From a Basement Flat to a Defiant Anthem: The Making of McAlmont & Butler’s ‘Yes’

It remains a burst of joy hard to reconcile with its origins. “Yes,” the 1995 single by McAlmont & Butler, hits with the rush of Phil Spector’s wall of sound: thunderous drums, sweeping strings, and David McAlmont’s sass-laden delivery—a direct descendent of Gloria Gaynor’s “I Will Survive.” But the song was born from a much lonelier place.

By early July 1994, guitarist Bernard Butler had dramatically quit Suede during the making of Dog Man Star. The split, played out in the music press, left him isolated. “I was lonely, pretty depressed and very lost,” he recalls. Living in a basement flat in Highgate, North London, he saw little future. “I thought I would probably be back doing a day job by Christmas.”

Rather than retreat, he built a minimal home studio from Loot magazine ads: a Tascam 16-track, a Seck mixer, and an Akai S950 sampler—not for trip-hop, but as a way to play back strings and keyboards. He bought sounds on floppy discs from a stranger in Hampstead. It was from this makeshift setup that the musical bed for “Yes” emerged, a track that would pair Butler’s cinematic arrangements with McAlmont’s defiant lyric, a middle finger to an ex. The result was an accidental anthem, proof that clarity can follow chaos.