"Good Grief" is ex-Suede's Bernard Butler's new release (on May, 31)

     To paraphrase Michael Douglas as Gordon Gekko in Wall Street, grief is good. It helps us process tragedies and sundry other emotional upheavals, and hopefully emerge as wiser people. It’s tempting, therefore, given the title, to approach Bernard Butler’s first solo album since 1999’s Friends And Lovers as a soul-searching appraisal of his last quarter century, and beyond.

Its maker doesn’t argue with that (see below), having eschewed his frequent bent for collaboration to put himself in the therapeutic crosshairs and ’fess up to thoughts and feelings he might previously have been reluctant to address. This is a resolutely autobiographical record, its contents birthed by 30- plus years in the spotlight, but navel-gazing is kept to a minimum and the themes touched upon feasibly apply to all of us.

The scene is set in the opening Camber Sands (probably the first mention of the East Sussex holiday spot in popular song since Squeeze wrote Pulling Mussels From The Shell in 1980), its coastal tranquility providing the jumping-off point for musings on unspecified chapters from Butler’s past (“I’m not going to fan the flames/Nor bore you to tears about the good old days”). It’s an elegantly rueful reminiscence, the slightly gruff quality of the singer’s voice wrapped in Mariachi horns and sweeps of violins.

Geography plays further roles along the way, in remembering his father’s tales of a boyhood spent leaping from a cliff-life outpost of Dublin (The Forty Foot) as a metaphor for facing fears, or when touching base with his own surroundings in London Snow, a “cautious tale” of how the vast metropolis at its picture-postcard prettiest only temporarily hides the hardships of living for the city.

And so it goes, themes of either escape or being trapped never far from front-and-center, representing the cauldrons of contrast and dichotomies familiar to anyone with a pulse. Yet, there are undeniably pockets of Good Grief that apply more directly to Butler than his fans, most pointedly on the surface thrills of the catchy-as-hell Living The Dream.

Bernard wasn’t long out of his teens when Suede hit big, and here he sings of “catching the moonbeams while I’m riding high”, all too aware that fame could be fleeting and good times could be replaced by bad in a drumbeat. Promise can give way to problems, and it’s always wise to keep that in mind - hey, maybe it is about you and me!

Likewise, the Mott The Hoople vibes and fuzzy reverb guitar intro to Pretty D aren’t a million miles away from Suede’s Dog Man Star, and the song’s allusions to a former fellow traveler (“I don’t care about the songs they said you wrote about me”) are bound to trigger speculation. But take a couple of steps back from the canvas and you’re in more universal terrain of conflict and reconciliation.

    Butler isn’t about to spoon-feed his listeners the answers to anything, though, and ultimately the most audacious trick Good Grief pulls off is in using veiled autobiography to frame portraits of the fragility of the human soul, which speak to everyone. That’s why we should care about the songs he’s written about us.