http://supmag.com/2013/01/suede/
SUEDE
'75 percent of cruise ships crash'
Interview Josh Jones
Photography Dan Wilton
In 1993, my older sister came back for the summer from University and I heard her playing a tape she’d copied off her housemate as she sulked in her room. As soon as she went downstairs, I went in there and stole it. It was called Suede (Nude Records, 1993). It was the best thing I’d ever heard. I never gave it back.
Suede were, without doubt, one of the most important bands of the ’90s. For me definitely, but for UK music as a whole. They moved us towards guitars, they were on the cusp, and found themselves as parents of, what became known as Britpop. And they hated being there. Not for them was the Cockney knees-up of Blur or Northern anthems offered by Oasis. They were the music of the disaffected, the marginalized and the alienated. They lurked in the shadows. People loved the androgyny, the risqué lyrics, the drugs, the drama and the fringes. The way they just were. Suede was a band that thrived on real-life drama.
Famously starring on the cover of Melody Maker without even releasing a record, they snarled, spat and shat on their roller-coaster-ride life. One that saw very high highs and some crashing lows – where the band’s personnel left and joined and each battled with their all-consuming lifestyle. Over five albums, Justine Frischmann left, Bernard Butler joined and left, then 17-year-old guitarist Richard Oakes joined, followed by Neil Codling with his keys and guitars and his cheek bones. Drugs and drink were ever present. Suede’s way was always the hard way.
Dog Man Star (Nude Records, 1994), was their sophomore offering, made all the more difficult as guitarist (and creative force behind the album) Bernard Butler quit as tensions between him and the rest of the band reached boiling point before the record was released. Then came the anthem-packed Coming Up (Nude Records, 1996), the band’s most successful record, followed with a collection of b-sides (which Suede were famous for) Sci-Fi Lullabies (Nude Records, 1997). In 1999, Head Music (Nude Records) divided their fans, and Neil Codling left the band with chronic fatigue syndrome. Their final offering, A New Morning (Columbia, 2002), was, according to Anderson, “the only album not influenced in its making by drugs” and, with only two singles released from it, a commercial disappointment. The band has since stated that that album was an album too far.
Now that they’re elder statesmen of the UK music scene, and clean of the ’90s excess, ’SUP decided it would be for the best if we had nothing harder than tea. We talked about then and now, their successful reformation and driving cars with the two founding members of the band, and friends from college, lead singer Brett Anderson and bassist Mat Osman.
Are you into tea?
Brett: I am into tea actually. I do love my tea. It’s one of the few pleasures I have left in life (laughs).
What kind of tea? Lapsang? Builders?
Brett: Just black tea. I do like my tea. I don’t really like coffee. It’s too strong.
Mat: I was telling Josh about Neil [Codling]’s idea for his cup of tea tattoo.
Brett: What was that?
Mat: Did I not tell you about that? I was talking to him about tattoos and I was saying I find it really weird how people have Celtic bands or these things that people will have no interest in for the rest of their lives. They actually have to spend the rest of their life with a Thai symbol or something. And Neil said he had a line drawing at home of a cup of tea with heat lines coming off it and he said he’d always wanted that. I can understand that though – cup of tea’s something you’d never be bored with.
Brett: Justine always wanted a motorway sign. You know the symbol with the bridge and the two lanes?
I always thought that was a robot. For a long, long time. Like, too long.
Mat: So you thought it was a sign saying ‘Robots Ahead’?
The bridge bit looked like two pointing fingers.
Brett: I suppose that’s one interpretation of a sign.
It took until my driving test that I realized what it was.
Dan [Photographer]: I’ve only been in a car with you driving once and it was that awful trip back from that festival that took forever and you hated it.
Brett: Are you a nervous driver, then?
I wasn’t until I got in a car with my best friend and he ate a salad like a horse when he was doing 90mph. Now I hate it.
Brett: I drive really slowly as well. I won’t break the speed limit; I’m really paranoid about it. It’s because I passed my test recently. About five years ago, but nowadays – I don’t know if you know – but if you get six points on your license within the first two years of passing they take away your license and you have to do it all over again.
