Suede Online

http://www.musicweek.com/news/read/sued ... nes/053909

Suede: 'Music is becoming a rich kids' plaything'
Tim Ingham
10 March 2013

Brett Anderson is unlikeable. Speak to the right people, and you’ll also learn he’s a bit of a fruitcake.
These aren’t my observations. It would take a braver man than I to suggest to Anderson – perhaps the most unrestrained, acerbic voice to emerge in the 1990s melodic British guitar boom – that he is at all unhinged or unpopular.
In this case, that man is Mat Osman; articulate, affable Suede bassist and trusted confidant of Anderson since the pair were at school together as teens. Two feet away from his old mucker, he grins as he recalls Anderson’s libidinously brusque, disconcertingly reptilian mainstream TV debut at the 1993 BRIT Awards – a performance that shocked Middle England on its own centre stage.
The inevitable, depressing comparison to 2013’s damp squib of a ceremony doesn't take long to arrive.
“The record business now is suffering and going for the safest thing - competent singers who are pushed down your neck every Saturday for 12 weeks,” says Osman. “It’s wiping out eccentricities and oddness; the things that UK music is known for. You look at the best British music stars throughout history and they’re nutcases, generally.”
The presumed nutcase who now once again delivers the splenetic howl to Suede’s claustrophobic, powerful brand of indie rock sits unmoved. Shamefully, as I’m told in the lead-up to this interview that Osman will be accompanying Anderson, my heart sinks slightly. The journalistic instincts are carnivorous for controversy – my fingers crossed that big mouth will strike again, alone, right onto my dictaphone.
In reality, Anderson is too laconic and untrusting to deliver a sudden plastic diatribe; in no hurry to spill forth the sort of scathing, aggrieved soundbites that once won him exclamation mark-strewn cover blobs on Melody Maker.
He reclines on the sofa of his management company’s sleek Shepherd’s Bush offices, suspicious; black T-shirt, black trousers, black shoes – and the faint air of a black cloud.
As Osman confidently tussles exclusively with almost all of my initial questions, Anderson is making it perfectly clear that this time, in this era, there will be no wasted words from his corner.
Suede’s new studio album, Bloodsports, will be the band’s first for 11 years when it is released on March 18. Bernard Butler, the maverick guitarist who drove Suede’s classic, self-titled breakthrough and much-vaunted follow-up Dog Man Star, has not returned, despite his involvement in Anderson’s mid-Noughties side project The Tears. However, the producer of those seminal albums, Ed Buller, is back behind the studio desk, alongside Butler’s fanboy-turned-mid-Nineties-replacement, Richard Oakes.
Indeed, Suede’s 2013 line-up mirrors that of the gang behind their pop breakthrough third LP, Coming Up (1996) – which spawned two Top 3 singles in Trash and Stay Together. That release was to be Suede’s sugary high, but the teeth-gnashing comedown was waiting in the wings.
With Anderson’s crack and heroin dependency escalating, fourth album Head Music - a UK No.1 - divided fans and critics, with some accusing Anderson’s lyric writing of becoming lazy and too easily calculable. Their fifth effort A New Morning (2002), produced by Stephen Street, reportedly cost £1million to make, but was a certified, crushing flop. It peaked at No.24.
Osman says he does not miss the days when Suede were “part of this strange little world of bands and record companies, where charts become this battle between you and the people around you. Everything about that last record is the sound of a band getting caught in the machinery”.
With the sort of clarity of hindsight that only a decade-long hiatus can bring, both Osman and Anderson now accept that their last two records contained mis-steps which were a direct result of bad advice – whether from the execs that surrounded them, or from their own recalcitrant prickliness.
“Whenever we’ve got involved with business decisions in the past they’ve always been disastrous,” accepts Anderson. “Even the release of [single] We Are The Pigs from Dog Man Star was the band making a questionable move because of our stubborn bloody-mindedness. We had the head of Sony basically on his knees in front of us pleading with us to release something else.
“But mistakes make you human. I hate seeing these bands taking these safe little steps up the ladder to success - Suede’s career has been a rollercoaster. I’m quite proud of that. At least it’s interesting. At least it’s been our own bloody story.”
That story looked to have a pretty definitive full stop at its denouement until, in March 2010, Suede agreed to perform their greatest hits for a packed Royal Albert Hall to raise money for Teenage Cancer Trust. A pair of warm-up shows at London’s 100 Club and Manchester’s Ritz preceded this glorious big stage return, both of which were rapturously received. Live showings then followed in Denmark, Spain, France and Berlin, as well as at Latitude Festival and the O2 Arena.
As the group’s enjoyment of playing together bloomed, so did their desire to add a new chapter to the Suede story. Anderson has now been clean for years and is determined to make a relevant, head-turning record in 2013 – but, hearteningly, he hasn’t lost a droplet of his us-against-the-world neuroticism or bullishness.
“You see lots of other acts who can just coast on their reputation,” he says. “For some reason that’s never happened to us. We’ve always had too many enemies. People are waiting for us to fall. A lot of people don’t like us out there.”
Osman smiles and knowingly glances at his friend. “Actually, it’s you, I think. They don’t like you.”
Anderson admits defeat. “You’re right. I’m not a particularly likeable person, publicly. They don’t know me, they just look at my persona, which isn’t me, of course. I’ve learned to deal with it. But if it means we live or die by the quality of our work, that’s good for us.”
So far, the reaction to Bloodsports has been nothing short of exemplary. The NME says it “really is classic Suede”, dubbing it the “comeback to beat in 2013”. Teaser track Barriers is a mutinous, pulsating three minutes of arena-sized heartache; first proper single It Starts And Ends With You a catchy sprint through sun-soaked riffs and a scampering, optimistic vocal.
Anderson has likened Bloodsports to the meeting point between Dog Man Star and Coming Up - which is technically cheating, because that’s the perfect Suede record. He’s not far wrong.
“If you’re a good band, as soon as you start playing, ideas for new records start niggling at you,” says Osman. “That’s what happened after we did the Albert Hall. We were very cagey about it early on: history is littered with the corpses of bands who got back together and thought they could make a new record. We agreed this couldn’t be nostalgia.
“It’s really easy to say, ‘We’re going to play the songs nice and neat, we’ll get an orchestra in, it will be £80 a ticket and everyone will buy a fancy programme.’ This isn’t a fucking souvenir of our career. This is something new that we’re extremely proud of. We’re going to work at it the way we would if we were 18.”
As Anderson’s comfort and conversational contributions increase, we hit on the subject that seems to bug him more than any other: the bleak mundanity of the modern UK music scene. We agree that despite his contempt for ‘Britpop’ retrospectivism, it was an era full of big egos and even bigger characters - elements that are now devastating by their absence at the top of the charts.
The million-selling kook - the unrestrained weirdo drawing parental discomfort and bemusement on TOTP - appears to be extinct. Who’s to blame?
Osman observes that Suede have greatly benefited from the spread of their work across the world via the likes of YouTube and Spotify - something born out in the tens of thousands who have bought tickets to see the band in China and South America of late. However, he clarifies, "If I was 20 and I’d just formed a band, I don’t think I’d think that way. I’d be saying: ‘Fuck you, pay me.’
"What scares me is the idea that being in a band is becoming a rich kids' plaything. It’s genuinely happening. It’s becoming that because you can’t afford to live on the dole anymore and the price of getting heard has risen and the music industry has been hurt, it’s becoming a hobby of public schoolboys.
"It’s tragic: music was once one of the few places on earth where privilege got you nothing. Genuinely, if you were from a Liverpool council estate you probably stood a better chance of having a hit record."
“The lack of money in the music industry means a lot of bands on the margins of making a living aren’t able to do so,” adds Anderson. “That’s a really sad thing, it’s often where the truly interesting music comes from. I wonder if The Fall could ever start off today - one of the most inspiring bands ever.
“I do think, though, it will go into another phase. When we were on the BRITs in 1993, we were reacting against something. It felt so thrilling to be playing this song which was really violent and dark [Animal Nitrate] in front of people in suits.
“It was a ‘fuck you’. Suede have always been at their best when they’ve been working against something, including the industry - I’ve never had any respect for the industry. I don’t think the industry’s had much respect for me.”
For good reason, our chat hovers over the marketplace ad for a new guitarist that Anderson placed in the NME back in 1989; a message that would become a defining creed for Suede to evolve by: ‘No musos. Some things are more important than ability. Call Brett.’
“Sprit and eccentricity and originality are key in great art,” the singer responds. “You need ability, the yin and the yang, but you’ve got to have those piquant elements.”
Osman agrees: “Are there two worse singers than John Lydon and Morrissey? Two people with no range, none of those tricks you see on TV now, and yet two of the most listenable musicians of all time.”
“I hate it when you see young artists cosying up to the industry,” adds Anderson. “Any youth movement loses its vitality when it starts hanging out with the insiders. We’ve always been outsiders.”
Yet Suede’s allure is about far more than just their interloper status. The heroes they reference - Morrissey, Mark E Smith, John Lydon - were all working class boys with an imposing, impressive self-education behind them.
They were venomous yet erudite - they had nothing to lose, but plenty with which to debate. Anderson remains a vital part of this lineage. His shocking turn at the BRITs all those years ago, his eyeballing of the establishment, seemed intrinsically linked to an upbringing that was intellectually aspirational, but practically tough.
“I never wanted this clichéd position of being a working class boy that celebrates all the working class things,” he agrees. “I was brought up on a council estate but there was Franz Liszt playing on the stereo, Aubrey Beardsley prints on the wall.
“I’ve always wanted to defy those narrow bands of categorisation - I think all the interesting artists have done that. Do I see that in anybody in the current crop? No, sadly. There’s lots of bands I find inspiring, but I can’t see that sort of character.”
Which inevitably means the return of Anderson and Suede comes at a juncture where they stick out every bit as much they did two decades ago - only now they look rakishly healthy, can afford to fund their own record and get to claim an indelible place in the soap opera of British music history.
They’re no longer hooked on class-As or erotically-tinged confrontation; but as evidenced here, they’re hardly mealy-mouthed Rock Hall Of Famers, either. Now well into their 40s, what’s driving Suede to create new music?
“The quest for making great art, if that doesn’t sound too crushingly pretentious.”
Of course it does, Brett. That’s kind of the point.
And with that, off Suede saunter into the midday London air, stuffed to the gills with ability - yet unsettling, captivating, peculiar proof that some things really are more important.

