Blue hour announcement

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sunshine
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Blue hour announcement

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http://www.nme.com/news/music/suede-nee ... ur-2305384

‘Suede need to be unpleasant’ – Brett Anderson tells us about their dark new album, ‘The Blue Hour’

By Andrew Trendell Apr 30, 2018 8:30 am
Story of the day
"We have to inhabit Suedeworld and it’s not a very nice place"
Suede have announced details of their return with eighth album ‘The Blue Hour’. Read our full interview with frontman Brett Anderson below.
Described as the third and final part in a ‘triptych’ of albums since their 2010 reunion, ‘The Blue Hour’ was produced by Alan Moulder and sees the band explore new sonic terrain.
“‘The Blue Hour’ is the time of day when the light is fading and night is closing in,” said the band in a statement. “The songs hint at a narrative but never quite reveal it and never quite explain. But as with any Suede album, it’s always about the songwriting. The band, the passion and the noise: ‘The Blue Hour’.”
Arriving on September 21, the band have hailed the album as a “genuinely progressive, expansive and definitive body of work”, with frontman Brett Anderson’s “vocal delivery and distinctive lyrics are more assured than ever, whilst the music sees the band play at the peak of their powers, with a visceral, brooding sense of dynamic and drama that is theirs alone”
“We literally just finished mixing it the Friday before last,” Anderson told NME. “It took about a year to write. That’s the hard part for me. Once the songs are there, then you can enjoy yourself to a certain extent. It all has to be framed within the context of songwriting. I don’t think anyone wants to hear a Suede ambient album. This isn’t.”
In what way does this new record take the Suede sound somewhere we’ve heard before?
“We learned a lot from ‘Night Thoughts’ and ‘Blood Sports’. When we came back with ‘Blood Sports’, there was still a slight feeling that we should try and write pop and rock music. There was no attempt to please the mainstream because it doesn’t exist any more, but we took quite a gamble with ‘Night Thoughts’ because it’s very much ‘an album’. People like music that doesn’t try and please too much, so that really freed us up on this record. We’ve also tried to drift a little further leftfield.
“I think we’re at this stage of our career where it doesn’t really matter what we do, as long as we’re engaged in doing it and making it interesting. Because of that, we can do quite extreme things. This is a very complicated record, much more so than the last too – and more diverse. It’s quite a journey. There are a lot of elements that we haven’t used before, like a choir and more spoken word and dialogue. There are a lot of field recordings on it too to thread the ideas together.”
How would you describe the character of this record?
“It’s quite dank and troubling. It was conceived as a record almost from a child’s point of view. My son is my muse these days, and I write about him and through his eyes. He inspired the book I wrote recently, ‘Coal Black Mornings’. He was my inspiration on the last two records and this is a continuation of that. I’ve always written from different perspectives. A lot of this is about the terrors of childhood, so it’s quite unpleasant in lots of ways. I think Suede should be unpleasant, that’s the point of a band like Suede. Whenever we’ve tried to pleasant, it never works. We have to inhabit Suedeworld and it’s not a very nice place! It’s set in a rural landscape, on the hard shoulder of the motorway, among the B-roads and among the rubbish that’s been fly-tipped. It’s set by a chain link fence with a dead badger lying rotting in the ground.“I like to set my songs in a very distinct geographical place. The early songs were very urban and this is set in the hinterland?”
Where do you go to find that unpleasantness?
“I find it everywhere. It’s everywhere in life. No one wants to hear about the nice things in life. It’s not that my life is particularly unpleasant, but I just find those things more interesting. That’s where the tension lies. It’s about the push and pull. No one wants to write about harmony. It’s dull. Well, I can’t do it very well so I choose not to.”
Do you feel like you have the adequate language to reflect this horrible nonsense world we find ourselves in, in 2018? Could you take on ‘Brexit Britain’ in a song?
“It’s an interesting thing. You have to choose your weapon, you have to choose your battleground. Unless you narrow it down to something specific, what are you going to write about? Everything? The world? History? I’ve always tried to talk about the microscopic, because that somehow illuminates the macroscopic. When you’re talking about relationships between people, that’s an incredibly political canvas. I’ve never been able to write about ‘the big picture’ in an obvious way. There are very few artists that can do that. That’s what politicians are for. An artist’s job is to reveal something more mysterious than that. It’s not the artist’s job to give any answers, it’s the artist’s job to deepen the mystery and to pose questions. You have to choose your canvas to work within. In talking about a small part of life, you can reveal further wider truths. But no, no Brexit anthems – is that going to be your headline?”
Nope, which I’m sure is a relief. So if Suede need to be unpleasant, is there much more baggage of expectation that comes with the band?
“I think about it quite a bit. We’ve gone wrong in the past. We had an album called ‘A New Morning’ which was a disaster in every way. It was just a very bad record. We were trying to undermine the notion of what it is to be Suede fan and oppose all of those cliches. It’s a very interesting question for an artist: how much do they respond to what their audience wants and how much do they lead? You can parallel it with politicians, can’t you? There are those politicians who base their decisions around polling people and the public opinion and popular consensus. There are politicians who make very unpopular decisions, but they have a sense of vision about these things. There are parallels with the artist and their fanbase. It’s important to challenge what you fans want, because if you end up following that you end up in self parody. I’ve always wanted to avoid that. There is a fine line and it’s a very interesting fine line. You’re leading and introducing people to your ideas but you need to do it in your own language – but still for that language to be fresh.”
Have you found that there’s more of a hunger for that since you re-emerged?
“I don’t really know. I’m really cheered by the fact that our fanbase want to be challenged. They want us to do what we do best, but they want us to have a vision. There’s this popular notion that the record-buying or music-listening public are becoming his numbed, brainless entity. Possibly the mainstream is becoming like that, but it’s misleading to think of the world at large like that. There are a lot of people that want to be challenged and want the experience of the album. They don’t want to be humoured by a few anodyne pop songs. They want a journey.”
What are you listening to, in terms of contemporary music?
“The first album that I’ve gone out and bought in a while is the new Shame album. They’re the first band that have really done it for me in a long time. ‘Songs Of Praise’ is my tip. There’s something there that has a point to it. There’s some sort of energy that speaks to me. It’s musically brilliant too – the guitar playing is fantastic. I love Fat White Family and Cabbage too. There’s a pocket of bands trying to make themselves heard. I’m not sure if there’s a platform for bands like that anymore, but I don’t pay too much attention to things like that. I’m not sure how they’re perceived by the rest of the world. All you can do is let these things filter through.”
Suede release ‘The Blue Hour’ on September 21.
The tracklist is:
As One
Wastelands
Mistress
Beyond The Outskirts
Chalk Circles
Cold Hands
Life Is Golden
Roadkill
Tides
Don’t Be Afraid If Nobody Loves You
Dead Bird
All The Wild Places
The Invisibles
sunshine
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Re: Blue hour announcement

