bloodsports promo and reviews

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sunshine
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Re: bloodsports promo and reviews

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http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/entertainment-arts-21470871
Suede: 'We want people to hate our record'
25 March 2013
Suede have released their first album in 11 years but band member Mat Osman says he wants people to hate the new record.
"It's supposed to niggle at you and get into your life and if it's not doing those things it wouldn't be a Suede record.
"So I'm hoping lots of people hate but that more people don't hate it," he said.
The BBC's Sabrina Sweeney spoke to Brett Anderson and Mat Osman about their new sound, Bloodsports.


Second chance Suede taking nothing for granted
By Sabrina Sweeney, Entertainment reporter, BBC News

Reformed Suede feel more in control of their destiny without the Britpop tag
"There's nothing more depressing than music that's just a soundtrack or just a souvenir".
Suede bassist Mat Osman strikes an emphatic tone when we meet to talk about the band's new album, Bloodsports - their first in 11 years. "What you want is 60 per cent loving it and 40 per cent hating it, because then you know you're getting under people's skin." "It's supposed to niggle at you and get into your life," adds Osman. "If it's not doing those things it wouldn't be a Suede record."
The band have held onto their fondness for polarising opinion. But they're "excited" at being back together again, making new music. And, this time round, it seems they're taking nothing for granted. "We were relentless about making sure it was a good record, not resting on our laurels and assuming that because we'd made it, that it was going to be great," says frontman, Brett Anderson.
Glory days: Suede released A New Morning in 2002 and split in 2003. "The last thing we would have ever done was release something that was half finished or not good enough. We've learned from doing that in the past and it would have been the death of the band again."
Lauded as the best new band in Britain shortly after they emerged onto the music scene in the early nineties, Suede's self-titled debut album became the fastest-selling in UK history, topping the charts and winning the coveted Mercury prize in 1993. Despite in-fighting and the departure of songwriter and guitarist, Bernard Butler, the band enjoyed further commercial success with Coming Up in 1996.
It produced five top 10 singles, becoming the band's biggest-selling album and bringing international success. However, by 1999 and their fourth studio album, Head Music, the cracks were beginning to show. Eventually, you're faced with the choice - you either make a new record or you have to stop. We thought we'd try and make a new record”
Few would have predicted that after the band's split in 2003 following the underwhelming fifth album, A New Morning, that they'd be back with a sound that has several echoes of their glory days. "We didn't split up for personal reasons," explains Osman. "We split up for musical reasons, so as a personal thing it was ridiculously easy [to reform].
Second chance: "But musically it was hard. We had to learn to be a band again. We wrote a ton of stuff, it wasn't good enough so we wrote some more. I think it shows. It was hard work but good things are normally." Suede's second chance came in 2010 with a rousing comeback gig at London's Royal Albert Hall for the Teenage Cancer Trust.
"We went into it without any sense of entitlement," recalls Anderson. "We just wanted to play again and sing those songs again." But two years on the circuit playing songs from 20 years ago became tiring for a group that feels the "point of being a band is to make records".
"Eventually, you're faced with the choice - you either make a new record or you have to stop. We thought we'd try and make a new record".
The new record, Bloodsports, is "a comment on relationships," says Anderson, conceived as a journey through a relationship, beginning with the chase and playing out the various stages of suspicion, jealousy, obsession and co-dependency, until a couple breaks up. "It's about the cycle of pain," he adds.
Now in their forties, Anderson and his four bandmates are older and wiser. But the frontman admits he "didn't want to make a record that sounded middle aged". "We wanted to have the same sensibility as a new band starting."
Suede seem to have turned the clock back to rekindle at least some of the passion and intensity they were famous for as twenty-somethings. "Most bands and musicians are egotistical enough to think they are entirely unique” - Mat Osman
Today, they are a successful post-1995 line-up - that is without Bernard Butler - but none of the new tracks quite capture the magic of early hits such as Animal Nitrate or Beautiful Ones.
Still, the album - opening with the rousing Barriers - is undeniably Suede, with dramatic key changes and Anderson's unmistakable flamboyant vocals.
Denying Brit pop: Their chart-friendly guitar music is part of the reason they earned the label of the founding fathers of Brit pop, a movement that spawned the likes of Oasis, Blur and Pulp. But the tag did not sit comfortably with them then, and still doesn't two decades later. Bloodsports is a "comment on relationships", according to Brett Anderson. "Most bands don't want to be told they are part of something bigger than them," reveals Osman.
"Most bands and musicians are egotistical enough to think they are entirely unique. "It's not something that I look on particularly fondly, he adds. "I look back on the band and what we were doing pretty fondly, but we didn't really hang out and I never really felt part of it.""We just did what we did," adds Anderson.
"The media projected things on to us. The things we were singing about in 1991 before anyone had heard of Brit pop or any bands had decided to ape what we did, were framed in a British framework because that's where we came from.
"We were just trying to be honest about who we were. I didn't want to pretend to be from LA or from somewhere glamorous. We just sung about our lives. We certainly weren't flying flags," he adds. "If Suede had been from Tokyo we would have been singing about ordinary life in Tokyo," adds Osman.
London is no longer the only source of inspiration. Growing up - Anderson, now clean from drugs, is married with a child - has given them lots of other experiences from which to draw. Ultimately, though, they say they just wanted to make a record "that connects with people".
"I'm not thinking about six weeks ahead, let alone another record," says Osman. "And it's nice being in that situation. "Nowadays we are entirely in control of our destiny. If we make a record we pay for it, if we want to release it, we do it.
"Back in the day it wasn't like that. You were on a schedule and it seems silly now to have got caught up in all of that.
"We've got this new record, I'm really liking it. We'll go and play it to some people and we'll worry about the future after that."
Bloodsports is out now on Warner Music. Suede begin their UK tour in March.
sunshine
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Re: bloodsports promo and reviews

Post by sunshine »

March 26, 2013
Suede - Bloodsports (2013)
http://beardfood.com/review/suede-bloodsports/
Bloodsports has no right to be this good. Few bands reform with the same energy as they once had, and even fewer find a way to progress into something still relevant. Brett Anderson's lyrics avoid the usual tired Suede clichés while Richard Oakes' guitar is re-invigorated in turn. The end result is some of the best music the band have ever made.
- sachin
Best song: It Starts And Ends With You
sunshine
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Re: bloodsports promo and reviews