http://www.scotsman.com/lifestyle/music ... -1-2828646

Album review: Suede - Bloodsports
By COLIN SOMERVILLE
10 March 2013 00:00

NO regrets from Brett Anderson about an underwhelming solo career, as he reassembles and records the band (still minus Bernard Butler) that provided the platform for success 20 years ago.
Suede - Bloodsports - Suede Ltd, £12.99 - * * *

Turning back time is impossible, and the urgency and angst of that first album is but a distant memory.
It threatens to kick into life with Richard Oakes’ bombastic guitar powering Snowblind, but that proves a false alarm. Anderson manfully tries to invest For The Strangers with the requisite drama and intensity, and struggles to make It Starts And Ends With You say anything remotely profound.
Suede were never genre nor era specific, and sporadically offer glimpses of former glories. But What Are You Not Telling Me? sounds like a song from an Andrew Lloyd Webber musical, as does the melodrama of Faultlines, a grand musical non sequitur. If you are going to re-enter the musical arena, surely it is best to do so with a flourish, but Bloodsports is too timid despite the superficial bluster. Not a single song stands up to be counted, reeking of uncomfortable familiarity, and Hit Me is “handbags at dawn” when rawer confrontation may be required. This may prove to be Suede’s swansong, but the band should be better remembered.

Download this: Snowblind, Sabotage

http://www.guardian.co.uk/music/2013/ma ... loodsports

Suede: Bloodsports – album stream
Suede are back with huge choruses and glam riffs – have a listen to their return and tell us what you think
Guardian music
guardian.co.uk, Monday 11 March 2013 09.52 GMT

Coming back up … an older, and possibly wiser Suede
Lovers of bad sex in council houses, rejoice! Suede are back! Bloodsports sees the reunited fivesome bringing back the crunchingly glam guitars, the spiralling synths, Brett Anderson's yearning yelp, and a cracking selection of those huge choruses.
"It needed to sound like a band, but it couldn't possibly sound like self-parody," Brett Anderson told the Quietus earlier this month. "That's why we discarded so many songs, it was like a new band starting over – you don't hear half their new songs when they first get together. We needed to have this brutal sense of what or wasn't good enough."
Our impression is that what they've left in certainly is good enough. But what do you think? Let us know…

http://www.superdeluxeedition.com/news/ ... ack-chaos/

Suede confuse fans with “Bloodsports” bonus track chaos
March 11, 2013 by Paul Sinclair