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Suede To Release The Blue Hour Album
John Doran , April 30th, 2018 07:56

Britpop originators ready eighth long player

Suede are releasing their eighth studio album The Blue Hour on September 21 via Warner. The long player was produced by Nine Inch Nails/ Gary Numan associate Alan Moulder and is their first new release since the stunning Night Thoughts in 2016.

Talking about the new LP the band said: "The Blue Hour is the time of day when the light is fading and night is closing in. The songs hint at a narrative but never quite reveal it and never quite explain. But as with any Suede album, it’s always about the songwriting. The band, the passion and the noise: The Blue Hour. "

The album is the final part of a triptych, which kicked off with Blood Sports in 2013; it is ambitious in scale featuring spoken word, a choir and sees them "continue to explore new ground sonically".

The Blue Hour can be pre-ordered from the band's website and they have stated that a tour will be announced soon.

Tracklisting:
As One
Wastelands
Mistress
Beyond The Outskirts
Chalk Circles
Cold Hands
Life Is Golden
Roadkill
Tides
Don’t Be Afraid If Nobody Loves You
Dead Bird
All The Wild Places
The Invisibles
Flytipping
‘Suede need to be unpleasant’ – Brett Anderson tells us about their dark new album, ‘The Blue Hour’

http://thequietus.com/articles/24495-su ... hour-album
sunshine
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Re: Blue hour announcement

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Suede Prep New LP, 'The Blue Hour'

Alt-rock band bill eighth LP as final installment of trilogy, following 2013's 'Bloodsports,' 2016's 'Night Thoughts'

By Ryan Reed

1 May 2018

Suede will release their eighth studio album, The Blue Hour, on September 21st. The Alan Moulder-produced LP marks the final installment of a trilogy (following 2013's Bloodsports and 2016's Night Thoughts) since their 2010 reunion.