Post by sunshine »

March 25, 2013
Suede – New Adventures In Lo-Fi
http://justplayed.wordpress.com/category/bloodsports/
It was only a matter of time before the deluxe bubble burst. As I wrote recently, increased prices for barely increased content increasingly rankles and offering fans a bit of extra card or some expanded artwork in return for a sizeable bump in the price is a disturbing current trend. As the good folk at SuperDeluxeEdition reported, the latest Suede album seemed to suffer from this with a £100 edition, possessing all of two additional songs, a print, a T shirt and a USB containing no additional music, actually not proving to be a definitive version of ‘Bloodsports‘. When this then arrived damaged, missing some of the, frankly already scant, content and with careless errors in abundance, the band’s message board rightly lit up. As is always the way in such circumstances, a number of hardcore fans looked to leap down the throat of anyone expressing a dissenting opinion. As someone who didn’t go near the ludicrously priced versions but was keen to hear the record, I’d been dipping in over there in recent weeks and noted with interest a thread about the digital distortion on several tracks, most noticeably ‘What Are You Not Telling Me?“. A whole passage of the track where the guitar soars and a rather beautiful song should take off is marred by digital crackle in the left channel where the volume has been artificially boosted. It’s clearly a fuck up. You can’t argue it sounds good. It doesn’t. It’s a potentially transcendent moment in the song – why would you actively want to spoil this with a distracting noise?
As a vinyl purchaser, I’d assumed I’d miss out on such woeful mastering for the LP mastering and yet it’s even on there. Having always been a fan of the wax, my move to almost 100% vinyl purchases happened about four years ago after getting truly fed up with the loudness war and its resultant mastering. There’s plenty of forum discussion about it out there if you care to look and Nick Southall, Twitter’s ever entertaining @sickmouthy, wrote a fine piece a few years back about this problem. Generally, mastering for vinyl is a little more sympathetic, largely because you physically can’t crank things too high and expect the grooves to be playable. However, the Suede error is at a key point in the chain as it appears everywhere, including an apparently not especially high fidelity high resolution version they’ve got on sale from select sites.
People make mistakes though, don’t they? No big deal. Fess up and sort it out. Ben Folds released a hideously mastered version of his album ‘Way To Normal‘ to such protests that he later put out a far less aggressively loud version. The initial vinyl pressing of Bill Fay‘s beautiful comeback album ‘Life Is People‘ features some unpleasant distortion on the final side and the label responded to concerns, listened to criticisms and rectified it. Surely, a band as big as Suede would ensure that their employees would respond in similar fashion?
Well, not quite. In a capital letter monologue which pitched itself somewhere between blasé and contemptuous, ‘Didz’ described poor quality control as charming and insisted that the crapulous mastering is intentional: “THEY ARE PART OF THE ATMOSPHERE OF THE TRACKS. IT IS HOW IT SHOULD SOUND. THESE TRACKS ARE CERTAINLY NOT CLIPPING, ALTHOUGH BLOODSPORTS IS MIXED AND MASTERED VERY AGGRESSIVELY (THIS IS WHY THEY SOUND SO LIVE AND LOUD ON THE RADIO) AND I CAN HEAR HOW THIS MIGHT BE MISCONSTRUED. THIS APPLIES TO ALL FORMATS.”
Here is the most egregious example of the ‘atmosphere’ they were aiming for, as uploaded to AudioBoo by someone with a not especially imaginative username. Delightful, isn’t it?
Obviously, every artist should make the music they want to make and have it sound however they want it to, but if this is sincerely the effect Suede were after then they might want to be a bit more gracious at receiving the entirely deserved criticism it brings. Having contempt for the people who actually bother to buy your music has always been a risky approach and it’s downright stupid in the industry of the 21st century. But, irrespective of this, if artists choose to actively dismantle and destroy their own music in this way then I guess we should stop talking of it as bad mastering and simply refer to it as bad music.
sunshine
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Re: bloodsports promo and reviews

