11th Nov Les Inrock / La Cigale, Paris (France)

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sunshine
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Posts: 7937
Joined: 14 Feb 2002, 01:00

11th Nov Les Inrock / La Cigale, Paris (France)

Post by sunshine »

OMG... not much left of the European tour now!

they played: still life, barriers, starts & ends, trash, animal nitrate, we are the pigs, sabotage, drowners, filmstar, heroin, the 2 of us, for the strangers, so young, metal mickey, beautiful ones
encore: she's in fashion, new generation
sunshine
Flight attendant
Posts: 7937
Joined: 14 Feb 2002, 01:00

Re: 11th Nov Les Inrock / La Cigale, Paris (France)

Post by sunshine »

8 November 2013
Interview: Suede
http://gigsinparis.com/interview-suede- ... -la-cigale
Jeremy Allen speaks to bassist Mat Osman about getting the band back together for a new album and a new start.
The last time I interviewed Suede bassist Mat Osman his band broke up immediately afterwards, though thankfully 10 years on, the Good Ship Suede is pushing forward at a rate of knots and shows no signs of abating. Back then I spoke to a forlorn Brett Anderson and a reflective Osman, wounded by the lukewarm reception their album A New Morning received both from the critics and those that usually bought their records in droves and neglected to do so that time around.
A decade on and three years since their astonishing comeback at the Albert Hall in London the band have got their “demons back” (in the sign off letter issued to the press Anderson said the fallen, malevolent little blighters had gone missing), and Bloodsports signifies a band back to their bruising best.
If A New Morning turned out to be a false dawn then Bloodsports has given Suede the scent for something even bigger and more expansive with the next offering – maybe even an album with the ambitions of Dog Man Star (it’s not a comparison that either Brett or Mat are shying away from in interviews right now). But in the meantime there’s a tour to be had, and Suede are playing at La Cigale in Paris this Monday. Gigs in Paris caught up with Osman on a line to Toulouse earlier in the week.
So Mat, is this tour you’re on now a kind of victory lap after the success of the record?
MO: I dunno, it’s kind of a weird thing because we haven’t really toured since we’ve been back. We’ve done festivals and we’ve done lots of British stuff and one-offs, but this is the first proper, living-on-a-bus-for-three-weeks-in-a-row, brutal kind of schedule. But it’s been quite nice because at festivals you’re not necessarily always playing to your own crowd – you play the hits or whatever – and this has been a chance to play a lot of Bloodsports and a lot of rare older things – ‘Modern Boys’ and ‘God’s Gift’, ‘Painted People’ and stuff like that.
Do you enjoy touring?
MO: I love playing live but I don’t think many people enjoy the process of touring. It’s kind of like, you know when you go on holiday? The day you travel there or the day you travel back… it’s like doing the first day and the last day again and again for two months (laughs). But I love playing live, I absolutely love it. It’s the reason we got back together. We did that first show at the Albert Hall and I’d kind of forgotten the feeling you get from that.
Do you see all the old faces or have you picked up a new generation of fans?
MO: It’s been such an eye opener. We worked harder on Bloodsports than any record we’ve ever done before; we definitely wrote more than we’ve ever done and I think it shows – especially when we’ve gone to Asia or South America or places like that – we’re just a new band, you know what I mean? A new band that just happens to have 120 songs in reserve (laughs). And the audiences wherever we go are generally all new in the front third. They’re people who in the last 10 years have discovered us through YouTube or Spotify or whatever.
Phew, so it’s not just the nostalgists reliving the 90’s then…
As you go back there are older fans of course, but I think you need a big chunk of the audience having no need for nostalgia, otherwise you become one of those dreadful bands who are just a souvenir of themselves. I remember seeing the Velvet Underground in France and leaving halfway through. The idea that this band that had meant so much to people could bore me just seemed so weird.
So it was March 2010 when you returned, and at the time it was touch and go whether you’d continue…
MO: I’m not kidding, we definitely had nothing booked after that. We literally said to each other ‘let’s do this and just see what it’s like’, and until we stepped on stage I was pretty sure we’d do it and then go back to doing other stuff. You forget the feeling of it, you really do. Before we split up we’d never done anything else. I started playing in bands with Brett when we were in school, and so we’d definitely taken it all for granted, though I think we’re a better band for it having had 10 years off. You don’t know what you’ve got until it’s gone – pardon me for resorting to cliché but it’s true.
The euphoria of that gig was a far cry from the despondency I witnessed first hand when I interviewed you a decade ago. As the interviewer it was easy to detect things weren’t great in the camp back then.
No, they weren’t at all, and they were self-destructive. I think that was the reason we were all fairly low. We were a band that out of adversity had always been at our best, but that’s always come from outside, whether we’d been ignored or written off; but the whole thing about the A New Morning record is it was our fault. We were totally in control of that record, we decided how it was made and I think we’d just become really tired and slightly lost. The things that were great about this band – the drama and the passion – you can’t fake. I think we’d made so many pronouncements over the years about what a band should be that we felt slightly embarrassed about it.
Did you feel like underdogs when you returned?
MO: I don’t think we felt like underdogs but I think we thought we could prove something. – there was very much a sense of doing it right because virtually nobody had done it right. It was a real vindication that a lot of people said it was the best comeback, it was a proper reinvention, a starting again rather than just a cash cow.
Did you have any doubts or worries?
MO: Yeah, all the way through it we had doubts. About eight months into making the record we had nothing – we had two songs or something – and we hit a low. I think all of us just thought then ‘oh, perhaps this isn’t going to happen’. There’s something so seductive about coming back and playing the old songs, it’s easy and you get an incredible reaction because you haven’t been around for ten years so you just go “this is great, we just write ten more songs like that and we’ll start all over”. But writing songs as good as on the other five albums isn’t easy, and as you get older I think it gets harder. And then we just chipped away at it and it was one of those things where two or three songs came and then suddenly you can see the shape of the record, and then very quickly the gaps got filled in.
And then you embarked on a new chapter…
MO: I was always embarrassed about the way Suede ended. We were a band tied up with high drama through every step of our career and everything had gone off at weird angles, and to finish by releasing a not very good record and splitting up was so, so unsatisfying. So coming back and playing the Albert Hall I thought ‘if this is where it ends then I’ll take that’.
And now I hear overtures from within the Suede camp that the next album could be a bit more, whisper it, Dog Man Star epic…
MO: When we came back I think we just wanted to be absolutely bulletproof Suede, it was almost the feeling we had when we did Coming Up which was really another comeback record, another new debut. It was kind of like ‘let’s do the essence of Suede, let’s not mess around, let’s get something that kicks like a maul’. I love records like that, the debut is like that and Coming Up is like that and they’re our most popular records. A song like ‘What Are You Not Telling Me?’ – which came very late on – I remember recording it and you could see everyone going ‘ooh yeah, we’d love to do a couple more like this’. It didn’t really fit on the record but you could just see everyone thinking ‘next time, now that we’re back, now we know people are listening…’
It’s the most powerful thing you can have in a band, the idea that people are listening. It’s the reason Dog Man Star sounded the way it did. We’d had so much attention for the first record that we did what we wanted. As long as it’s good it doesn’t matter that it’s difficult or unusual or any of these things because people will listen. We can compete with the pop acts because people want to hear what we do.
Suede will play a headlining show at La Cigale on Monday, November 11 alongside Temples and Teleman as part of Festival LesInrocks, tickets are available here.
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