Suede singer Brett Anderson still finds Bernard Butler’s departure from the band “raw and quite difficult.”

The guitarist left the ‘Animal Nitrate’ band in 1994 after a string of rows and frontman Brett says the memory is so painful he still avoids talking about it, for fear of opening “a huge can of worms”.

When asked if he is now able to talk to Bernard about the band he said: “No, even now it’s quite raw and quite difficult, so we sort of steer clear of it, to be honest. It would open a huge can of worms and I’m not sure either of us really want to go there with it.”

The rocker says he would be “willing to talk” with Bernard if he expressed desire to do so but believes there is an unspoken understanding between them to not bring up the past because they both “f***ked up”.

He continued: “If Bernard wanted to talk about it I’d be willing to talk about it, but I think both of us are like, ‘well, that’s in the past and we both f***ked up a bit,’ and there was a tacit kind of understanding, you know, that we’d leave it.”

Richard Oakes replaced Bernard as guitarist at the age of 17 and the band went on to record three more albums, ‘Coming Up’, ‘Head Music’ and ‘A New Morning’ before splitting in 2003.

Late last year they reformed and Richard said Bernard had joked about turning up to their reunion to throw peanuts at them.

He said to NME magazine: “He did say he say going to come down London’s Royal Albert Hall and throw peanuts at us, but he didn’t in the end.”