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http://thequietus.com/articles/11661-suede-america
Features
Trash: The Problems Of Being An American Fan Of The London Suede
Ned Raggett , March 18th, 2013 07:21
In early spring or so of 1992 I was wandering around the bookstore at UCLA, where I was due to graduate in a few months’ time. At some point the previous year, I had finally started picking up Melody Maker on a regular basis; I was enough of a random – near indiscriminatory, in fact – Anglophile to prefer its coverage to that of the regular music press in the US. In retrospect the reason why was often simply that of immediacy – music talk in print every week versus every month or every two weeks is a powerful motivating factor, as was the fact that Rolling Stone seemed eternally stuck in 1972 no matter how hard it tried while Spin never fully got the Guccione stink out of its system enough for me, especially with the AIDS conspiracy nonsense. In contrast, I already knew that Melody Maker did things like actually feature My Bloody Valentine as a cover story, so clearly superior forces were at work, at least in my brain.
But as I noted, immediacy. Plus the benefits of being a national publication, but for that reason it was also hyperbolic, often bizarrely so (when you grow up without a general UK press model to provide context, it seemed like it was shouting all the time on the front page). So when I picked up an issue that had as its headline “BEST NEW BAND IN BRITAIN?” I was a little dubious. Though at the same time, curious.
Nearly twenty years on and I’ve seen Suede go through just about everything, albeit at a remove – and that’s the thing; as any distant fan of a band can tell you, when musicians you really really like are getting famous seemingly everywhere but your neck of the woods, even the shrinking of the world via the net doesn’t change a certain residual feeling of ‘why not HERE too, ferchrissakes?’ Just ask any Robyn fan in the US right now, for example. My hyperfandom has, as with so many things, changed with time, but for a while there I kinda needed everything I could get my hands on, see them as often as I could. Except, well, I was in Los Angeles and not London. Oops.
Going through everything about My American Life With Suede, Sorta would take a little too long to go through in detail here without just taking over the Quietus as a whole – I’ve written here or there about some of it, though, so feel free to pore over when I had a Chinese lunch with the band or seeing them do a triumphant show headlining over the Cranberries, who were about to leave them in the dust in terms of US sales and profile. It was a bit of a weird alternate history of the nineties for me, given that Suede have no place, nothing at all, in the wide popular memory of the US. Hardly the first UK act to do so, hardly the last, but some bands or musicians never cross the Atlantic anyway, so at least Suede did that much, and on an initially higher profile than some.
It was all very 20th century, really, how I and others kept in touch or saw the band as we did. Bootleg videotapes were swapped, converted from UK to US TV settings, naturally. Lo-res scans of articles helped to fill in details. Fanzines, fanzines galore! LA at least had figures like Rodney on the ROQ playing them irregularly but that was the exception, not the rule; I was a college radio DJ myself so I could do my part but when you’re a 120 watt station you’re lucky to get a small swathe of people to pay attention, if that.
And LA and its environs were, at the least, a logical place for the band to play, enough collective Anglophilia among some level of the populace to ensure some turnout, somewhere, especially for any band that claims the Smiths as an inspiration in a town where Morrissey might as well be a patron saint. I ended up catching Suede every time they came through, four times total, if not every show they played. But I saw them with Bernard twice in 1993, a wonderful show in early 1995 with Richard Oakes nicely settled into his new role and a killer concluding encore of 'My Dark Star', then finally a frustrating show in 1997 shortly after the instrument theft, with borrowed gear, sound problems, Brett slamming his mike into the ground at least once and a sense that they wished they could have done much better. (I remember being astoundingly jealous of the folks who saw them the night after that, when they went acoustic as a result and played a bunch of B-sides among other things.) Then after that the long, long wait for another American tour that never materialized, even as I and others continued to hunt down double-pack CD singles and other oddly formatted releases. (Remember the MiniDisc single for 'Electricity'…then again, perhaps you don’t want to.)
No Top Of The Pops appearances for me to remember, though, no comeback dates at Reading in the rain, no fan club gigs, no video invites, none of that rush of possibility anyone in the UK had by default. The grass is always greener, of course, but it seemed like to us over here that the hometown crowd could just turn on the TV or radio or open up a magazine or newspaper and boom, there they were – maybe not every year of the nineties but close to it. I’ve always been one to be a solitary rather than a social listener in general but it’s always nice to have a sense that people know what you’re talking about rather than being asked “So what music do you listen to?” and getting blank looks in response to answers provided. (And to my mind I was talking about the accessible stuff I enjoyed at the time! I knew it would have been even worse if I started going on about stuff on Rephlex…)
It should be noted, of course, that Sony was doing its best early on to prevent those blank looks. One reason why Suede has a kind of residual memory here or there lies in the fact that there was some pretty heavy marketing going on; I seem to remember everything from mobiles (yes, I had one) to mass flyering and the like. It should be kept in mind too, from a US business standpoint in 1993, that the previous couple of years had seen some UK-based fluke successes hit the big time, Jesus Jones and EMF getting number one singles, not to mention the slow burn-to-massive breakouts of the Cure and Depeche Mode shortly before that. Then there was that little Nirvana thing that happened, so the idea that something ‘alternative’ could be something more was established. Hey, these guys are kinda weird, aren’t they? Pass the cash, let’s see what happens!