With a week to go until the release of Bloodsports, the first new Suede album in over 10 years, excitement is in danger of turning into resentment as diehard fans fume over the seemingly random distribution of ‘bonus’ tracks delivered geographically and via different ‘channels’.
In the UK, if you wish to buy Bloodsports on CD, it is a simple ten track album, with the following track listing.
1. Barriers
2. Snowblind
3. It Starts and Ends With You
4. Sabotage
5. For the Strangers
6. Hit Me
7. Sometimes I Feel I’ll Float Away
8. What Are You Not Telling Me?
9. Always
10. Faultlines
This is available from Amazon for £9.99 at the time of writing (UK Pre-order: Bloodsports). It should be noted, that there is no physical deluxe edition in the UK at the usual £10-£15 price point.
However, for the same money (£9.99) lovers of inferior quality MP3s are rewarded with two bonus tracks available via a ‘deluxe’ digital 12-track version from iTunes. The bonus tracks are:
• Dawn Chorus
• Howl
In Japan a deluxe CD+DVD edition also adds two bonus tracks, they are
• Dawn Chorus
• Nothing Can Stop Us
And if you want the two UK iTunes bonus tracks on a physical CD, then you need to seek out the Polish release which contains the same two songs:
• Dawn Chorus
• Howl
But what about the expensive deluxe bundles available in the UK? Surely they will contain all the bonus tracks above, won’t they?
The deluxe Hardback book box set costs up to £100. You’d think so, but in fact this is not the case. The £35 Bloodsports “Hardback Book Box Set” contains the 10-track album on CD and vinyl and comes with an “exclusive 7-inch featuring an unreleased B-Side”. The label have confirmed that the vinyl single features Dawn Chorus backed with a further new track No Holding Back. So this deluxe set does not include Howl or Nothing Can Stop Us. You have to buy the Polish version AND the Japanese CD+DVD, in addition to this deluxe release, to have all the bonus tracks on a physical format.
A quick check online tells us you’d be looking at spending around £35 to get both of these items imported to the UK. This is on top of the £35 already invested in the “Hardback Book Box Set” plus the rather high shipping costs (£10 for UK delivery). That’s £80 for UK buyers to gather together four physical bonus tracks – three on CD and one on vinyl.
Incredibly, even the very expensive (£99) “Hardback Book Ltd Edition & Signed Box Set” – now sold out – repeats the omissions from the £35 set. You get a T-Shirt, a signed print, the same vinyl and CD combinations as the cheaper deluxe book set, and a USB stick which includes the album in ‘high quality’ and an exclusive video. The two seven-inch vinyl tracks (Dawn Chorus and No Holding Back) are included on the USB stick but this £100 box does not include Howl or Nothing Can Stop Us in ANY FORM WHATSOEVER. In other words, the iTunes, Japan and Poland editions all contain tracks NOT in the super deluxe box set.
Of course no one is forcing people to buy ‘everything’, and offering bonus tracks – particularly digitally – is not new, but Suede fans are a passionate and loyal sort, and in the UK in particular many would have spent much of the nineties being persuaded to buy multiple versions of Suede’s singles (CD1, CD2, CD3, DVD, cassette single etc.) in order to ensure that owned all the extra non-album tracks. The difference is that back then you could probably collect every issue of a single for around £10 and have four or five new tracks to show for it.
Fast forward almost 20 years, and the same loyal fans are being tempted to buy a £100 (or £35) box set that contains LESS Suede music on CD than the Polish deluxe edition which retails for £12.60!?
Of course the band may well be intending to issue these elusive bonus tracks on a physical format in the UK and/or other territories at some point in the near future (maybe for another Bloodsports single), but if this is the case, then they should probably make this clear before their most ardent fans set off – grudgingly – on an expensive global shopping expedition for fear of missing out.
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Are you a Suede fan with a Bloodsports buying dilemma? Let us know your thoughts on how the label have dealt with this bonus track issue – please leave a comment.

http://www.clashmusic.com/features/for- ... gers-suede

For The Strangers: Suede
"...that’s where the magic is.”
Robin Murray / 11 · 03 · 2013

It really shouldn’t work.
Suede’s return – as joyous an occasion as it was – seemed to be geared around an exercise in nostalgia. For fans, it was a rare chance to catch the group in their natural setting, adding some visceral, electrifying noise to those glorious, often grandiose studio recordings.
But for Suede, this was something quite different. A re-invigorating process, the passion and conviction with which they attacked those re-union shows suggested a lust that had yet to be tempered. Much mooted, the process behind a new album has – unbeknownst to fans – already begun. “I think we just felt that this is what you do if you’re in a band” explains Mat Osman, matter of factly. “It’s that thing of a band being like a shark, it has to keep moving or it dies. I love doing the shows, doing festivals and stuff but you can’t keep doing it. It’s diminishing returns. For a while we’ve been thinking that we want to do a record and we thought we could do a record, because quite often those two things don’t go together. We spent a long time writing and worrying about whether we were actually going to do it or not. For a long time we were 50/50 over whether we were able to do it, whether we could actually make a record we were proud of.”
Each step Suede take is carefully pored over. Aware that they have a legacy to protect, the band simply did not want to tarnish the good will their return had engendered with an album that fell below standards. “I think definitely the experience of making the last Suede ‘A New Morning’ where I think looking back on it, it would definitely have been better for our career generally to have not released that record - that made us feel that if we do write a load of stuff which is not good enough then we won’t release it. We were definitely prepared to put a lot of work in and then not release the record” Brett Anderson insists. “Every record you make is hard, there’s no such thing as an easy album to make. The whole point of it is that you work hard at it and it’s a struggle to some extent otherwise.. you don’t get anything for free, do you know what I mean? It’s a challenge and that’s the beauty of it. The challenge is overcoming these things. It was an especially hard record to make in that coming back after ten years of not making records you’ve got a very fine balancing act of sounding like yourself but not sounding like a self parody. Finding the right balance there was the tricky thing.”
Plus, as Mat Osman freely admits, the ‘comeback record’ is a notoriously difficult beast to tame. “I think being aware that most comeback records are awful. It’s true isn’t it?” he laughs. “I mean, generally... it’s the problem we had when we came back to do live gigs and it’s the same with the record. People have done it before and they’re not very good. We’ve kind of worked really hard at not being: right, we’re in a band we’ve got 12 songs and a God given right to inflict them on the world. After the live stuff I think won us back a lot of friends we were very aware of not fucking that up. It was only two, three months after that was finished that we thought: right, now this is beginning to work. You get three or four key songs together and suddenly you can see this record, hear this record.”
Working with Ed Buller, Suede were utterly ruthless during the recording process. Refusing to endorse mediocrity, sessions found the studio floor littered with discarded ideas. “Brutal, I think is the word. Brutal” Osman muses. “Everyone had tens of songs ditched, didn’t they? Everyone had stuff that they were really fond of which either the rest of the band – or Ed – just went, no it’s not good enough. One of Ed’s conditions for working with us was: I have to be able to be really rude. One of the things I like about him is that we’ve known him for 20 years and he’s quite prepared to be rude. Literally, you’ll come to him and go: I think this is fucking brilliant we’ve been working on it. He’ll say: “oh I don’t like it. It’s awful. Why would you want to write a song like that?” Which is pretty dispiriting but that’s the way you get around what happens with these comeback records which is that you have to start from scratch, you have to learn to be a band again, you have to get your standards up, you have to do the things that new bands do. Which is write a ton of stuff for the sheer fun of doing it and then throw that stuff away because it’s not good enough.”
The results are – frankly – much better than we had any right to expect. ‘Bloodsports’ is neither a re-tread not a re-invention, it simply sounds as you would imagine Suede in 2013 to sound; older, for sure, but that weight of experience is matched by a need to push ahead, a new to measure themselves against younger (but not necessarily hungrier) groups. Lyrically, Brett Anderson dwells on love, but – as he explains – this is something he felt he simply couldn’t avoid. “I’m increasingly of the mind that it’s the only real, valid content for pop music, really” the singer insists. “Pop music is about emotion, it’s about all these things but I find it very hard to listen to music that has theoretical subject matter. For me, it’s about passion and intensity and the songs need to reflect that, really”.
Continuing, Brett Anderson outlined the underlying narrative that threads through each the entire album. “They’re about the marathon of being in a relationship. Not just about the infatuation or the split. The idea for the album was that it was from the start of a relationship to the end” he says. “It starts and ends with you, sort of thing. You meet someone, there’s a song about the infatuation thing and there are songs in between about suspicion, co-dependency and all these states which you reach within a relationship and then inevitably obsession and splitting up. It was a journey through a relationship. It came quite naturally, the subject matter. You have to write about what you feel is driving you. I didn’t want to write some sort of theoretical album that didn’t mean anything to me. I think people can see through that quite quickly”.
‘Bloodsports’ is marked by Anderson’s lyrical content, containing the sort of whip crack wit which made him such an enticing proposition at the band’s peak. Alongside this, though, is a refusal to be tempered, a desire to break past the sometimes cold environment of the studio. “We wanted to sound like how we sound live” Osman insists. “We’ve learned a lot about playing live over the past couple of years. You listen to lots of live versions of the songs and they just sound so exciting live. I don’t think – even in our heyday – we captured the violence of what it’s like to be at a Suede gig. Sonically. We really wanted to capture that live, wiry sound.”
Infused with a taut dynamic, ‘Bloodsports’ finds Suede analyzing what is really means to be Suede. The band’s own viewpoints – five members with different interests, different conceptions – it matched by Ed Buller, someone who is intrinsically associated with the group’s output. “I think there are little differences but that’s kind of what being in a band is - rather than changing the members each time” says the frontman. “It’s the slightly different ideas of where you’re going.. we always end up in the same place but it kind of pulls it into interesting places”.
Together, Suede and their producer hammered out a new conception for Suede in a fresh era. Whereas Ed Buller favoured a pop approach, Brett Anderson argued for something quite different. “I didn’t want to make an album like that because I thought it would sound dated” he states. |We met in the middle, I wanted it to sound a little bit cooler and more modern, in a sense, while he wanted it to sound like a classic Suede record. We met somewhere in a quite interesting point between the two things. That’s point of collaborating with other people, it’s that they drag you somewhere that you can’t comfortably go sometimes. It’s this mid point, that’s where the magic is.”

