out.

[To Bernard]: Would you like to work with David again?

Bernard: I’d love to do a tour, but it’s just so bloody expensive. I’ve always said it has to be special, and it has to be the full thing or not at all. When we did the tour in 2015, me and David got paid less than the road crew because it was an awful lot to put together. The problem is also that Mako’s gone now, so that’s a tough one. I would love to do it again, but it’s one of those things on the list…

[To David]: Would you like to work with Bernard again?

David: We’ve started new material, but Bernard gets the heebie-jeebies with the industry. I’d imagine there’s a likelihood, but a lot of it depends if there’s a likely audience for it. Nothing happens with M & B until Bernard’s ready.

SDE: Can you tell us about your current solo projects?

David: I’m doing some shows this year and I want to get some reissues out. There are a couple of Thieves songs that have never been rereleased, so it’s time to start packaging stuff. Foremost in my mind is getting the old records reissued and doing them live for the audiences who have been with me this long and never heard those songs.

Bernard: I’d like to get a new song out by the end of this year and an album early next year. I feel good about it – it’s very different from the last record [Good Grief] and it’s colourful and upbeat. You’ve got to be in a place where you’re not worried about what people think and then you can be totally free. Once you do that, you just feel really good about what you’re doing.

Thanks to David McAlmont and Bernard Butler who were talking to Sean Hannam for SDE. The Sound of McAlmont & Butler is reissued this Friday, on 18 September 2026 via Demon Music.

If you want even more ‘chat’ with Bernard and David, Paul Sinclair interviewed them both a decade ago on this site for the previous reissue of this album! Bernard’s interview and David’s interview.

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