Suede’s Brett Anderson and Matt Osman tell Chris Evans about their new album, Autofiction

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sunshine
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Suede’s Brett Anderson and Matt Osman tell Chris Evans about their new album, Autofiction

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15 Sep 2022, 15:07
Suede’s Brett Anderson and Matt Osman tell Chris Evans about their new album, Autofiction
Virgin Radio
Suede's Brett Anderson and Matt Osman joined The Chris Evans Breakfast Show with Sky to talk about their new album, Autofiction, which lands this week.
Autofiction, the group’s ninth album, is released tomorrow, Friday 16th September. Explaining the record’s title, Brett told Chris: “It’s a literary genre. It’s part-memoir and part-fiction. It struck me that all art is autofiction to one degree or another. Nothing’s absolute truth or absolute fantasy. There’s fantasy within truth and truth within fantasy.”
The frontman added: “Sometimes I’m using characterisation to explore truths and sometimes it’s much more from the diary.”
Suede are touring the album across the UK in March 2023, and also have a run of sold-out intimate record store shows soon. Of their live gigs, Brett said: “Part of the Suede show now is very much about the loop of response between the band and the audience, and harnessing that energy.”
Speaking about getting back onstage recently, he continued: “We did a couple of gigs under the name Crushed Kid, as a way of starting again, as it were. And they were tiny little gigs, and we were eyeball to eyeball with the front row of the crowd, and I love that. Because as you get more successful, the venues you play get bigger, and you play these big festivals and the crowd are miles away, and it’s like, ‘Oh god, I just want to be in there with the crowd and creating that loop of response.’"
Explaining more about Crushed Kid, bassist Matt said: “We formed this band, Crushed Kid. We had an Instagram page two years ago, that we started. We had a single reviewed in a couple of places, that we’d put out. The whole thing was planned before Covid. This was what we were going to do. We were going to start again as this new band, and we were going to harness that kind of energy. But what happened is, we had these gigs booked, and no-one knew about them... apart from the media. So what happened is, we suddenly looked at who was coming to these gigs, and it was like 30 journalists and no-one else! And suddenly it’s like, ‘Oh my god, these are going to be so bad!’. So we did mention it to a couple of people!”
Brett, who co-founded Suede with Matt, recalled their musical beginnings back in the day. “We started this thing called bedroom rock when we must have been about 17 or 18, mustn’t me? And basically bedroom rock was us playing these terrible songs really badly with like two or three friends enduring them and then half-heartedly clapping at the end.”
He joked: “The first proper gig we ever did wasn’t that much different from that!
“There were regularly more people on stage than in the audience in those days.”
The vocalist continued: “We were terrible when we first started, but being terrible was quite good for us, because we weren’t competent enough musicians to be able to sound like The Stone Roses, which all the other bands were able to do, so the only band that we could end up sounding like was Suede.
“So, we went away for a few years and rehearsed, and wrote songs, and then suddenly we were able to sound like us, and that gave us something that only we had, really.”
He added: “I think you should embrace ineptitude. You should embrace flaws and embrace imperfections.”
Returning the conversation to the upcoming new album, Brett told Chris: “That’s the spirit that we entered into making Autofiction with. It’s got mistakes in it, it’s got count-ins in it, it’s got all the debris of the studio sounds left in, and the idea is almost like you’re walking in on a band rehearsing.
“As I get older, I kind of dislike perfect, overproduced music, and I like imperfection in music. I love it when you can hear humanity in music. I love it when it sounds like it’s made by human beings, and hopefully that’s what Autofiction sounds like.”
Suede broke up in 2003, before reforming seven years later. Matt, who is the brother of author, TV producer and game show host Richard Osman, recalled what he did during the hiatus. “I did loads of stuff. I worked as a journalist. I worked in an office,” he said. “I had this weird thing, that I thought the music business was kind of venal and aggressive and shallow, and I thought I’d do something else. And then I found out that all jobs are venal and shallow! It’s not just the music business, it’s business!
“I remember the day that we split up, Alex Lee, who was playing with us, who played in loads of bands, he said to me, ‘This isn’t normal, you know, what happened to you. Your first band being really massive, travelling the world, number ones and everything.’ But I didn’t realise that until it was taken away.”
Brett added: “I think that’s one of the reasons that we’ve had the desire to make new music, is almost because we realised what we’d almost thrown away, and we wanted to right those wrongs, I suppose. And that’s a real motivation, I think, never being satisfied with what you’ve done in the past, and always thinking that the next record can be better.”
Autofiction is out tomorrow, 16th September. Tour tickets are available tomorrow at 9am from suede.co.uk
https://virginradio.co.uk/the-chris-eva ... l7LOrLtCyI
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