After yesterday's Auteurs track mixing the premature deaths of Lenny Bruce and Rudolph Valentino, two more from the 90s Britpop pioneers about two more stars who died young – Marilyn Monroe and James Dean. Suede are best known for songs such as Animal Nitrate and Beautiful Ones, but these two album tracks from the classic Dog Man Star (1994) are two of their more haunting, ghostly and, even for them, melancholic. Many of their songs focus on the point of view of the disaffected young. Heroine deliberately also sounds like a reference to heroin, but from the teenage narrator it is a yearning for, and inevitably loss of glamour. Daddy's Speeding meanwhile references the death of the famous film actor, not so much about the timeless fame and glamour it brought to his name, instead from the perspective of a child left behind. The writing, and Brett Anderson's voice and Bernard Butler's guitar bring out this sense of loneliness and tragedy with characteristic power and empathy.
[Verse 1]
She walks in beauty like the night
Discarding her clothes in the plastic flowers
Pornographic and tragic in black and white
My Marilyn, come to my slum for an hour
[Chorus]
I'm aching
To see my heroine
I'm aching
Been dying for hours and hours
[Verse 2]
She walks in the beauty of a magazine
Complicating the boys in the office towers
Rafaella or Della, the silent dream
My Marilyn, come to my slum for an hour
[Chorus]
I'm aching
To see my heroine
I'm aching
Been dying for hours and hours
Been dying for hours and hours
[Verse 3]
She walks in beauty like the night
Hypnotizing the silence with her powers
Armageddon is bedding this picture, alright
My Marilyn, come to slum for an hour
[Chorus]
I'm aching
To see my heroine
I'm aching
Been dying for hours and hours
I'm eighteen
And I need my heroines
I'm aching
Been dying for hours and nobody knows
[Outro]
I'm never alone now
'Cause I'm with her, with her, with her
And nobody knows
I'm never alone now
'Cause I'm with her, with her, with her
And nobody knows
I'm never alone now
'Cause I'm with her, with her, with her.
[Verse 1]
Whiplash caught the silver son
Took the film to number one
Crashed the car and left us here
Broken glass for teenage boys
Trapped in steel and celluloid
They crash the cars and leave us here
[Verse 2]
And daddy burned a million eyes
Dared the dogs to criticize
He crashed the car and I was born
And daddy turned a million heads
Took the teenage dream to bed
He crashed the car and left us here
[Chorus]
With dreams of gasoline drying our eyes
Green fields of destiny, high in the sky
Oh, can you see him?
Oh, daddy's speeding
[Verse 3]
Whiplash caught the silver son
Killed the sad American
Crashed the car and left us here
And sorrow turns his eyes to mine
Come with me, now, it's your time
Let's crash the car and I'll be born
And sorrow breaks the silent day
Takes the teenage boys away
They crash the cars and leave us here
[Chorus]
With dreams of gasoline drying our eyes
Green fields and death machines, high in the sky
Oh, can you see him?
Oh, daddy's speeding.
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