'Bloodsports' is out next Monday (March 18th).

http://thephoenix.com/Boston/music/1528 ... -record-b/


11th March 2013
Interview: Brett Anderson of Suede on new record Bloodsports, the art of the comeback, and getting his demon back
By MICHAEL MAROTTA

It's virtually impossible not to hold a so-called "comeback record" up against a band's past, and it's useless not to judge Suede's sixth studio effort, Bloodsports, out March 19 on Warner Bros., against the UK rock band's 1990s history. But it's the context of Suede's uneven career that makes this album so remarkable. It's rare that a band like this, 20 years after their blitzing, neo-glam, Britpop-kickstarting debut LP, can stake a claim to immediate relevance as older, seasoned statesmen of British rock, and rarer still to do it after an 11-year absence. Much like David Bowie, who's also enjoying a renaissance these days, Suede's epitaph was written long ago. Or so it seemed.
But the majestic Bloodsports, an instantly classic Suede record that brims with the raw emotion that defined the band's early years — the reckless sexual abandon of their first record, the lush, winterized orchestration of Dog Man Star, and even the glossy microwaved pop of Coming Up — accomplishes what was thought to be the impossible. It transports the listener to the years right after 1996's Coming Up, after frontman Brett Anderson re-wrote the Suede rulebook (that was the first comeback, right?) by taking a center-stage shine to songwriting duties a few short years after the departure of his acclaimed writing partner, guitarist Bernard Butler.
More important, perhaps, then, Bloodsports also nearly eradicates from the senses the two mixed-review records that came after Coming Up: 1999's more ambient leaning Head Music (which still had a few brilliant moments, notably "Everything Will Flow") and the entirely forgettable and misguided A New Morning (2002), which many said found the band in the role of self-parody. By 2003, they had called it a day.
Bloodsports will both please longtime fans who yearned for the ultra-obsessive mid-'90s era (no one just kind of likes Suede, right?) and establishes a course of modernity for the band. A few years ago, I caught them at Coachella, and the hits from yesterday sounded fresh and vital, but despite promises of new material, one had to wonder if their rare US appearance was merely a nostalgia binge in exchange for a big paycheck.
As it turns out, it was not. New songs like "For the Strangers" and "It Starts and Ends with You" find the band recharged and re-focused; the bedroom ballad "Sabotage" brings Richard Oakes's electric-arcing guitars back to his Coming Up days; and post-Britpop daggers like "Snowblind" and "Hit Me" extend the band's once-stalled Greatest Hits machine. Anderson himself sounds like the previous 15 years never happened.
In my conversation with the usually reserved frontman this week, we discussed the positive reaction to Bloodsports, finding a balance between their successes and failures of the past, their reunion with mid-'90s producer Ed Buller, and their relationship with America.
Anderson, as it's been noted, has got his demon back. Just don't call his band "the London Suede."
Hey Brett, how are you doing? Hi Michael, are you in Boston? How is it in Boston today?
Pretty good, but I think you guys have a score to settle with my city? Oh about the stolen gear? Yeah someone in Boston has got some nice guitars.
I used to joke that that there's a second-hand shop outside the city that has a wall of Richard Oakes guitars; a giant wall of all of Suede's gear with discount tags. It's a depressing thing, isn't it, that it happened. It happened to us before in the States, on the first tour.
Well you always try to find silver linings for everything like that, and of course it's not my gear, but the one thing that did come out of it was a pretty intimate acoustic set at the Paradise. You went deep into the catalogue, played "May Dark Star" and tracks like that, which you weren't playing on theComing Up, tour, so it kinda gave Boston a different look. Well, exactly. I think sometimes you have to go with whatever hand fate deals you, and sometimes you can pull from the jaws of defeat. There's something exciting in doing something you haven't been prepared for.
Which is a good segue, in doing something people aren't prepared for: congratulations onBloodsports, this is a phenomenal record. Oh thank you!
The response has been huge, does it feel good to be back? It feels great, we're really proud of the record, we worked really hard on it. I think its sort of paid off and the response has been great, actually.
People are using terms like "triumphant comeback" and "return to form" and stuff like that . . . Yes, all of those clichés! [Laughs]
They look good in headlines. . . . Exactly, its nice that they're using that instead of something more derogatory [laughs]. But no, it's great. I think it's a fine record, I really do, and like I said we worked incredibly hard on it, and it really matters to us. It's very easy to get 20 years into it, and people can get complacent. And the times we've been complacent before, it's all fallen apart. I learned that lesson, and I'll never lose that hunger again I don't think. We're either 100 percent committed or we won't do it at all.
Was the break necessary to recharge the Suede engine? Oh god yeah. I don't think we could have made Bloodsports in 2004, or whatever; that would have been impossible, it needed to go away. I needed to make some solo records, I needed to learn a bit more about life rather than be caught in these . . . emotional pours, from the moment when you become successful. So yeah, absolutely, it definitely needed that space, and to come back to it with a little bit of hunger and passion, and come back to it almost like we realized what we nearly lost.
That's they key thing. You become quite complacent being in a band, and the success, you take it for granted, blah blah blah, and it just numbs you a bit after a while. We needed to go away and re-approach it.
There's a great comment on one of the "It Starts and Ends with You" music-video pages on YouTube, the one Pitchfork posted. It's the top comment, and it says: "Brett got his demon back." I thought, what a great way to sum it up. That is something I said, it's paraphrasing, when I split the band up in 2003. I kinda posted something on the Suede website, kinda apologizing to the people who were pissed off, but also explaining I needed to do anything it took to get my demon back. And that was the way I looked at it, I felt I lost my demon a little bit.
When you go throughBloodsports, tracks like "Snowblind" or "For the Strangers," we're talking classic Suede. Was that electricity apparent right away in the studio? No, not really, we had to work at it. I think it took a while to click into gear, and we actually wrote a whole load of songs that we rejected, and I think that was very — it's a very painstaking process, rejecting songs, and I didn't want to have that thing where, when some bands reform, you can tell that they think because they reformed and because they can play the songs from 20 years ago, that the magic is still there. And they assume it's still there in the studio as well.
You kid yourself, almost, and I didn't want to make any assumptions like that. And I wanted to be really brutal about whether what we were doing now was good enough. And Ed Buller, the producer, really helped with that, he was a really good guiding force, and he's got a really good pair of ears when it comes to Suede. He knows what makes a good Suede record; he's made four of them now. And four of our best albums. He was great, being involved with this record.
Was it a given to work with Ed Buller onBloodsports? Oh yeah, definitely, there was no other option to me, as far as I'm concerned. Ed isn't the youngest bloke on the block nor the hippest name in the book, know what I mean? But he's a member of the family, the Suede family, and he's made all our best records. We made out reputation with him, and he made his reputation with us, pretty much, and I think there's no other choice. I wasn't gonna go get some hit name out of the directory of producers just because they are the thing. Ed's got that passion for Suede that you simply can't buy, he's got that commitment, he was obsessed with making this record, as much as the band was, maybe even more. That kind of energy you just can't buy.
