Faced with the problem as to how to play them live, Suede recruited Simon Gilbert's cousin Neil Codling, who made his debut at a fan-club gig in January 1996. Buller has stated that the reason why the album has a much better sound than the previous albums is that he had minimal involvement in the mixing process, mixing only two songs. Buller credits much of the album's success to Dave Bascombe, who mixed the majority of the songs. According to Buller, having an outside observer mix the record with "fresh ears" enhances the overall production quality. Bascombe's input on "Trash" was crucial, as it was his idea to speed up the vocals. One of Suede's popular B-sides "Young Men" was left off the album, as Buller felt it was "too dark" and not as "poppy [and] in your face" as other songs on the record. Music The musical sound of Coming Up is more accessible than previous album Dog Man Star. Its singles were much more successful than those of their second LP, while the lyrical content concerns the band's disaffection at the mid-90s hedonistic, celebrity-obsessed culture; "Beautiful Ones" and "She" are caricatures of British yuppies, celebrities and heroin-chic models. "Beautiful Ones" was originally titled "Dead Leg" after Osman threatened to give Oakes a dead leg if he was unable to write a top ten single. According to Anderson, "The Chemistry Between Us" is about "the emptiness of it all", when it comes to taking drugs with strangers who have no common ground other than being high on drugs. The main refrain of the song is "Class A, Class B, is that the only chemistry between us." Critical reception Reviews were generally positive and seemed to respect Suede's new poppy and direct sound. James Delingpole of The Daily Telegraph wrote: "Coming Up is their defiant reminder of what made Suede so special [...] If Dog Man Star was Diamond Dogs, then this is Suede's Ziggy Stardust – extravagant, steeped in glam and unashamedly poppy." Roy Wilkinson of Select called it: "a wondrous pop album, simultaneously immediate and full of scope, a lovely, charming mix of absolute beauty and the thrillingly awkward." Caroline Sullivan of The Guardian felt that even despite the album's simplistic composition of "vibrant three-minute howla-longs", it still manages to avoid being too mainstream and incomparable to rivals Oasis and Blur. Andy Gill of The Independent, however was