Filmstar (Remastered)

Though Suede's guitarist on their first two albums, Bernard Butler, lived a stones throw from the band's co-writer, vocalist Brett Anderson, he elected to send his demos by post. Following Butler's less-than-amicable departure, Suede hired 17-year-old fan Richard Oakes to help write the band's third album Coming Up. Anderson told the NME how this altered the band's song writing process: "Before it had always been that Bernard would send me a piece of music and I'd write the vocal melody and I'd write the lyrics. But with Coming Up onwards I was much more involved with the writing of the music. 'She' and 'Filmstar' have this really simple double-beat rhythm. I just was round at Richard's flat and clapped my hands and sang 'Filmstar, nah nah nah' and he wrote his guitar part around that. It was much more about the exchanging of ideas."

This was one of the quickest songs Brett Anderson has written. Speaking to Danielle Perry on Absolute Radio, he recalled "waking up one day with this little thing in my head, 'Filmstar, propping up the bar...' Though it was really early in the morning Anderson called Richard Oakes saying, "I've got this thing, can I come round to your flat?!" Once there, Anderson sat him down and sang "Filmstar, propping up the bar." Oakes "just sort of sat there and threaded this guitar thing" and the pair wrote the entire song really quickly. Anderson added it was unusual to come up with a song so speedily. "I think lots of people assume that it's that easy because they've seen biopics about The Doors or something like that where they suddenly write 'Light My Fire,'" he said. "It was never like that. It's always months and months of like poring over chords and changing words slightly. But this actually was really a very quick process."