Yet marketing and publicity is never everything, and even at the time it was well recognized that the fact that Nirvana and of course Pearl Jam did break through, followed by everything else in their commercial wake, meant that a lot of people were all about gravelly yarls and real rock, man. If Anglophiles are prone to blinders, Anglophobes can have their own (not to mention other phobic types that looked at the earring and the random pronouncements about sexuality and drew their own conclusions). Brett’s singing definitely wasn’t that of Eddie Vedder, even if the crunch of a lot of the songs weren’t out of place at all – and hey, Pearl Jam used pianos too. The newly suspicious college radio/fanzine underground further relied on hometown heroes, whether Bikini Kill or Pavement or something else. In retrospect, it’s telling that the glam/goth-damaged band with an over the top guitarist and a high-voiced and uneasily-pitched singer that did end up hitting the full heights around that time was the Smashing Pumpkins. Billy Corgan and company might have been – in a specific context – a little freaky, definitely Anglophilic themselves, but they were an American band, coming to your town to party it down, however self-loathingly.
So as a result, there was always a feeling that encountering Suede in the US was something done by accident. The Tonight Show appearance they did in 1993, their one and only moment of national broadcast TV media I’m aware of, was a late night thing that you had to be there to know about; without YouTube at most I’d have a slightly scuzzy video smear of a memory of it. Some time later I remembered hearing from a friend about how they had ended up on some random music program apparently making a meal in a kitchen set; when I finally saw a bit of it I was amused but again, it wasn’t like anything came of it. There was the whole kerfuffle about having to change their name to The London Suede in the US – still THE most unwieldy answer to the situation I can imagine (seriously, was ‘Suede UK’ that hard to choose as an option?). The huge gap in release dates between the UK and US versions of Coming Up almost drove me to despair, until I finally broke down and got the UK version – not the easiest thing to do when I was on a tight budget. The discourse was elsewhere, firmly so.
Then again, it’s not surprising. Sure, in my head the world should be listening to everything I am because of my wonderful and unimpeachable taste and all, though there’s points of disagreement on that fact to this day. Such is the life of the outraged fan, even if it’s a low simmer of annoyance. Of course Suede wasn’t the only thing I was listening to, widely popular or not, while all the various complaints and criticisms of the band have as much of a place as the wild celebrations, whether the complaints were from people who just didn’t like them or thought that they weren’t that interesting from the start or were from fans of early days who felt that whether it was Bernard’s departure or a switch to an increased use of electronics or just one too many references to nuclear skies or a remark on the intellectual capacity of mice, something had gone wrong. “Well, whatever,” I’d think, using my first home CD burner to put together a collection of Head Music B-sides from all the singles I’d been feverishly picking up. (And a lot of those are really good, I should say. One was even a big Swedish hit in its own right. I told you I was a hyperfan.)
Also, there were emerging contexts I could talk to people everyday about the band as I’d like. Suede might not have been Radiohead or Nine Inch Nails when it came to establishing a website early on and making it increasingly central to their existence, but they did take a full plunge in 1996 – I still remember wishing to hell that their audio broadcast of a London show that year had worked out as planned, but we got the Neil Tennant guest appearances on a single later so hey. Meanwhile, just the year before, I’d set up a mailing list for fans to chat called wild-ones – it was never official per se but the management was on there (and I sometimes wondered if some of the band were on there in deep cover). Pre-widespread bulletin boards, pre-AIM/ICQ, pre-everything else, it was the easiest and simplest thing to do outside of the Usenet groups, and if all one could do was plaintext most of the time, communication was communication and I’m still friends with many from the list – and for that matter from the Usenet groups – to this day.
In a weird kind of way, I supposed I had a shining moment of sorts as an American fan back in 2003 when, on a visit to London for celebrations of a friend’s wedding, I had the chance to visit Suede’s management offices. I didn’t go on about it anywhere, on the list or elsewhere, and the band themselves – only a couple of weeks from the announcement of their breakup – were somewhere else in the world doing promotion for their Singles compilation (I think it was Dubai, which somehow seems appropriate). Seeing the workaday existence of the offices – and the very friendly folks there, Charlie, David, Ben, all of whom I’d talked with to one extent or another online over the years – was both fun and a reminder that it wasn’t all glamour. It was also a hell of a chance to pick up some alternate editions of albums and singles I didn’t already have so I have to thank them again!
But how appropriate, really, that it ended up liked that – an office visit, a swing by the ICA to pick up David’s just published biography of the band, which I devoured on the flight home, then the news a couple of weeks later of the breakup along with various reports of the final shows. Once again, everything at a distance, no big attention or news in the States about it, there were far larger fish to fry and the crackle of energy was elsewhere, even in the realm of increasingly expansive online music discourse. At a friend’s encouragement I did end up making the journey again to see one of Brett’s first solo shows in London in 2007 but that was probably my last act of active fandom still, a final fling.
The past is a foreign country, one’s own as much as a collective past, and if the story of distance from a previous passion is an old one to tell, it seems multiplied when it was all done at a physical distance to start with. It seems appropriate that Suede’s recent return to the US and to the LA area was, like their first visit, accompanied by tales of packed shows and excitement in the UK, not to mention lots of press – and now torrented recordings, YouTube clips, all the joys of the SEO world we live in – and would be at a big area festival as well, much like their first LA-area visit in 1993. It also seems appropriate they were stuck a few rungs down the bill, labeled yet one more time as the London Suede and were resolutely untalked about and unreported on from what I could tell outside the hardcore fanbase, aside from a random mention along the lines of how ‘the London Suede played and did anybody care?’ See you in the next life, indeed.
sunshine
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Re: bloodsports promo and reviews