When word of the new record surfaced about a year ago, there was talk, maybe you had said it as well, that you were striving for this combination ofDog Man Star andComing Up. How did you end up pulling that off? [Laughs]. It did seem like quite an ambitious thing, didn't it?
Most of the fans probably said "Oh sure, everyone says it's a combination of this and that." But you fucking did it. Well, thank you! I don't know how we pulled it off, like I said, we kind of just really, really cared about it. And I think, this whole reclamation thing we've done is a lot about rewriting the mistakes we made towards the end. The last two Suede albums, maybe not so much Head Music, it's half a great album, but definitely the last album, A New Morning, we shouldn't have released it, it wasn't good enough. And I think splitting up, and the way we split up, on a bit of a low, it left a sour taste in our mouths about what Suede were. The real motivation with this was reminding people of the kind of music we used to make, and still can make. And it was trying to rewrite history a bit, which sounds impossible, but that was our main motivation
AfterDog Man Star, and some lineup changes, you redefined the Suede template withComing Up. Was there pressure to do that again withHead Music, or was the weight of the band just too much by the late '90s to continue on that track? Yeah, I think with Head Music we were too self conscious about reinventing ourselves and finding a new sound, and I don't think it was successful because there was too much of an emphasis on the theoretical side of it, and that's why I called it Head Music. It was almost like theory music for us, it didn't come completely naturally. There were moments that just flowed, things like "Indian Strings," and stuff like that, but the sense of it was we were theorizing a bit, and that's where it went wrong.
Looking back on it, I kind of wish someone in our circles, one of our advisors or whatever, would have said, "Look it's okay to sound like yourself, there's nothing wrong with that." Lots of great bands make records that sound just like themselves and I think the media was pressurizing everyone to kind of reinvent themselves in the '90s. That's a very '90s thing. Of course you've got to push yourself, push your own envelope, evolve, but there's a difference between evolving and reinventing, and I think there are very few bands that can successfully reinvent. You can probably count them on the fingers of one hand. There's nothing wrong with making great records and feeling like they are you. And that's what I really wanted with Bloodsports, I wanted it to feel like a great Suede record.
And it does. I made a comment over the weekend that ifComing Up came out in 1996, this almost feels like what you wanted, as a fan, in 1998, '99. Exactly, yeah. That was the idea, that we were trying to re-write history [laughs] and this could be the fourth album. A sliding door situation, kind of like, take a slightly different turn back in 1997.
But what's also interesting, too, is that it has been 11 years since A New Morning, it's 2013, and while Suede's music has always been very seductive and sleek, and passionate, there's now a sophistication to Bloodsports that's overwhelming, there's a maturity there. With songs like "Sometimes I Feel I'll Float away," there's an evolution that's there that feels right . . . in the moment. I almost like to think the two people fighting on theBloodsports album cover is really that couple from theStay Together EP 20 years later. Haha, right.
Is a lot of this coming from where you are, at age 45, settled down, and having seen life over the past 20 years — in terms of the maturity of this record? Maturity is a tricky thing to talk about, isn't it, because right away, it sounds comfortable. The idea of maturity in music just sends shivers down my spine. To want to sound mature is a kind of death in itself, isn't it?
And I think you want to mature naturally through experience, and experience is a truly valuable thing. We were experienced in making this record to give it this sort of, in production terms, just to make it sound fresh and exciting, didn't want to make a studio album. I wanted it to have a live energy, to capture that feel. So that kind of experience, when I look at previous work, even in the debut album, which was born out of playing live, it didn't ever capture that raw aggression. Things like that.
Knowing you wanted to mend your mistakes from the past – that's the valuable side of maturity. I didn't want it to come off as over sophisticated, I think a rock band has to be very careful about being over sophisticated, it can come off as too forced.
We're approaching the 20th anniversary of the debut LP, and in 1993 it really kicked British music in the balls, and now 20 years later it feels like we're back at that point where music feels stagnant again. There's nothing that really grabs you anymore. Do you feel like this is déjà vu and the time is right for Suede to reclaim that mantle? I don't know. The way that Suede announced ourselves on the scene, you can't ever recreate that, you're talking about zeitgeist, and these elements that you can't ever recreate, they are once in a lifetime things. And the energy and excitement about the band and the way it fit into music at the time. All you can do, is . . . just do your best fucking job at making as great a record as you can and everything just has to follow. I think people follow, and plot, and predict zeitgeist, and I think you either have to be a genius or incredibly lucky. And its never been my intention to try and do that.
But I know what you mean, there is a certain stagnancy about music. I do get excited about certain things, but they are disparate, and few and far between. There is some amazing music out there. I love a new band called Teleman that I just discovered, they made a great song called "Cristina," that Bernard Butler produced, which is absolutely fantastic. And what else do I like? The new Foals album, a band called Savages and stuff like that. There's lots of really exciting music out there.
But there is . . . music has become incredibly safe again. Because what I think has happened, is because of what's happened to the music industry with piracy and posting on the Internet, there's less money in it, so therefore the powers that be have almost become more conservative to make as much money as they had before, be much more business minded about it, which means being much more safe about it. Which is very sad.
And speaking of that business side of things, Suede has always had a fairly tumultuous relationship with America. Can you envision a reconciliation with the United States? There's never been . . . [laughs] any friction between the band and the United States. I've always loved coming to the States, and we played Coachella a few years ago, and I remembered how much I loved being there. I spent a wonderful couple of days out there in the States. Loved the show and everything.
The whole name thing, that's always been the problem for us. You know the whole "London Suede" thing. I just took my eye off the ball at the wrong moment, woke up and realized we had really messed up. And that's a problem, that name, I just can't be known under that name.
Well the band will never be known as that in thePhoenix I can tell you that! I know, I know, it's a superficial thing, and all that legal shit. I dunno, I'd love to come out to the States again. I really would, but we can't just do it on a whim.
Are there plans for a tour here? That's the one question every stateside Suede fan wants to know. I don't know, we haven't even talked about touring outside Europe at all this year. We talked about maybe doing some touring at the end of the year.
We're trying to keep it fairly loose. To be honest, the whole reason, one of the reasons, it went wrong last time was we had too much of a rigid timetable on what we were doing. And as soon as it becomes this machine like process of living your life, I think the magic goes. And we're trying to be a bit freer by it and not have our lives completely dictated by it.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/music/reviews/82x2