Mat: Can you still not listen to any music that has a voice or a rhythm when you’re driving?
Brett (laughs): I can now actually.
Mat: It used be just used to be ambient and classical in his car. Do you want a cup of tea, Dan?
Dan: Yes please. Is that mine?
Brett: No, no. That one’s mine brewing.
[A very British conversation about whose tea is whose ensues.]
Brett: What about that story of when you took your test for the first time, Mat?When you crashed the car.
Mat: That was the second time I took my test that I crashed it. The first time I failed for driving on the wrong side of the road. Just completely the wrong side of the road. There was a bollard in the middle of the road or something. The second time, I crashed it. My dad used to work for British Leyland, so I had a car but I couldn’t drive it. So it just sat in my drive and I’d just sit in it listening to the radio. During the second test everything had gone really well, I was all excited and I thought I’d cracked it. Then we drove into the car park at the end and I went between two cars to park, I just missed the brake, hit the accelerator, went through this parking space, up a little bank and into a row of iron railings. Everyone else who’d taken their test was already back and doing their questions. Driving instructors must be unshakeable because we were sitting there, almost vertical, looking up at the sky and he just said, ‘I’m now going to ask you some questions on the Highway Code.’ Having said that, I’d just like to point out I’ve been driving for 25 years and never had a crash or claimed on insurance and have a clean driving license.
Are you going to read me your CV now?
Brett: This isn’t that sort of interview, Mat.
Mat: If anyone’s looking for a professional driver… Come on then Josh, let’s hear your interview.
It’s started already. I’m pretty much done. It’s weird interviewing you because I’ve worked with you before.
Brett: You’ve worked with Mat?
Mat: Yeah, Josh has written many things for me. But now you’re organizing interviews at The O2 with the likes of Backstreet Boys and New Kids On The Block?
Yeah, that’s a long story.
Dan: Don’t they do a New Kids On The Block cruise now?
Yes, and there’s an R. Kelly one and Weezer do one too.
Mat (to Brett): Did you know that? This is the heritage rock thing in the States – but I can’t understand them. They last for about a week.
Brett: What? With the same band playing every night?
Mat: Yeah. And they bring along some other bands as friends and then I assume they hang out with everyone on the boat. And the fans get a guaranteed photo or something.
Brett: You can’t avoid them I bet. Do you think cruises have the same kitsch associations in America as they do in this country? I can’t imagine it working here, it just sounds so naff.
Mat: Everything about it sounds horrible to me. They all crash. Always. 75 percent of cruise ships crash.
Brett: Just the thought of being stuck with the same people all the time. You’re basically in prison, aren’t you? The worst night of my life was spent on a party boat on the River Thames because you can’t get off. I went to this party and it was an absolute nightmare and I thought ‘Okay, well I’ll go home.’ When I asked when they’d let us off they were like, ‘Four in the morning.’ This was about 9 p.m. Do you know what I mean? It was really awful.
Mat: Being forced to party. So if your question is, ‘Will there be a Suede cruise?’
Brett: Definitely. Yes, Yes. Yes.
I guess we should talk about the new album. Are you already in the studio with it?
Mat: We’re easing into the studio. It’s weird how much things have changed in seven years. A lot of it has been written at home and passed around. We’ve done lots of bits and pieces at Neil’s house around the corner. He’s got the world’s smallest studio so we have to do it in shifts. You can’t fit the whole band in there at once. It’s kind of strange compared with 20 years ago, whereby being in the studio was a block of time when you made the record and nothing outside of that was involved. Now we’re easing into it and we’ll go to a proper studio where people bring you tea.
Would you say this is the most relaxed Suede album you’ve recorded?