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http://www.nme.com/news/suede/69423
March 27, 2013 9:14
Suede, Cat Power and The Strypes to kick off new series of Later... Suede Tickets
Later…Live with Jools Holland will return on April 9 with guests including Suede and Cat Power.
The long-running music show will start its 42nd series with the first in eight half-hour live shows on BBC 2 at 10PM on Tuesday, April 9. Suede will appear to perform songs from their new album 'Bloodsports' while Cat Power will make a rare live appearance in the UK, playing songs from her 2012 album 'Sun'.
Meanwhile, newcomers Laura Mvula and The Strypes will also perform. The Strypes have won over celebrity fans including Noel Gallagher and Elton John with the former Oasis guitarist among the crowd that crammed into London's Old Blue Last on January 23 to catch the band, who have signed to Mercury. The Irish teenagers play energised takes on classic rock and R&B covers including Bo Diddley's 'You Can’t Judge A Book By It's Cover', T-Bone Walker's 'Call It Stormy Monday (But Tuesday Is Just As Bad)' and Muddy Waters' 'Mannish Boy' as well as their own original material.
A longer version of Later…Live with Jools Holland will air on Friday, April 12.
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Re: bloodsports promo and reviews

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http://www.dailystar.co.uk/playlist/view/306392/
SUEDE SAY THEY'RE BETTER THAN EVER
I can count on the fingers of one hand the great songs that aren’t about relationships in some way.
30th March 2013
By Kim Carr
COMEBACK kings Suede reckon they’re better than ever – because they’ve given up partying.
The reformed 90s rockers are in the Top 10 with new album Bloodsports, and insist giving up their wild living has improved them.
Singer Brett Anderson told me: “We’re more focused and professional, which sounds really boring but it makes us better as we know how to channel our energy now.
“In the 90s, a gig was just another moment in the crazy carnival of our day. Now the shows are all we care about – I can’t be bothered with the other bulls**t any more.
“I’ve done all that, and it’s a dull cliché anyway, which I’ll leave for new bands to find out for themselves.
“We know our job is to play great shows, which seems unromantic and not very rock and roll, but it means when we’re on stage there’s fireworks.”
The five-piece split in 2002 and don’t pay attention to the charts since returning.
Brett laughed: “Radio 1 don’t play us any more but I’m a 45-year-old man so we’re not really competing in that way these days.”
Bloodsports is themed around a relationship and, despite being a happily married dad-of-one, Brett still finds it easy to write about heartache.
“As I get older I think relationships are the only thing to write about.
“I can count on the fingers of one hand the great songs that aren’t about relationships in some way.”
Talking of ex-guitarist Bernard Butler, 42, Brett confessed: “I’ve learned before, to my eternal regret, that if a creative relationship works you’re a fool to throw it away.
“So now Suede’s relationships work again, I’d like to think we could make another great record to follow this great record and start a new chapter for the band.”
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Re: bloodsports promo and reviews