In a mysterious statement about the album, the British alt-rock band noted that the title references "the time of day when the light is fading and night is closing in." They also teased the record as "progressive" and "expansive," adding, "The songs hint at a narrative but never quite reveal it and never quite explain. But as with any Suede album, it's always about the songwriting. The band, the passion and the noise: 'The Blue Hour.'"

A trailer for the LP features droning noise and choral-styled vocals, but frontman Brett Anderson insisted to NME that their new songs are rooted in traditional songwriting. "I don't think anyone wants to hear a Suede ambient album," he said. "This isn't."

Anderson also called the album more "complicated" and "diverse" than the band's last two. "It’s quite a journey," he said. "There are a lot of elements that we haven’t used before, like a choir and more spoken word and dialogue. There are a lot of field recordings on it too to thread the ideas together.”

In March, Suede issued a 25th anniversary box set celebrating their self-titled debut LP. That same month, Anderson released a memoir, Coal Black Mornings.

The Blue Hour Track List

1. "As One"
2. "Wastelands"
3. "Mistress"
4. "Beyond The Outskirts"
5. "Chalk Circles"
6. "Cold Hands"
7. "Life Is Golden"
8. "Roadkill"
9. "Tides"
10. "Don’t Be Afraid If Nobody Loves You"
11. "Dead Bird"
12. "All The Wild Places"
13. "The Invisibles"
14. "Flytipping"

https://www.rollingstone.com/music/news ... ur-w519694
sunshine
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Re: Blue hour announcement

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April 30 2018
Suede Announce New Album The Blue Hour
by Sam Sodomsky
Out in September

Suede have announced a new album, The Blue Hour. It’s out September 21. The LP was produced by Alan Moulder and is the third and final part of a trilogy including their previous albums, Bloodsports and Night Thoughts. Watch a trailer for The Blue Hour below.

In an interview with NME, Suede’s Brett Anderson said, “This is a very complicated record, much more so than the last too—and more diverse. It’s quite a journey. There are a lot of elements that we haven’t used before, like a choir and more spoken word and dialogue. There are a lot of field recordings on it too to thread the ideas together.”

Suede’s latest album, Night Thoughts, arrived in 2016. That same year, they released a deluxe edition of their 1996 album Coming Up.

https://pitchfork.com/news/suede-announ ... blue-hour/?
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Re: Blue hour announcement

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Q magazine Sep 2018
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sunshine
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Re: Blue hour announcement

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Q review
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sunshine
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Re: Blue hour announcement

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ARTS
Brett Anderson on how Suede went from seedy Soho pop scene to the Somerset school run
With a new Suede album on the way, the Britpop pioneer Brett Anderson tells Will Hodgkinson about David Bowie’s early support and why fatherhood is better than any drug
Will Hodgkinson
July 3 2018, 12:01am,
The Times

In 1993, the year John Major launched his Back to Basics campaign promoting decency, courtesy and neighbourliness, an indecent, discourteous neighbour from hell scuppered the prime minister’s plans by becoming the most talked-about pop star in Britain.

Suede, with its songs about seedy sex, druggy torpor and suburban alienation, was the biggest selling debut album since Frankie Goes to Hollywood’s Welcome to the Pleasuredome. Fronting the eponymous band was the singer Brett Anderson, hitting his bottom with a microphone, pulling at his shirt to reveal a pallid, androgynous chest and generally looking not at all like the kind of man Major had in mind to represent his British idyll of warm beer and long shadows on county cricket grounds. Not since David Bowie — who appeared with Anderson that year on the cover of the NME — had such a distinctly unwholesome star gripped the public’s imagination. What hellish future lay in store for this effete degenerate?

“I’m doing the school run. I’m running around making toast. I’m finding book bags. I’m making sure the reading gets done,” says Anderson, now a clean-living 50-year-old who lives with his wife, six-year-old son and fourteen-year-old stepson in Somerset. “It is nothing that glamorous. Once the kids are at school I’ll try and write a lot, particularly in winter. There isn’t much to do in the countryside in winter.”

We’re in a small room at the offices of Suede’s publicist in Earls Court, London, and Anderson, handsome in a clean-cut way, the foppish fringe of old replaced by short, neat hair and the once-billowing shirt buttoned to an age-appropriate level, looks very different from the person who pranced about to Metal Mickey and Animal Nitrate on Top of the Pops in the early 1990s. Back then, Suede ushered in a new era of British indie after years of domination by grunge and dance music. The band inadvertently paved the way for Britpop, although as Anderson says, “It went from Mike Leigh to Carry On remarkably quickly.”