Brett: No. No. They never are. Never. Whatever album you’re doing is always the hardest you’ve ever made. And this is no exception. They’re just hard in different ways. I always have a real crisis point with making records where I think I can’t possibly do it. And it’s always a real emotional journey. So it’s not easy in those terms. It’s not easy in creative terms. It’s kind of easy in terms of expectation and pressure and stuff like that. We don’t have a record company, we don’t have any great expectations from outside, really. But that doesn’t mean you can take your foot off the gas and make a piece of shoddy work– it’s got to be amazing. In fact, it’s got to be even more so because I don’t want to be another one of these bands that reform and make an average record and then fall apart again, as seems to be the pattern that happens. Every week I open the Sunday Times and they have ‘Dud Of The Week’ in there alongside ‘Album Of The Week’ and it’s always things like The Cranberries or Feeder – in fact, last week it was Spiritualized. You know, these bands that have reformed and made new albums? It’s my ambition not to be in ‘Dud Of The Week’.
That Spiritualized album had really mixed reviews.
Brett: It had genuinely mixed reviews, and ‘mixed reviews’ is usually a euphemism for bad reviews, but these really were mixed. I read some amazing reviews for it and also some really bad ones.
Mat: I think the thing about Spiritualized is that, by now, you must know whether you like Spiritualized or not.
Brett: And this album is very Spiritualized. You know songs about satisfying my soul and stuff like that. It sounds like a Spiritualized record, for better or for worse. I mean, if you like that, then great. Some of it’s really good.
I saw them play at Hackney Empire recently and it was really average. I appreciated it, but I didn’t enjoy it. I found it a bit too self-indulgent, which makes me sound like a proper music journalist when I say that. It was a weird audience and he didn’t interact with the crowd at all – I know that’s kind of his thing – but he was standing sideways on to us and just looked at the wings of the stage for the whole show.
Brett: I can understand that. I sometimes don’t want to interact with the crowd. I sometimes choose not to say a word. I quite like the purity of that. I think if you can do it in the right spirit. If you can come across like you’re really committed, but you’re not being aloof and distant, then it can be a really intense performance. It’s a real fine line, getting the tone right – you can come across as arrogant and distant and like you don’t care.
Mat: I think in a way, that’s better. I think there’s another real danger for when bands from our era reform and that’s kind of almost becoming like a raconteur as a job. There’s these bands you see now and they talk for four minutes before each song and explain what it’s about and tell you little stories.
Brett: It’s like a heritage thing. It’s like music to accompany a novel or an autobiography.
Mat: It’s all about, ‘Do you remember this?’ and ‘We’ve grown up together’ and all that. There is a place for it, it’s just I would hate to be one of those bands. There’s something really careerist about it.
Brett: There’s something quite self-important about it as well.
Mat: Exactly, the people are interested in hearing little tales about your life.
Brett: I quite like the idea of playing and it being a musically pure experience, and the shows we’ve been doing over the past two years have been very turbo-charged and very energetic and really sort of dense with music. It’s been another great song and another great song and battering people to death with songs.
I went to both the Bush Hall show and the 100 Club shows back in 2010 when you first reformed and they were really so frenetic and so rammed with people.
Brett: I loved the Bush Hall one especially. That was my favorite one.
This guy in a trench coat pushed his way through the crowds and stood right in front of me – actually on my feet. He had a bottle of red wine hidden in his sleeve. Every time he’d put his hand in the air he’d down a bit more of the wine. You can’t get angry at a guy like that.
Mat (laughs): He’s living the dream there. I love gigs like that. We kind of grew up on gigs like that – Suede did. There was always a big thing when we started off, and I guess it’s because we started off playing for two or three years to not even half-empty rooms. We played to empty rooms.
Brett: We played gigs to an audience of one person before. I remember we played in front of Neil’s cousin once. One guy. That’s really fucking depressing. That’s more depressing than there being no one in the room.
Mat: He was right at the front. We should have given him an instrument – a tambourine or something.
Brett: It really was depressing.
Mat: I think because of that, when we did that first set of Suede shows in 2010, we’d always play somewhere smaller than we could get. It was that thing where we’d rather make sure that it was sold out than made extra money with an extra 200 people in there. There’s something about those gigs that’s really hard to recapture and it just happens sometimes. That Bush Hall gig was like that. It was that thing where people were lost in it. You know what I mean? And for it to be like that you need to be kind of crushed and overheated and it needs to be too loud, so for a moment you just lose yourself. It’s a very unmodern kind of gig in a way. Because with lots of modern gigs people are set back as there are so many barriers nowadays and they’ve got their camera phone screens, which is another level of separation between you.