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http://www.nme.com/news/suede/69480
March 30, 2013
Suede's Brett Anderson says he wants to make 'another great record'
Singer wants to follow-up new LP 'Bloodsports' and 'start a new chapter' for the band
Suede frontman Brett Anderson has revealed that he wants to release another "great record" with the band following the success of their most recent album, 'Bloodsports'.
The LP was the band's first in over 10 years and entered the Official UK Albums Chart at Number 10, giving them their first Top 10 hit since 1999's 'Head Music'. Now, speaking to the Daily Star, the singer hinted that the reformed Britpop band could carry on making music together.
Initially talking about former guitarist Bernard Butler, he said: "I've learned before, to my eternal regret, that if a creative relationship works you're a fool to throw it away." He then added: "So now Suede's relationships work again, I'd like to think we could make another great record to follow this great record and start a new chapter for the band."
Anderson also said that the band had benefited from adopting a more mature approach to performing music, stating: "We're more focused and professional, which sounds really boring but it makes us better as we know how to channel our energy now. In the 90s, a gig was just another moment in the crazy carnival of our day. Now the shows are all we care about - I can't be bothered with the other bullshit any more.
"I've done all that, and it's a dull cliche anyway, which I'll leave for new bands to find out for themselves," he added. "We know our job is to play great shows, which seems unromantic and not very rock 'n' roll, but it means when we're on stage there's fireworks."
Earlier this week, Anderson slated the state of the UK's Top 40 after claiming that record companies "play safe" and said that they "can't afford to nurture something interesting so music is made by committee". Speaking in a recent issue of NME, meanwhile, he suggested that many of today's alternative rockers are too careeriest in their motives.
"I think being in an alternative rock band has become a career over the years, sadly," he said. "I never thought I was embarking on a career in 1989 – we didn't think five days ahead, let alone five years. I don't think a band nowadays would have the motivation to make a record like 'Dog Man Star' for their second album. We were always maverick, a bit 'fuck you' to the record label."
Suede are set to play a show at London's Alexandra Palace this evening (March 30).
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Re: bloodsports promo and reviews

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http://www.uncut.co.uk/suede-bloodsports-review
Suede - Bloodsports
Not quite a return to their storming, Britpop peak – but the signs are encouraging...
After such a fall, it seemed impossible. That Suede – generally acknowledged to have launched Britpop in 1992 with debut single “The Drowners”, a brilliantly brash, slo-mo amalgam of early Bowie and The Smiths – might somehow scramble back up the cliff face and make another record, was surely blue-sky thinking of the most desperately hopeful kind. The band, who parted ways in November of 2003 had had a rocky run of it.
Their last album, 2002’s A New Morning had signalled a fresh start for the newly clean Brett Anderson – who’d spent 18 months in the grip of crack cocaine addiction, his muse deserting him by degrees – and a reboot for a band that had watched the zeitgeist slipping out of focus and all but their most devout fans withdrawing. As it turned out, the “new morning” was more a final dusk. Protracted recording sessions didn’t help, but the main problem was a war on two fronts: an uncertain embrace of acoustic song craft, and electric tracks where their eccentricities became tired tropes.
There was a lot to prove, then, when Suede reunited in 2010 for the Teenage Cancer Trust shows. If not exactly a triumphant return to their majestic prime, this one-off was a reminder that that prime was indeed quite something (they were, after all, Melody Maker cover stars before they’d released their first single), and it suggested that Suede’s tank might not be empty yet. It also served as a reintroduction, paving the way for – could it really happen? – a new Suede album. Anderson announced exactly that in September of 2012, just over a year after first mentioning the possibility of a sixth studio LP with the qualification that “nothing would see the light of day unless I was really, really excited about it.” Bloodsports presumably fills that brief.
Produced by Ed Buller, who worked on their first three LPs and tagged by Anderson as “a cross between bits of ‘Dog Man Star’ and bits of ‘Coming Up’”, it prompts a sigh of relief, if not wild cheering. Suede were caught between a rock and a hard place; while acutely aware of what made them great, they were not only sensibly unwilling, but also unable to replicate that youthful, amped-up glory (Anderson is now 44). A New Morning, however, proved the folly of reinvention. Bloodsports, then, is a recalibration. If it has any parallel, it’s in the Manic Street Preachers’ Everything Must Go, a punched-up, hook-heavy set more about overall impact than detail, and a calculated counter to their previous record. Anderson claims it’s “about the endless carnal game of love” and it tracks the path of a relationship from infatuation through estrangement to break-up. Accordingly, much of it has a widescreen, (melo)dramatic wallop and none of the songs serve Suede’s comeback too shabbily. “For The Strangers”, “Sabotage” and “It Starts And Ends With You” are unremarkable hybrids of consensual, grown-up rock that drag their heels in terms of contemporaneity (U2, Keane, The Killers) but they push the big-picture buttons effectively enough. Lyrics, though, are still a sticking point. Anderson has long since dropped his Cockney affectations, and he’s no longer seduced by the breath-taking modernity of cigarettes, neon and magazines, but he still struggles with poetic resonance. Analogies are uniformly limited to one thing being “like” another and some metaphors simply don’t ring true. Does any telephone really emit “a brittle sigh”, as is described in “What Are You Not Telling Me”?
There’s a territory-reclaiming trifecta, though, that pushes Suede through. “Barriers” is a powerful opening salvo, its clarion sweeps of guitar underpinned by Blondie’s turbo-charged rhythms and pumped up with ’80s cliff-top dynamics. The darkly insistent “Snowblind” easily matches it, as does “Hit Me”, an irresistible, glammed-up stomp that hints at “Sweet Child O’ Mine” and is bound to do the indie-disco business from Brighton to Wick. Bloodsports may not be quite as “furious” as Anderson has claimed, but Suede’s renewed charge is obvious. It’s a creditable step back into the ring after years on the ropes/
Sharon O'Connell

Q+A
Brett Anderson
Did you feel like there was a lot at stake with Bloodsports?
There was a huge amount. What was at stake was rescuing the reputation of Suede, really. We probably shouldn’t have released that last album; we did the thing we’d always said we’d avoid – releasing a record just to go on tour. It wasn’t released with the joy and passion with which records should be released.
What were you aiming at sonically with the new LP?
We were trying to find that sweet spot between feeling like Suede and feeling fresh, which is a really interesting point on the spectrum. I don’t think there’s any point in coming back and trying to reinvent the band, and I wanted it to sound identifiably like a Suede record. But I didn’t want it to sound like self-parody or pastiche.
Was there ever a point where you thought Suede were done for good?
There was a point about midway through the new record where it wasn’t really coming together like I wanted it to. I did toy with the idea of saying, “Let’s not do this, and I’ll carry on making solo records.” But that was to do with trying to re-establish the band chemistry. We almost approached this like we were a new band. We didn’t want to have this bullshit complacent attitude: “We’re Suede and whatever we do is going to sound great.”
INTERVIEW: SHARON O’CONNELL
Rating: 7 / 10
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Re: bloodsports promo and reviews