BBC Review
A passionate and seductive album which reminds us how distinctive this band can be.
Jaime Gill 2013-03-12

The last time as much was at stake on a Suede album as Bloodsports, it was 1996, they’d just sacked guitarist Bernard Butler and critics dismissed the beleaguered band as overhyped or just plain over.
The result was the glittering Coming Up, the band’s revenge, commercial apogee and – unknown to everyone – the beginning of a long, drawn-out decline. That decline culminated in 2002’s listless A New Morning, unloved by critics, fans and public alike, and leading to a merciful split.

Fans were delighted by the band’s live reunion in 2010, but more divided over news that the band had returned to the studio. Would a sixth record further illustrate the law of diminishing returns which saw Suede plummet from the swaggering beauty of their first three records to the confused inconsistency of their final two? Or might it restore their reputation? Well, Suede’s notoriously rabid fanbase – and the band, no doubt – can relax. If Bloodsports can’t quite match the bloody passion of their debut or the vaulting beauty of their masterpiece, Dog Man Star, it easily bests its two patchy predecessors.
Singer Brett Anderson has described the record as a cross between Dog Man Star and Coming Up, but Bloodsports is actually its own beast. While it occasionally wanders into the same epic territory as Dog Man Star (notably on the dark, squalling storm of Sabotage and the sombre ballad Faultlines) and sometimes echoes the punchy catchiness of Coming Up (the brutishly effective It Starts and Ends With You and the stadium-sized Hit Me), it’s the band’s most organic, raw and unselfconscious record to date.
It also finds Suede exploring new sonic territory, something unexpected at this late stage in their career. For the Strangers is sweet and simple, not words normally associated with the band, its subtle but sure melody slowly building to a big warm hug of a chorus.

At the other end of the emotional spectrum lies What Are You Not Telling Me?, a stark and spooked piano ballad which blossoms into a desperately sad chorus. There are lesser moments, too, particularly the unmemorable Always, and Bloodsports plays it too safe to restore the band to the vanguard of British pop.

But it’s a fine Suede record, a passionate and seductive creature which reminds us of how distinctive and dynamic this most underestimated band can be. And that is a little miracle in itself.

http://www.clashmusic.com/reviews/suede-bloodsports

Suede - Bloodsports
A photocopy...
12 · 03 · 2013
The baggy-trousered Suedeheads of the Nineties are now forty year-old accountants, but Brett and co. have turned to an old flame in original producer Ed Buller, dramatising their way into creating a bright return. ‘Barriers’ is a field-wide opener, stating the point that Suede can still write pop songs. The mountain of riffs carried throughout are lustful and shamelessly British, especially in single ‘It Starts And Ends With You’. This is a photocopy of the original Britpop blueprint.

8/10

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wu5LeCTqK8I

Suede's Brett Anderson and Mat Osman look back at some classic NME covers and discuss their relationship with NME magazine over the years.

OMG - what a surprise turning the samsung on to listen to tonight's match!

http://www.parismatch.com/Culture-Match ... nt-470383/


culture-match | lundi 11 mars 2013
Avec Suede, les années 90 reviennent
« Suede », ou le groupe pop anglais des années 90. Son chanteur à la mèche rebelle, Brett Anderson, jouait de son androgynie pour plaire à ceux qui ne comprenaient pas Oasis et trouvaient Blur trop timorées. C’était en 1993. Ils étaient la bande-son de la « Cool Britannia » de Tony Blair. Et puis la drogue, les disputes, ont eu raison du groupe. Séparés pendant une décennie, Brett et ses copains se sont retrouvés pour un nouveau disque « Bloodsports ». Interview.
Aurélie Raya - Parismatch.com

Paris Match. Vous sortez un nouvel album de « Suede » 10 ans après le précédent…
Brett Anderson. Oui, le roi Henry VIII était sur le trône pour notre précédent disque… Nous nous étions reformés en 2010 pour un concert de charité organisé par Roger Daltrey des « Who ». Il n’aurait pas dû y avoir de suites. Mais cela nous semblait si naturel, si évident, de jouer ensemble. C’était cool de se revoir. Donc on a continué. Mais, au bout d’un moment, interpréter les vieux morceaux ne suffit plus, il faut du nouveau.
Pourquoi Bernard Butler, le guitariste d’origine, n’est-il pas revenu ?
On ne lui a pas de demandé. Il n’est plus dans le groupe. Il ne le souhaite plus d’ailleurs. Il s’occupe de sa famille, il produit des artistes, il ne veut pas se déplacer sans cesse, faire des tournées… On est toujours ami, on se voit de temps en temps, mais je sais que la dernière chose qu’il désire, c’est de parler à des journalistes ! Il déteste cet aspect du métier, or c’est nécessaire, il me semble.
Vous aimez toujours ça vous ?
Hum… J’aime que les gens entendent mon travail. Moi aussi j’ai une famille dont je n’aime pas m’éloigner trop longtemps. Je n’assurerai plus jamais des tournées longues de 18 mois comme dans les années 90, mais je suis encore excité. Je me sens meilleur, je contrôle davantage la situation. Quand on a commencé il y a 25 ans, je ne savais rien, et j’ai appris. Certes vous vous détériorez physiquement, mais c’est toujours incroyable le live. Mais je n’ai pas envie de donner le sentiment que l’on se bat pour ressembler à ce que l’on était dans les années 90. La seule chose que je souhaite retrouver de cette époque, c’est l’état d’esprit.
Vous avez déclaré dans un journal britannique que cet album avait été le plus dur à écrire. Pourquoi ?
Parce que c’est difficile de sonner nouveau, tout en restant vous-même. Ne pas s’autoparodier. Tout est affaire d’écriture avec « Suede », on vit pour nos chansons, on écrit, on écrit, on écrit, et on jette beaucoup… On a choisi 10 morceaux parmi les 40 que l’on avait composé.
"On n’est pas très sympa en fait !"
Le premier album de « Suede » date de 1993. Qu’en pensez-vous aujourd’hui ?
Je suis très fier. C’est toujours un grand disque ; une chanson comme « Animal lovers », fonctionne encore, il est très bien. C’était une époque incroyable. On avait 25 ans.
Et vous n’avez pas traîné puisque le suivant sortait un an plus tard, « Dog man star »…
L’inspiration semblait alors inépuisable… Les chansons surgissaient tout le temps, le flux ne s’arrêtait jamais. C’était une période de créativité intense. « Dog man star » est notre meilleur disque.
Pensez-vous que le confort nuise à la créativité ?
Les deux disques pour lesquels nous avons dépensé le plus d’argent sont les pires que nous ayons enregistrés, soit les deux derniers. Je ne sais pas si c’est lié, mais… Ce sont des phases. Vous vous détruisez passé des débuts réussis, afin de retrouver cette énergie de jeunesse. Le dernier album, « New morning », c’est le son de notre destruction. On faisait tout mal pour que cela foire. Nous nous sommes séparés et plus vus pendant 7 ans. On s’est rapproché une fois calmés, l’envie revenue. Ce sont des cycles.
Vous avez connu le succès pendant la « Brit pop » revoyez-vous des membres de Blur, Oasis, Pulp…
Non, on ne se fréquente pas. On n’est pas très sympa en fait !
Avez-vous écouté le nouveau disque de David Bowie, l’une de vos influences majeures ?
Pas encore. Je n’ai rien à dire puisque je ne l’ai pas écouté, si ce n’est qu’il faut regarder la réaction de la presse face à un tel événement. C’est trop. Elle n’est pas objective. Elle ne réagit pas au disque, mais au fait qu’il soit toujours là. Bowie est exceptionnel, mais je crois que si je n’ai pas encore écouté son
album, c’est par peur de me sentir déçu. « Hunky Dory » est imbattable.