Has this album been more collaborative than previous ones? You said you’ve been sending material back and forth between you all.
Mat: It’s been really collaborative. I think more than anything, because we didn’t know what kind of record we were going to make – we knew the kind of record we wanted to make, but that never works out does it?
Brett: It started off as quite a different record than it has become. We wrote a load of songs last year and we’ve ditched pretty much all of them apart from one and started to make a new sounding record. It’s changing still, it’s not over yet so it’s difficult to really have an end point with it.
[The Blow Monkeys' “Digging your Scene” comes on the stereo]
Brett: I haven’t heard this record for years. It’s Blow Monkeys, isn’t it? It’s a great record. I’m sorry, I can’t concentrate with this playing. Can I turn it off? Is that alright? I do like the record – it’s not a criticism of the music, it’s actually too good. It’s the same thing as driving in the car – suddenly I’m not looking for signs anymore. What was I saying? Yeah, the album’s changing, it’s difficult to talk about while it’s still in flux. We’ll end up contradicting ourselves and we don’t know what it’s going to be still yet. But it’s kind of an exciting journey. And we still don’t know if we’re definitely going to release it either, which is another exciting thing. It’s still on a knife-edge, it feels really good. I think we will probably will, but I think all of us want it to be amazing. We’re not going to release it if it’s a half-assed album.
Are you bored of reunion questions?
Mat: Yeah. I’m bored of bands that reunite to be honest. I’d like to pretend that I think it’s a brilliant idea that everyone reunites, but it patently isn’t. One of the only reasons that it makes sense to me is to prove that it can be done right. Because it just hugely isn’t.
Brett: It’s really quite interesting how hard it is to do isn’t it? The whole dynamics of the life of a band. I can’t think of any examples of bands who have reformed and managed to outshine themselves and their past. That’s an interesting thing. I’m not saying Suede have or haven’t, that remains to be seen. The chances are, you’re competing against your past and you’re competing against when you were part of the zeitgeist. That’s impossible to fight against. It’s a strange thing. When bands often reform and don’t write new material and just play stuff from the past, I completely understand that point of view – that they’re going to do a completely retro approach. But you’re in danger of becoming self-parody there, so it’s a very, very tricky balancing act. There’s a part of me that sort of thinks we should have just stayed together and just carried on – just taken some time off and not actually officially split up. But, erm… maybe not.
I can’t imagine Suede are a particularly nostalgic band. Was getting back together partly because you didn’t have a big bang finish or a high drama split? Did you feel you had a point to prove?
Mat: Yeah, I think it’s a huge advantage that we didn’t hate each other. That’s a big deal. We all still live in the same area and we all still see each other. There is the thing that I felt we missed a moment of high drama. Because the story of Suede has been fairly dramatic, it kind of ended in the wrong way. Perhaps we should have ended it hating each other. Perhaps it should have ended with a punch-up on stage and us suing each other. That would have at least been in keeping with the rest of the history of the band. I think there was a bit in all of us when we did the Royal Albert Hall gig, I had no idea if we’d do anything after it, but I kind of liked the idea that we’d come back and finish on something quite special. Something quite interesting with a story to it. I always felt that to kind of dribble away like we did was really quite sad.
Do you feel like throughout your career you’ve had to make comebacks? After Bernard left, then after with Coming Up, the music press announced ‘Suede are back’, so this isn’t anything new to you.
Mat: Oh yeah. This is going to be our third debut album.
Brett: We’ve had a career of making comeback records. Every album that we’ve released has had this sense that it’s a comeback record. We always seem to be fighting against our own dynamic. I don’t know what’s going on. It’s really odd.
Mat: I think it’s just an aversion to being comfortable. I don’t know if it’s a deliberate thing, but it’s totally true of the band.
Brett: It’s just what happened in the history of the band. Bernard left after the first album, so there was, in a sense, a fight back after that, even though we wrote Dog Man Star with Bernard. Then, with Coming Up, we had a new lineup.