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http://www.independent.co.uk/arts-enter ... 67687.html

Back in black: Brett Anderson on Britpop blow-ups, going solo and the triumphant return of Suede
Nick Duerden
Sunday 14 April 2013
Brett Anderson released four solo albums between 2007 and 2011. The Suede singer once cut a daring swathe through a staid music scene with records that were pop landmarks and some seminal live performances: he was one of the few British rock stars who could look threatening in a big girl's blouse.
But the solo albums were largely ignored (the first failed to dent the Top 50, the other three the Top 100). This seems, Morrissey, Paul Weller and a few others aside, an all-too common fate for singers of once-big bands. Some are philosophical about this, others less so.
"Actually, I enjoyed my solo career," Anderson says. "Very much so. But, no, the records didn't quite capture the public's imagination. I'm disappointed they didn't connect. I suppose people never quite got their head around Brett Anderson as a solo artist."
People had long since stopped getting their heads around Suede records, too. In many ways, they peaked early. When the band released their eponymous debut in 1993, they were hailed as the most exciting new band in a generation, Anderson cast as the new David Bowie. If he was playing a role, he played it well. "I see myself as a bisexual man who has never had a homosexual experience," he famously uttered.
In that same year, Suede performed at the Brit Awards, playing their new single "Animal Nitrate", a song about the thrills of inhaling poppers, to a largely shocked, sometimes appalled, audience. "I've never felt more out of place; it was so ridiculously corporate," he said afterwards, thereby effortlessly establishing his role as pop's new androgynous anti-hero.
But by the time they released their 2002 album, A New Morning, Suede had long since lost that initial threat, and with it much of their appeal. It was poorly received, and didn't sell well. The band split shortly after. Anderson seemed already resolved to this, and the drugs he once took to help him open the doors of perception now had a noticeably more destructive effect. Not even he could inject glamour into his crack addiction.
The solo career was his attempt to rid himself of his earlier lipstick-smeared flamboyance and play instead at being a different kind of artist altogether: low-key, subdued and, musically, almost mournful.
"Those albums were a willing retreat away from that whole world," he suggests. "I became so sickened by it in the 1990s that I just wanted to step away completely, and make music in a much more personal way. Without wishing to sound like I'm in group therapy, I learnt a lot about myself: my limits, my capabilities. I needed to unlearn certain things, and I needed time away from it all if I was ever going to come back at some point with any hope of integrity."
As perhaps he always knew he would, Anderson did eventually return to Suede. In 2010, the band was invited to play a Teenage Cancer Trust charity concert. He quickly agreed, and began the process of rallying around the other members. Bassist Mat Osman, by now working as a delivery-van driver (having spent all his band royalties a little too carelessly), was thrilled to be asked. Drummer Simon Gilbert, who had emigrated to Bangkok, where he learnt the language, opened shops and played in various local acts, was also keen to return.
Keyboardist Neil Codling, who had spent the intervening decade touring with Natalie Imbruglia and battling with ME, was more wary, but felt the band had unfinished business. Hardest to tempt back was guitarist Richard Oakes. Back in 1994, Oakes was the mercurial 17-year-old drafted in to replace the band's original mercurial guitarist, Bernard Butler, who quit after one too many arguments with Anderson. Oakes was reclusive, and contentedly so. But Anderson proved persuasive.
The charity gig, held at London's Royal Albert Hall, exceeded all expectations. "It was the best show we had ever done," Gilbert says now. "We came off stage afterwards and thought, we can't possibly stop now, not after that." Simon Price, this newspaper's rock reviewer, agreed: "Suede's five men in black have pulled it out of the fire with fearless hands," he wrote at the time.
Reviving a previously spent force, however, was not without its difficulties, and the group were wary of doing so purely for the sake of nostalgia. "That would have been a living death," Anderson says. "The trick was to make new music that stood up to our best work without sounding like a parody of it." He pauses. "It wasn't easy, but we discovered we could still make exciting music together. Not every band that comes back after a 10-year gap can do that. A lot of bands wouldn't even dare try. We did."
I meet three members of Suede on an early March afternoon in their management offices in west London. Osman and Oakes are elsewhere, leaving Anderson, Gilbert k and Codling to face me and reminisce, sometimes reluctantly, about the old days. Codling is all but silent, a preternaturally youthful 39-year-old hiding behind Clark Kent glasses, while Gilbert, who once matched the singer's narcotic appetite, today exudes an almost yogic serenity. "We've all become a bit more centred and relaxed with ourselves," he says, smiling. "We've grown up."
Anderson, meanwhile, looks unaccountably good for someone once seemingly intent on narcotic oblivion. At 45, he is fit and healthy, and remains whippet-thin. He still has that just-blowdried hairstyle, still with its shampooed sheen, and his cheekbones continue to frame his face in a Quentin Crisp pout that so perfectly complements his manner, and which suggests the questions he is forced to endure are, frankly, beneath him.
Bloodsports, Suede's latest album, which entered the charts at number 10, has successfully bucked comeback convention by sounding both fresh and new, yet still recognisably like the Suede of old, right down to Anderson's theatrical warble and his occasionally preposterous lyrical declarations. "Your lips are like sabotage," he sings at one point. "Her touch is like a raven's shadow."
"It was as hard a record as I, personally, have ever made," he says. "But I'm proud of it. It was a difficult thing to achieve, but we did it. We found the sweet spot."
Crossing one pipecleaner leg over the other, and resting his wrists on a perched knee, his pout melts, unambiguously, into a smile.
It is difficult to overestimate the impact Suede made on music back in the early 1990s without resorting to hyperbole. They arrived at a time when the British charts were still submerged in the offcuts of American grunge. Madchester, once dominated by the Stone Roses and Happy Mondays, was waning, and in its place arrived another "new" scene, shoegazing, populated by Home Counties guitar nerds overfond of their effects pedals, who rarely dared peak out from beneath their fringes. Suede were different. They were brash and beautiful, and their frontman, the product of a dull suburban upbringing, was wantonly reinventing himself as a squalid bohemian.
"It was an incredibly exciting thing to be in Suede in 1992, 1993," Anderson says. "What we were doing was right at the vanguard of something that hadn't been set in stone yet. We were coming out of a lot of really bad music and doing something at last worth listening to. There was something noble in that."
What they, and others in their wake, were doing became known as Britpop. "Yes, but I can't be bothered going all over that again," he sighs. "We all know what happened." He's right, we do. Suede may have been Britpop's initial torchbearers, but they were soon eclipsed by more commercial propositions such as Blur and Oasis. Anderson failed to disguise his disgust. "It became horribly twisted, a musical Carry on… film, and we did our utmost to distance ourselves from it," he told this paper in 2003.
He also found himself, not always unwittingly, embroiled in the more soap-opera elements of it all. His former girlfriend, Elastica's Justine Frischmann, had begun dating Blur's Damon Albarn, prompting what appeared to be real enmity between the two acts, while his withering putdowns of Oasis's mainstream dominance ("They make real music, made of wood," he once quipped), elevated him to ringmaster status, mocking the puppets he felt he had helped create.
But today, this is a subject he is loath to revisit. "This is where questions like this become annoying," he says. "These 'rivalries' that were formed 20 years ago weren't even particularly relevant to me then, let alone now. It's a fictional world that my persona inhabits only according to the press. The real me doesn't live in those places at all."
But, I try to point out, I wasn't asking him to revisit supposed rivalries. I was merely asking whether he remained competitive (his answer: "worryingly so"), and what he made of Damon Albarn and Noel Gallagher's musical efforts these days. "I've not heard them," he says. "OK, I might accidentally have overheard something, but not consciously." Why not? "I just wouldn't seek something like that out, to be honest," is his reply.
We talk instead about Suede's trajectory. I ask whether he has many regrets, and he smiles and says, "How much time have you got?" He regrets allowing his relationship with Bernard Butler to sour so spectacularly (though they did later reconcile), and that the band came to such an ignominious end in 2002. "We deserved better." His experiences with drugs, however, he feels less regret over.
"I'm happy that I experienced real highs and real lows, and that it wasn't just a safe time in which we plodded along the usual path," he says. "I'm glad we had a rollercoaster ride of it. It's impossible not to have some regrets – everybody does – but it's how you use them that counts. If you're going to let yourself get eaten up by them, then you've lost. You need to learn from them, and accept that you are happy with where you've ended up. The extremities I went through, the mistakes I made, are what have led me to where I am now."
Which is where, exactly? It is never easy, after all, for a rock star on the comeback trail, attempting to reconcile the debauched hedonist he once was to, in this case, a happily married man with two children, but one who still makes exciting music.
"It is such an oversimplification to suggest that, as you get older, you lose your hunger," he complains. "Nonsense. OK, yes, I am 45 years old now, and I no longer live on the cliff face, but that doesn't mean that everything in my life is comfortable, or that if it was it would somehow invalidate me as an artist. There is always tension in life, and there are still enough things wrong with my mind that enable me to want to collect them in art."
Back in the day, he says, he would seek out friction from wherever he could, careening from one self-designed crisis to another. "I still know where to find that friction now; I just seek it from different places." He smiles. "And I know where to look."
'Bloodsports' is out now on Warner Brothers Records
sunshine
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Re: bloodsports promo and reviews

