Entertainment News Desk

The world’s oldest rock band has died, on stage.

All four members of Dubious Suede passed away during their last concert, but no one noticed.

“Yeah, it appears they continued the last half hour of the gig on pure momentum,” a spokesperson for their management company said.

“The Suede”, as they were known to their legions of fans over the decades, were pronounced dead at their hotel room after the event.

“It took an hour to confirm they were dead,” said the management company spokesperson. “You never quite knew with the Suede.”

Dubious Suede were lead singer Alex Swagger; lead guitarist Stud Basel; base guitarist Homo Erectus; and drummer Kurt Vile. Swagger was just shy of his ninety eighth birthday and carried and oxygen tank.

Known for their destructive stadium rock antics, the Suede virtually wrote the guidebook to the rock and roll lifestyle. Indeed, Stud killed seven party guests in his swimming pool one night when he poured a heap of piranha into the water. “He redefined excess,” said rock historian Mental Ally. “In prison, he ate his cell and was on the verge of eating his cellmate when the guards overpowered him.”

It wasn’t the only prison sentence served by members of the group. Alex Swagger served time in Alcatraz with Al Capone when a teenager.

“That was before Dubious Suede,” remembers Ally. “The original wild child, he escaped by riding the swollen dead body of a suicide across San Francisco Bay. That was when he moved to New Orleans and met Stud. They began playing rhythm and blues together in a brothel in the French Quarter. When Rock and Roll arrived, they were perfectly placed to ride the wave.

“It’s not quite clear when Dubious Suede was formed and none of the members could ever quite remember, when asked. Not that they could remember much of anything. Towards the end, Alex was reading lyrics off audience T-Shirts. Homo came up with that idea, you know, selling T-Shirts with song lyrics on them. Big-breasted women caused a problem. Great merch earner though, the T-Shirts.

“They almost didn’t make it of the 1950s, having originally booked the airplane that Buddy Holly died in. The Suede broke up a bar and wound up in jail, and so Buddy, the Big Bopper and Richie Valens took the flight instead. The Suede were driven to their next concert in police cars.”

For a long time, Dubious Suede were at the fringes of the rock and roll phenomenon, known more for their offstage behavior than their music, never quite achieving stardom. When the Beatles led the British Invasion of America, the Suede led a lesser-known American counter-attack in London. “They were doubling as body guards for Ronnie and Reggie Kray, finding their groove,” recalls a friend. “In London they developed their signature moves. Beer glasses, knuckle dusters, industrial nails. They went on to make nailing fans to the stage floor a part of their act. People loved it.”

However, despite an appearance at Woodstock and a violent exchange with the Hell’s Angels at Altamont, which the Suede won, the group hardly charted. “They were really an album band,” Mental Ally explained. “The problem was, every time they brought out an album, it took ten years to begin to sell. Their music drifted in their legend’s wake.

“Then they went into a glam rock phase which cost them millions, and a punk rock phase which cost them their freedom. They played a prison gig which led to the greatest mass breakout in American history. It went downhill from there.

“Alex’s fifth marriage ended in a shoot-out with his ex-wife; Stud left the band to work as a mercenary in Africa and Homo became a nun for five years. Kurt kept the flame going as best he could as a New Romantic.”

It was the advent of giant stadium rock that eventually brought the Suede to the fore. Once Stud had learned to walk again and Alex was allowed back into the United States, they slowly found each other over the 1980s. “They were convinced they had played at Live Aid,” said a biographer of Alex Swagger, “though they hadn’t. But it’s amazing if you say something enough it begins to become the truth. Eventually, everyone believed they had played Live Aid, and, what’s even crazier, people began to recall their performance as a classic, though some remembered it as being in London and others in New York. Anyway, on the strength of that, they began to become popular in a way they had never been before. By the 1990s, they were one of the great stadium rock acts.”

“It couldn’t last,” said Mental Ally, “not with the Suede. By the end of the century their lives had degenerated into a cocktail of depravity and ongoing dementia. At the height of their fame, they were worth billions. Five bankruptcies later, they were found begging on a street in Berlin. Alex had eaten one of his legs to survive; Kurt, who was always the most stable of the group, was a male prostitute; while Homo and Stud were selling their blood and semen for drug money. It was an epic fall. Destitute, deranged, drug-addled, they were rescued by the reality TV documentary, “Dubious Suede – What The Fuck?” which was hugely successful.”

The band played on but their fan base began to die. “Covid took a lot of their support,” says Mikey Mick, a rock journalist who toured with them when they caused a coup d’etat in Argentina in the 1980s. “In the end you could count their fans on the fingers of one hand. But the Suede kept playing. Even after they were dead. That final set – heavenly!”