From our correspondent Traz in London
A TART WITH HEART
Suede's Brett Anderson looks back at 10 years of subversive
singles and not terribly good videos.
Pop music, it seems fair to say, is fucked. As we're asked to
entertain, say, a solo record by the former singer of Hepburn,
or feel a twinge of remorse that Sive have split, the
three-minute seditions that Suede call singles seem like a very
distant memory. What's taking them so long? Where are they when
we need them? Actually, singer Brett Anderson - very tall, hair
newly high-lighted - is sitting in the London offices of his
management, amiably offering Notebook a fag and drinking coffee
- very strong, very black - and talking about the album his
band have been working on for more than a year.
Anderson claims espresso is pretty much the strongest stimulant
he indulges in these days. "People sometimes choose to perceive
us as slightly kinda tarty," he suggests, not unfairly. "obsessed
with the glitzy side of London, running around with cocaine
streaming out of our noses." He laughs. "There's a much more...I
suppose miserable side to the band I want to remind people about.
I've been going through a phase of actually thinking about life;
I'd given up drugs and my brain was starting to work again."
How is life without drugs? "It's great," he says, with feeling.
"I wouldn't go back." Life after drugs, though, can never be the
same as life before drugs. "No, not at all. Once the door's opened,
it's opened - or slightly ajar. You can't de-invent the nuclear
bomb. I don't regret anything I've done at all; that's how you
evolve as a person." As a result, Suede is now a decidedly more
introspective beast ("soulful" is the key word, it seems), a world
away from the brutal plasticity of 1999's Head Music, a record that
took every cliche about Suede and buffed it to a dazzling sheen.
Initial work on the new album was "quite folky", reports Anderson.
"I stayed at this cottage out in the countryside for about six
months, totally on my own. It was pretty much me and my guitar, in
a place called Chipstead in Surrey - it doesn't sound very
countrified but you have to walk a couple of miles if you want to
get a pint of milk. I was writing lots of songs with very much a
feeling of solitude.
"I think about how our career sits with the times: the world's
changed incredibly since Coming Up [1996]. It's quite strange being
in a band and trying to jigsaw yourself into various parts of the
culture. It sounds like a boring cliche - guitar man talking about
dance records - but the most exciting records of the last five years
for me have been stuff like OutKast and Oxide & Neutrino. I don't
think there's been a great British guitar band for a while." Does
he have an opinion of Radiohead? "They exist," he replies drily,
"that's my opinion about them."
Unlike Radiohead, Blur and, to an extent, Richard Ashcroft, Suede
never withdrew from pop. "I've never wanted to retreat into this
kind of inverted-snobbery, avant-garde world like some people do,"
Brett concurs. "I think it's because I'm not some middle-class person
from an art-school background. I've always liked listening to the
radio and got a kick out of listening to great pop songs. I've never
been impressed with people who can be obscure with music - it's much
harder to write a song. I don't think, 'Oh, I wonder how they did
that.' I know how they did that."
The mass appeal of conventional song structures affords a much greater
opportunity for subversion, of course. "Totally, yeah, you can be much
more challenging. I think that Suede do genuinely get under people's
skin. When we started, one of my ambitions was to write about something
that wasn't just boy-meets-girl, and stick it in the Top 10, which we
did lots of times."
While there will be no new album until early next year, there is a
handy DVD greatest-hits compilation - with the great Suede title
'Lost in TV' - to remind us just how many times Suede have laced the
charts with danger. Brett agrees: "We've done some really good work and
I think it's good to remind people of it. People have three-minute
memories these days, and if you're not constantly in the news - which I
choose not to be...you get lots of musicians who want to promote their
professional life with their private life, but I'm just not like that,
it's just not me."
He'll confess, however, to not being "incredibly proud of any of the
videos we've made." And that's the best part of the DVD: an incredibly
dry band commentary (see Suede slouch indifferently like couch potatoes!
Watch them slope off to make tea!) that offers pearls like "We'd just
done a load of Charlie - back in the days when it was good" and
"Everyone looks more of a nob than us, which is pretty unusual."
There's a new song, too, included as an extra on the DVD: 'Simon', five
minutes of weightless, floating sadness. The song is about a close friend
of Brett's who comitted suicide -"too personal to put on a record". And
yes, it certainly suggests Suede have rediscovered their "soul".
Brett admits to feeling "quite excited" about returning to the fray.
"It's kinda challenging," he says. "I don't think we really fit in." But
you're Suede, you're not meant to fit in -surely that's the point?
"Yeah," he says with casual assurance, "that is the point."
'Lost in TV' (Nude) is released on 22 November. Suede's new album will
be released in spring 2002.
(source: Esquire, december 2001, 15-11-2001)
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