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http://www.undertheradar.co.nz/interview/593/Suede.utr
Wednesday, 1st May 2013 8:58AM
Interview: Suede
By Natalie Finnigan
After a ten year hiatus, the oft-forgotten pioneers of the Brit-Pop movement, Suede, are back with a new album, Bloodsports. Over 20 years have passed since they made their debut on the London music scene and after "going out with a whimper, rather than a bang" when they broke up in 2003, bassist Mat Osman says they all felt as though they had unfinished business as a band. Natalie Finnigan spoke to Mat about Suede's past, and posed the all important question: have you made a brief return to the stage for the purpose of reliving Suede's glory years, or is this the new Suede and the beginning of a new era...
Hi Natalie, how are you?
I'm good thanks Mat, how are you?
I'm great thanks!
Where are you at the moment?
I've been based in West London for ever and ever and ever. Funnily enough me and Brett (Anderson, lead singer) used to live together about a mile from here, 25 years ago, so I've lived here most of my life - very unadventurous.
But have you been out touring the new album?
We've been doing a bit but not much actually. We did a big London show up at the Alexandra Palace and we're off to Norway on Friday for a festival, but we don't really go for that massive 'living on a bus for six months' kind of tour. There just comes a point in your life where you don't want to live on a bus with 20 guys. That point has well and truly come for me.
This intrigues me, and takes me all the way down my question list to a risky one. Without pissing you off by asking that cliche, 'how is the music industry different now from when you started?' question, I do want to know whether you've had to change your approach. Most bands now rely on touring to make money, so how do you get away without touring extensively?
Young bands today work so hard - they really do. It's the biggest change. When we do festivals we meet a lot of younger bands, and a lot of these guys have grown up in the internet age, and they've spent their lives on a bus or a plane.
It's quite rough really isn't it?
Well I think it's a shame. For a band like us it's been amazing, because in the 90's we sold a lot of records and that's what you did to get by. Now, we do a lot of festivals and that's fine, so I can live with what has happened to the music industry because it's been okay for us, but I think if I was 20, and like so many of these bands I was working in a bar during the day to make a record that millions of people hear and about 400 people pay for, I don't know whether I'd be so keen to be honest. The thing in Britain, and I don't know if it's the same in your part of the world, but being in a band is something that the rich kids sort of do. It's kind of gone the way acting used to be, when we used to have only posh actors, because to dabble in something that didn't really pay, you had to have money.
Well in New Zealand, it doesn't really matter if you're the number one selling artist, you're probably still not going to make that much money... unless you're Tim or Neil Finn maybe...
Haha, yeah that's true... but what about those Flight of the Conchords guys, they're from New Zealand aren't they?
Yeah but they went Hollywood so it's a bit different... nah but I guess you're right - they would have made some serious money.
Well the thing is, you either play festivals or you work with the muppets - that's all that's left.
I know some bands have started focusing on commercials and advertising...
I find that really sad. I'm not blaming them or anything, because if the choice is between making music for commercials or not making music, then fine, but I think if you're writing music focused on whether or not Budweiser are going to like it... I don't know, it becomes a very different life.
It's particularly weird when some of these bands are actually known for their 'down with the corporation-yay for anarchy' type sentiment...
Yes but it's surprising how quickly stuff gets sold back to you. Anything that's anti-corporate, it's weird but the corporates seem to want it all the more.
Maybe some of these older bands mellowed out with age and figured they could compromise?
The funny thing is, I think it works the other way around. I think a lot of the older bands still have that 'no adverts - no messing with these people' policy, but that's because they do get paid good money to play festivals. I find it very hard to be tough on any of the people who are starting now, because I don't know how they get paid. I've met bands, who if they started making records 20 years ago, could've been spending all day working on record number two, but instead they're working in bars and shops...
I guess if they really love it they'll do it - they'll be the supporting act and sleep on hotel room floors for fifteen years in the hope that one day they wont have to...
Yeah, but it shouldn't just be a hobby...
Hmmmm. I've got no idea what will happen to the industry...
No, neither.
So have you been working with other bands or on other projects since Suede broke up in 2003?
Little bits and pieces, I did TV work over here, but I've spent most of the time working as a writer and journalist. When the band broke up I had that epiphany that I really didn't want to have anything to do with music industry. I thought that it was an almost evil, depraved, money-obsessed place. It took time working in other industries to realised that it's exactly the same with everything else. It's no different from working as a journalist or being in the oil industry - once money has its grubby little hooks into something, then it's not that different. There's 85% of people who are there to get paid and don't really care about it, and there's 15% who absolutely love what they do and make the whole thing worth it.
Who have you been writing for?
I've done loads of stuff - lots of writing for British newspapers and magazines, a guide book to London... pretty much anything other than writing about music, which I still think is the most impossible thing. Either it's something that I love, which I can't put into words, or it's something I hate and I think 'Why am I writing about this?'
I don't typically like reviews for that reason...
I totally understand that - you need to be a special kind of person to be able to sit there and say 'Yes, Yes, Yes - No, No, No' to records and stuff - I couldn't do it.
I almost feel like it's a redundant activity anyway in the way that it's typically done, because when you're listening to something, you either like it or you don't, and that has no impact whatsoever on anyone other than yourself...
Yes, but at the same time the music press is King, because without them you just can't hear a lot of these records. Most of the records in my collection that I love I found through the music press because they didn't get radio play in the UK.
That's true - I could talk about this all day but I better ask you about your album eh?
Yes, probably.
You had a reunion show or two during 2010, 2011, and that went really well and you enjoyed it - what was it that made you get back together? You had a pretty tumultuous period before you broke up - what changed over the ten years you were apart that meant working together again was an appealing prospect?
Well, a couple of things happened. We came back together to do a show for a teenage cancer trust. Roger Daltrey from The Who organises these shows every year, and he asked us, and we said 'we're not together anymore' and he said 'Well would you get back together?'. It was a charity we'd worked with before and it was at the Royal Albert Hall, which we absolutely loved, and I think there was a feeling with all of us that Suede had ended with a bit of a whimper, rather than a bang, and it didn't seem to fit with the dramatic nature of the band.
I think we all thought we should do this, because it will either be great, and a fantastic ending to all that we've done, or it will be awful, but at least it was awful for a good cause, and it raised $50k or whatever and we haven't inflicted ourselves on the world just for our own vanity! It was so great. The reaction was unexpected because there was obviously a reservoir of affection for the band and it felt very fresh and natural and so we decided that night to go and play some places that we'd love to play.
The minute you do that you get offers, and so we tried not get caught up in all of that, but instead we said 'why don't we just go and play the places that we've always loved playing or the places that we've always wanted to play'. That's pretty much what we did for a year and a half to two years. We played all of our favourite cities, and normally when you do this you have to play all the stuff from your last record and your greatest hits, but when we did the set list we picked all of the songs we thought would work and make the best show. I loved that tour. It was a lovely mix of people who hadn't seen us in ten years, and people who had never seen the band but had discovered through YouTube or whatever.
So when did you decide you needed to make a record?
There comes a point when you do that, where it is dangerous, in that it becomes normal, and pretty soon it becomes like, you have to do another record for this to make sense, and it just nags at you. The last record we did I didn't really like, and there's this sense that the last thing you've done is what you'll be judged on, so we wanted to do something better. We started writing, and it proved to be much harder than just playing together again. You kind of forget that when you're playing together you've got the best songs from over 20 years, but when you're writing again it's hard to live up to that. We wrote about 30 or 40 songs, and we had a whole album kind of done, and then we went and played them live and they just didn't stand up with the rest of the material. These songs had to be able to be played between 'So Young' and 'The 2 of Us', so it took a long time. We discarded a lot of stuff. We got Ed Buller in and he was even harder on it because he had a clear vision. We spent the best part of year writing and then just suddenly last summer, we wrote 'Barriers' and 'For The Strangers' in the same week, and it was like 'Ah, I get it now, I get how Suede needs to sound in 2013' and after that it was very natural. I'd love to say that it was like riding a bike, and we got back in the room and the five of us created magic from nothing, but it wasn't at all. It was a lot of hard work and probably all the more satisfying for that. I am really proud of the record and I feel the new material fits well with the old.
I guess it sounds like a great... well do you see this as a conclusion?
Well at the moment I'm trying to see everything as a conclusion. The first time around - it's ridiculous when it becomes and every day thing to do - being in a band and touring the world - it should never be ordinary. It should always be fantastical and feel temporary and feel fragile.
That's the magic isn't it?
Yeah exactly. And literally, the day I hear anyone mention their career, I know something is dead in it. When you start out you don't expect anyone is going to be listening. So basically the philosophy at the moment is to see everything as the last one - the last tour, the last show, the last song. I think that's a pretty good step.
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