Mat: The other thing is there’s something so sweet about it. One of the reasons Coming Up is so dear to me is the fact that lots of people had written us off. It is all the more satisfying – you’d have to be a very mature human being to not occasionally get pleasure from being able to say, ‘I told you so.’ I think it’s quite a good motive for doing things.
Brett: Revenge?
Mat: Yeah. Revenge and picking on people.
Suede fans have always been famous for their dedication to you and they came out in force to fill first the Royal Albert Hall and then The O2 Arena. Is it weird to think you’ve soundtracked a lot of people’s puberty?
Mat: No. I think that’s top of my list of reasons for doing it.
Brett: Yeah it’s a lovely thing when people come up to you and say they had their first ever kiss to one of your songs – that’s happened lots of times. Or that they got married to one of your songs and things like that. That’s kind of really nice. That’s why you make music. It’s passing on the baton. There’s lots of music that soundtracked my life and you want to be part of that process. You want to be soundtracking someone else’s life – you want it to be special in that way.
You’ve always been seen as outsiders and that brought a lot of your fans together as they identified with that. Do you still see yourselves as outsiders?
Brett: Yeah, absolutely. It’s really strange – we never feel part of the music industry. I’ve always felt that Suede has a healthy disrespect for everything. I still don’t feel part of it – it doesn’t matter what happens or what we do, I still feel that we’re not really part of it. And I think that’s a great thing.
Mat: I think there’s a reason why so many bands come out of the suburbs and out of the provinces. I know that’s a dreadful word. Apart from the Pistols and The Clash, London doesn’t really do bands. It does, like, Jamiroquai and stuff like that. I think there is that thing about growing up somewhere where the world of art seems so fucking remote that the idea of being part of it seems so strange that even when you’ve got your foot in the door you don’t even feel like you’re there. I was at some drinks last week and this 20-year-old girl was asking me about the band and she was asking me which famous people were my friends. I said I don’t have any famous friends. She couldn’t understand as I’d met all these people. I was thinking of the history of Suede and that we had met all these people but they always seemed to me like big city, media people and it never really occurred to me that I was one of them. I don’t think that still, we don’t have a lot of contemporaries or safety net of friends in the music industry. I don’t know people at record labels who can offer us huge publishing deals. There’s always a part of you that will forever remain 15 and from the suburbs.
You have known each other for absolutely ages. What would you say is the secret to your friendship?
Brett: I’ve known Mat for, God – since 1985, when we met in college.
Mat: I think the reason we’ve never fought and we’ve got on is that everyone in Suede has a vision for it and it always comes first. It’s one of the things that I like when I look at other bands. I’m glad we’re not like them. Everyone in Suede puts the band before themselves, partly because it’s brought us so much. I think the reason why we didn’t ever fall out was that the vision we all had was pretty similar. It may have taken us on some strange routes to get there, and I think that’s maybe why splitting up was a good thing, because the last record we made together wasn’t anyone’s idea of what a Suede record should have sounded like.
Brett: No. It’s a terrible record. We should never had made it.
Mat: It’s true. It would have been a great thing to have recorded it and then decided not to release it and then split up.
Brett: You can pick bits and pieces that are good out of it, but as a body of work it would have been better if we didn’t release it.
Mat: It just doesn’t have that living, beating heart.
Brett: It’s a confused record.
Mat: It’s not a misunderstood record. That’s the most frustrating thing about it. It’s not one of those records that will be found as a lost classic. People were entirely right about it.
Brett: It’s interesting, because the album before Head Music, I think, actually is quite misunderstood. I think if we lost about three songs off that album it would have been absolutely great. We did all this with the reissues last year. It’s just sort of mental masturbation really. All the ifs and ands. But you can’t let record companies choose these things like that though. War is too important to be left to the politicians, choosing track listings of ‘Best Of’ CDs is too important to be left to the record companies (laughs).
Mat, wasn’t the first thing you said to Brett was, ‘Do you want to be in a band?’
Mat: I think that’s totally true.
Brett: It was, yeah.
Mat (to Brett): You were playing Beatles songs in the common room at Sixth Form college.
Brett: Yes, I went through quite a busking phase.
Brett, I read that you when you first saw Mat, he looked like Franz Liszt.