http://counteract-magazine.com/2013/03/ ... oodsports/

Album: Suede – Bloodsports
Written by Jessica Goodman
March 12, 2013
It’s been a long time coming. In fact, it’s been more than ten years since the critical disaster of their last album, over nine years since the band parted ways, and almost exactly three years since they got back together. After numerous live shows, festival appearances, and an extended time in the studio, at long last, Suede are finally releasing their sixth studio album. You can be rest assured, because it certainly doesn’t disappoint.
Opening track ‘Barriers’ is about as strong a start as you can get. It may have been overshadowed when it was first released (coinciding with the announcement of David Bowie’s return will have that effect), but as Brett Anderson’s distinctive vocals swoon over heart-thumping rhythms, it’s clear that Suede are back for the better, and they’ve got nothing more to prove. ‘Barriers’ fades into ‘Snowblind,’ a track with heavy guitar riffs that harken back to the bands earliest output. ‘It Starts And Ends With You’ is the album’s first single proper, and with a chorus you can’t help but sing along to, it’s easy to see why.
‘Sabotage’ sees the album take a slower and more sultry turn, whilst ‘For The Strangers’ takes the tempo down further still. As its melodic bassline reverberates under sweeping vocals, soaring guitars, and heartfelt lyrics, you can almost feel yourself falling head-over-heels all over again. ‘Hit Me’ is 2013’s ‘Beautiful Ones.’ Whilst it might not have quite so many la la la’s, it’s still hooky enough to have you echoing the words before it ends.
And where would Suede be without the ballads that made so many people fall in love with them first time around? Cue ‘Sometimes I Feel I’ll Float Away,’ a sweeping, soaring number that combines heavy guitars with mournful vocals. ‘What Are You Not Telling Me?’ is the albums token piano track; soft, stripped-back, and ever-so-delicate, but steeped in effects that somehow miss the mark. ‘Always’ begins in much the same vein, but soon picks up with a sway-a-long rhythm and an ever-so-Suede guitar melody that could almost be telling its own story. ‘Faultlines’ brings the record to its sprawling conclusion, building layers of melody and stadium-sounding percussion under passionate vocals, before stripping them away and fading into silence.
From the first power riffs of ‘Barriers’ through to the final ringing notes of ‘Faultlines,’ ‘Bloodsports’ is distinctly classic Suede. It picks up where ‘Coming Up’ left off in 1996, and reaffirms a legacy that, though well-loved, had been tarnished. Up until now, that is.

Bloodsports is released March 18 2013.

http://www.kyeo.tv/2013/03/12/album-rev ... oodsports/

ALBUM REVIEW: Suede – Bloodsports
Zeinab Lenton - March 12, 2013

Suede: Bloodsports (Warner Music)

Full disclosure: your correspondent is a huge Suede fan. Way back in the distant days of the early 90s I was enthralled by the particular grimy glamour that Suede represented, and captivated by their music, a distinctive blend of the romance of glam and the grit of a grungier, indie sensibility.

This might lead you to think that this review is going to be a bit of a puff piece – with a long-time fan at the helm, what else could it be? However, when you love a band as much as I love Suede, the weight of expectation makes reviewing a comeback album a horrifying prospect. What if it’s rubbish? What if they sully their legacy? What if, worst above all else, they try to jazz things up by mimicking the big hitters of today’s mainstream rock scene? What if they – please God, no – have gone Coldplay?

I needn’t have worried. They’re not different, they’re just better. Album pener Barriers sounds like a statement of intent: it has a large-scale swell of ambition and creative assurance that indicates a band with their eyes set on reclaiming their place in the firmament, not simply plodding, dead-eyed, on a for-the-fans tour.

Snowblind has the jagged, bendy guitar and howling, plaintive wails that make for the best of Suede tracks. Anderson’s romantic dramas have never seemed so dark, and so tinged with dangerous yearning. Sounding somewhere between fan-favourite Killing Of A Flashboy and The Beautiful Ones, Hit Me is a perfect gig song – uplifting, noisy and underpinned by a fuzzing melodic guitar riff and – yes! – the “la-la-las” that Anderson has made somewhat of a lyric signature.

What Are You Not Telling Me is the kind of delicate ballad that Anderson excels at, evoking loneliness, abandonment and a sense of fatalism that is almost heartbreaking in its sadness and beauty. And, just in case you’ve forgotten how good Suede are, Always arrives to remind you, a perfect down-tempo Suede slow-burner. It put me in mind of Asphalt World, that great, epic sweep of desolation and lushness from Dog Man Star, arguably Suede’s greatest record.

Faultlines makes for an epic album-closer, and it was this point that I realized that, 11 years after their last studio release Suede have returned with an album that is possibly as good as their greatest record.

Bloodsports is that perfect beast of a comeback album – at once familiar and distinctive, but also evidencing renewed ambition, progression and, above all, a relevance to the here and now. The early 90s were a time of recession, of grey council flats and concrete skies. A lack of opportunities, cultural hegemony and a Conservative government dripping in corruption laid a backdrop to Suede’s ascendance.

Perhaps, in this new millennium, where things don’t seem to have changed at all, where we appear to have fallen, narcoticised, back in time to a grim heyday, we need Suede more than ever before.