And while the sleazy, cheap glamour that Suede’s early songs evoked was redolent of the singer’s life at the time, the band’s new album, The Blue Hour, reflects his present reality. It is a poetic and florid but dark evocation of the English countryside seen through the eyes of a child and it features a lot of dead animals. One track is called Roadkill. I tell Anderson it reminds me of driving through the West Country along the A303.

“That’s interesting. I wrote most of it, subconsciously at least, while driving on the A303. I’m fascinated by the hinterland, those scruffy, man-made areas being reclaimed by nature, and I’m constantly shocked by roadkill; carcasses of badgers, pheasants, foxes . . . Dead animals everywhere. I’ve lived in the countryside for a couple of years and I wanted to write about it, not in an idyllic way, but in a Ted Hughes way: a bleak, brutal place where there is a fight for survival. Besides, I’ve exhausted the urban clichés. Now it is time to exhaust the rural clichés.”

When Suede broke through, Anderson seemed not so much like an urban sophisticate as a provincial figurehead for teenage misfits from Nowheresville, UK. He grew up in a council house in Haywards Heath, the West Sussex town he describes as being “not even on the edge of London. It is on the edge of Gatwick.” His father was a taxi driver with a love of classical music, his mother was an artist, and the family were poor. Anderson felt like the perennial outsider, neither working class nor middle class, his face pressed against the window of a more exciting life in the capital.

“I would go to the station and look up the tracks, hoping to get a glimpse of London,” he says. “And weirdly, the feeling of being an outsider never left me. I know Suede have had quite a lot of success, but I feel we have to prove ourselves time and time again. If Suede ever did anything substandard we would be absolutely jumped upon. Kicked to death. We don’t fit in.”

Still, Melody Maker splashed Suede as Britain’s best new band before they had released a note. The NME cover with Bowie marked the passing of the androgynous art-rock crown, and it came after only two singles. “He was unfashionable at the time, so referencing Bowie in 1992 was kind of outré. My abiding memory is that he was nice to be with. He wasn’t saying, ‘Don’t forget to file your tax returns.’ We just had a nice afternoon together. I was expecting a slightly sticky situation, but he was well versed in what we had done. I played him So Young and he loved it, which meant so much to me.”

Before that came three years of failure. Anderson was studying town planning at University College London when in 1989 he formed Suede with his childhood friend Mat Osman and his girlfriend Justine Frischmann, later to find fame as the singer of the Britpop insiders Elastica. Against all evidence to the contrary, Anderson spent those years convinced that the world needed Suede.

“I had a strange sense of self-belief,” he says, sounding amused at the memory. “If I was my father, I would have said, ‘You might want to think about a Plan B here,’ because it was absolute garbage. We couldn’t play, couldn’t write and couldn’t fit in with anything going on in 1989. We were roundly ignored by the music industry, and for three years there were more people on stage at our gigs than there were in the audience. At the Amersham Arms in south London we played to one person. It was deeply humiliating.”

According to Coal Black Mornings, Anderson’s memoir on life up to the moment Suede got signed, it also seemed like a sad time. He was 21 when his mother died, and Frischmann left him (and the band) for Damon Albarn of Blur soon after, but unhappiness proved the spur. Suddenly, aided by the arrival of the guitar virtuoso Bernard Butler, everything fell into place. Anderson’s Withnail and I-like persona and lyrical combination of seedy reality and dreamlike fantasy, somewhere between Bowie and Philip Larkin, turned him into a star. Meanwhile, ready-made quotes such as “I’m a bisexual man who’s never had a homosexual experience” got up people’s noses. You have to wonder what it did to him.

“It’s a fascinating thing,” he says of fame. “The very act of jumping on stage is an act of egotism. You are saying, ‘Look at me, aren’t I great?’ We had years of abject failure and poverty, so then to be carried along on this wave of hysteria had profound effects on me as a person and it wasn’t particularly good.”

Suede’s success foreshadowed the national obsession that was Britpop when, for an unlikely historical blip, indie rock defined Britain’s image of itself. Suede had been singing about shameful sex in bedsits. All of a sudden Blur and Oasis were singing about country houses and cigarettes and alcohol and battling it out on primetime television like a pair of Premiership football teams.