Brett: Mat? Yeah he did used to look like him. My dad used to be slightly obsessed with Mat because my dad was obsessed with Franz Liszt.
Mat: Seriously obsessed with Franz Liszt.
Brett: We used to go to his birthplace every year. We’d drive to Raiding in Hungary in a Morris Traveller – one of those knackered, old, wooden cars and pick up soil from his birthplace and bring it back.
Soil? Did you plant stuff in it?
Brett (laughs): No, he used to keep it in a vial around his neck.
Mat: There is a picture of Liszt – I can’t remember if it’s on a book or a record that Brett’s dad had and Franz Liszt had the same haircut as I had then and he had a mole on his forehead where I have one, so there was some part of Franz Liszt born into me in his eyes.
Is being a rock star all it’s cracked up to be?
Mat: I still find those the weirdest fucking two words together.
Brett: It’s such a loaded term isn’t it? It’s so full of cliché. Straightaway you’re seeing people snorting cocaine and wearing shades and riding in limousines, aren’t you?
Mat: Being in a band that people love is all it’s cracked up to be. There are lots of things about it that are absolutely fucking great. I would recommend it to anyone. There are very few things in life that are as fulfilling – if it’s what you love. There are downsides to it, but there are downsides to absolutely everything. It can be a great, great thing. There are those moments when you do a good gig where it is so ridiculously easy and everyone seems to win – it seems to be exactly the kind of thing which never happens in the outside world – everyone goes home happy.
Brett: I often wonder what sort of person I’d be if I hadn’t done this. That’s kind of tied up in the question really isn’t it? You never really know. It’s that whole Sliding Doors thing. Would I be deeply, deeply unhappy or would I be happier in a different way? It’s a fascinating mental game you can play with yourself. I think it gives you extreme confidence and power and love. I think it’s a pretty good thing at the end of the day. I think it’s a great thing to have spent time on the earth and made it a slightly better place in your own small way. I think that’s probably the point to life really – to try and make the world a slightly better place. I think by making music, you kind of do. It’s quite a positive thing.
Is that what you want Suede’s legacy to be?
Mat: I really like the idea that there’ll be some fantastic band that sounds nothing like us, but got together because they were Suede fans or met at a Suede gig.
Brett: There’s lots of those. That’s the funny thing – bands like Klaxons and Bloc Party who don’t sound anything like us but are massive Suede fans. I think that’s quite nice.
Mat: Yeah I know, I love that idea. I really do. I love the fact that there are people who really matter to me because of their records who I’ve never met and possibly liked who sit nicely in my head. Before this interview I was listening to that Lauren Hill record. And I’m sure I have nothing in common with Lauren Hill, and it’s a record full of Christian rap, which is my idea of hell, but it’s a brilliant record and there are some beautiful parts in it.
Brett: C-rap.
Mat: Yeah, the big C-rap. But the idea that you stick something out there and it’s like a virus and will live on in little bits of music and people’s dress sense.
Do you always want to divide opinion as Suede?
Brett: No. But we seem to. It’s never really been an intention – it probably was in the early days. We probably liked polarizing opinion. But it just seems to happen. People seem to react to us extremely.
Mat: You always want an extreme reaction, whatever it is.
Brett: I think we just wanted to be very, very popular. But we weren’t able to be very, very popular. When I was writing songs like “The Wild Ones” and “So Young” and things like that, I thought they were massive international, crossover hits like “I Will Always Love You”, or something like that in my head, but I wasn’t good enough at it to write those songs, so they came out as these twisted versions of my own take on these things. My view of the songs I was writing was different to everyone else’s view. It wasn’t to polarize opinion, it was an attempt to write these amazing, affecting songs. But they didn’t quite affect people the way I thought they were going to (laughs).
Mat: It’s that thing about falling short in interesting places.
Brett: Yeah, exactly.
Mat: It’s one of the reasons why debut albums are often so great. You’ve got these bands aiming to be The Beatles or Stevie Wonder, and they’re not capable, but they try and they fall in an interesting place. They go outside their comfort zone. I think for most bands it’s the way that they fail that people love them for. You just have to make sure you fail in an interesting way.