“The mainstream shifted left of centre and Suede were at the beginning of that shift,” Anderson says. “We were an indie band, on an indie label, writing about odd things that didn’t happen to most people. But we were having Top Ten hits, and we were the first band of our type to do that for years. I was writing about a failed, grey, John Major world, reflecting my experiences as a poor white twentysomething on the dole. The seed of quirkiness and Englishness was planted, and before long it was all about jingoism and flag-waving. Which I despised.”

Needless to say, the glory days did not last. By the second album, Dog Man Star, relations between Anderson and Butler were so bad that they worked by post. Butler sent cassettes of the music, Anderson wrote lyrics to it, and the rest of the band first heard the songs in the studio. Suede were in their purple patch, but their lives were in chaos, and in a decade it was over. After the below-par 2002 album A New Morning Suede split, re-forming in 2010 at the behest of a Teenage Cancer Trust gig. It makes you wonder if that chaos was integral to the band’s best work.

“I think about it a lot,” says Anderson at the suggestion. “When I was a young man I was very conscious of sacrificing my own happiness to the songs. It was a course for self-destruction I had set, and along the way I would write some good music. It’s a powerful Jungian archetype, like Van Gogh and Frida Kahlo, but that ignores all the art that is made within harmony. Or all the people whose lives are in chaos and who don’t produce anything whatsoever.”

Anderson also went down the traditional rock-star route of taking lots of drugs in many different varieties. “People think drugs are a creative force because so many creative people have used drugs, but it is a misunderstanding. Creative people have inquisitive minds and they’re drawn toward these things, but it hasn’t actually made anyone more productive or creative. Personally, I think there are always interesting things to write about, and my life is no longer chaos. It can be charming to be 21 and lead a crazy life. To be a 50-year-old man and still sleeping on people’s floors would be disastrous, so I look for inspiration in smaller things. For years, muses were lovers and friends. Now my muse is my son.”

The Blue Hour, which Anderson describes as an album of “English folk horror”, is proof that a long, creative career in pop is possible; that just as in film or theatre, the format can support ideas from all stages of life (Richard Oakes, who replaced Butler in September 1994, aged 17, remains as the band’s guitarist. After Suede split Butler and Anderson made one album as the Tears; Butler now works as a producer.)

“Virtually all bands follow a predetermined course,” Anderson concludes before heading back to his settled existence in Somerset with his wife and kids. “It is a story of struggle, followed by success, followed by self-destruction, followed — if you’re lucky — by enlightenment and reinvention. Suede were no different.”

There are benefits to surviving it all, though. “Back then, people used to lean out of vans and shout, ‘There’s that twat from Suede.’ Now people are very nice.” He sounds almost surprised.
The Blue Hour by Suede is out on September 21
sunshine
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Re: Blue hour announcement

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https://www.nme.com/music-interviews/su ... 377804/amp

Watch: Suede take us deep inside the dark and terrifying world of new album ‘The Blue Hour’
Andrew Trendell
Sep 11, 2018 3:40 pm
“He’d obviously be played by Nicolas Cage,” says Suede frontman Brett Anderson when considering the ideal actor for the role of bassist Mat Osman in the band’s biopic. “I always thought that Carla Bruni would make a good Neil,” Osman replies. “They’ve got exactly the same hair. Actually, Melania Trump.”
And what about Brett? “I don’t know. Peter Egan?”
Watch our full ‘In Conversation’ video interview with Suede above
From the unwitting but revolutionary forefathers of Britpop to the imperial and experimental comeback kings you see before you today, the tale of Suede is one you can never second guess. The next scene in their movie, the lush, adventurous but haunting world of eighth album ‘The Blue Hour’, is another staggering left turn. This time, it’s “set in a rural landscape, on the hard shoulder of the motorway, among the B-roads and among the rubbish that’s been fly-tipped. It’s set by a chain link fence with a dead badger lying rotting in the ground.”
“I wanted it to be about vulnerability and fear,” Anderson continues. “A lot of it is told from a child’s point of view.”
Watch above as the band talk to us about avoiding platitudes, the emotional journey of the new record, living outside of the shadow of their legacy, their current tastes, their plans for the future, and what it means to be Suede in 2018.
Suede release ‘The Blue Hour’ on September 21.
The band’s upcoming UK and Ireland tour dates are below. Tickets are available here. They will be joined by The Horrors.

Friday October 12 – LONDON Eventim Apollo
Saturday October 13 – LONDON Eventim Apollo
Sunday October 14 – DUBLIN Bord Gais Energy Theatre
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