Released: 18.03.13

Wow you've been busy! Haven't you got schoolwork to do?

The other week I ordered my Super Deluxe just in time before they sold out! Will be a nice present for next Wednesday!

Been listening to the full album streams the past few days, sounds amazingggggggg!!! Brilliant comeback!

Suede's Brett Anderson Back With New Album 'Bloodsports': 'Most Of Britpop Was F***ing Awful'
13/03/2013
http://www.huffingtonpost.co.uk/2013/03 ... _hp_ref=uk

For every follower of Britpop who took their place on either side of the river when it came to the perceived chart duel waged by Blur and Oasis, there’s a, usually more detached but dedicated, narrow-eyed observer of that period who affirms that Suede were the real, only, deal.
For that fan, frontman Brett Anderson, in his floor-length leather coat and Ferry-esque bangs, with his broken heart and yearning chords, may have been the ultimate icon of that period, and also its antidote to the more anodyne aspects of the soundtrack of Blair’s first years.
Anderson is more prosaic…
"Most of Britpop was crap," he tells HuffPost UK. "Was it that good? It wasn’t exactly the Kinks and the Beatles, was it? A lot of shit. Come on, most of it was f***ing awful. Sorry, we don’t have a rose-tinted view of Britpop. I’m not just saying that for effect.
Suede are back together after a decade
"Suede's Britain wasn't about Camden High Street. I always hated the Little Britain thing, such a crass misinterpretation of what it was supposed to be about. But that always happens with youth movements - look at your postcard punks - as soon as they find a voice, they got commodified and sanitised, turned into money. I just wanted to sing in my own voice, or what I thought was my own voice."
His bandmate, Mat Osman, agrees: “We were trying to do something universal, writing about our own ordinary lives, and instead it went all Union-Jacky.”
Is Simon Cowell more honest, then, with his blatant efforts? “It’s honest and it’s sh*t. I don’t know whether that’s really an advantage. It’s f***ing awful, but it’s honestly awful,” is Anderson’s summary.
The reason we are looking back, temporarily, is because it’s 2013, and Suede are back with a new album – ‘Bloodsports’ – and a new attitude. “This was the first album we made where, if it wasn’t any good, we just wouldn’t do it,” says Osman.
Inevitably, talk of reformation must include talk of the initial split, and Anderson, whose lyrics resemble those of Pulp’s Jarvis Cocker in their suburban poetry – old lines like 'watch the early morning sun, drip like blood from the day’ still tingle – is typically forthright about what went wrong a decade ago as they released their fifth studio album…
"Looking back on it, we should have split up and we probably wanted to subconsciously, but didn’t have the guts to do it, and making a bad record, was almost like when you’re with someone, and the only way you can split up with them is to behave so badly that they split up with you.”
But now, 10 years later and with a handful of reunion gigs behind them, Anderson and Osman are convinced the chemistry between the band mates is as good, and productive, as ever. Like slipping on a comfy pair of slippers?
“I’m sure there’s an analogy that’s more flattering than that,” Anderson winces. “But, yes, that’s what a band is, the point of it is the chemistry of it, which is the strength and the weakness.
“It’s not like learning to ride a bicycle, you do have to relearn it,” he describes. “One of the reasons we didn’t tell anyone we were making a record was because we didn’t know if it was going to be any good.
“Trying to find something that was a Suede record (something he describes, under duress, as “something dramatic, passionate, with extremes to it”) and did the things we did do well, without it being a self-parody. Can you parody yourself?”
Fortunately, ‘Bloodsports’ has passed their own strict examination, something they admit isn’t true for all their back-catalogue…
“We’re quite honest with ourselves, we’ve made records in the past that were failures, regardless of how many they sold, they’re not good records,” says Anderson, crisply.
“You have to inspire people, to do that, you can’t not care about it. That’s what went wrong with the last Suede record, we just didn’t care enough any more.
“The last Suede album wasn’t a very good record. The second to last Suede album was half a good record. Not that I think everything we’ve ever done is amazing, but the first three albums were pretty good, this album, we’re so close to it, it’s difficult to judge, but we’ve had a good filter with this record.”
This may be just as well because they agree that neither of them is equipped for any other kind of life…
“I have to be a musician, I can’t do anything else,” admits Anderson. “It’s like being an adult baby, it’s a bit sad and absolutely terrifying.”
“It’s actually worse, because you’ve been mollycoddled,” adds Osman. “It’s actually worse than just sitting around in a room for 25 years. You’re more useless.”
At the opposite end of the spectrum to all the coddling, Osman describes the cold shadow of shallowness that descends once a band has split up, and stopped feeding the machine.
"I knew how shallow the music business was, but there were certain people I’d spoken to twice a week for the last 15 years, who I never heard from again. And that level, you could tell someone that, but until it happens and you see someone on the street, and they blank you, you don’t physically understand it, and there’s lots of stuff like that."
Despite this, they’re back – there’s no talk yet of a tour, but it seems unlikely they’ll be able to resist, after all, as Osman describes it, “if you’re a musician, that’s what you do.”
And Anderson agrees… “I heartily endorse that. If I had a signet ring and some sealing wax, I’d be using it.”
Suede's album 'Bloodsports' is released on 18 March. Watch the video below for 'It Starts and Ends With You'...

Suede – Bloodsports
(Suede Ltd) UK release date: 18 March 2013
By Philip Matusavage| 13 March 2013
http://www.musicomh.com/reviews/albums/ ... loodsports

You have to feel sorry for Suede. The excitement inspired by their explosion onto the scene in 1992 which saw them memorably hailed as “The Best New Band in Britain” had, by their implosion in 2003, turned into widespread derision and, worse, indifference.
In subsequent years the former members engaged in a motley variety of activities, from Brett Anderson’s misfiring reunion with former member Bernard Butler in The Tears and low-key solo career to launching obscure bands (Richard Oakes’ Artmagic) and joining existing ones (Simon Gilbert and Bangkok’s Futon). Bassist Mat Osman even composed the theme for Channel 4 panel show 8 out of 10 Cats. Not all of these projects were unworthy of attention but they seemed rather random and haphazard and for a while it looked certain that memories of Suede’s terrific triumphs would fade and the band would slink quietly into obscurity.
It was pleasing, then, when (following the enormous success of Blur’s reunion) the band regrouped in 2010 for a series of gigs and a succession of dazzlingly comprehensive reissues of their albums. This was a chance to rescue Suede’s reputation from the decrepitude into which it had fallen. In a generation who had been adolescents in the mid-90s a wave of potent affection was stirred, enough for the resurgent five-piece to play such enormous venues as London’s O2 Arena. The gigs were taut and impressive – this clearly was a band with something to prove – yet hanging over proceedings was the inescapable feeling that nostalgia was anathema to what Suede, who at their peak had seemed so vital and uncompromising, were about.
January’s surprise release of new song Barriers put that concern to rest. An assuredly widescreen anthem, it sounded like classic Suede without seeming out of place beside contemporary acts like Florence And The Machine and Kings Of Leon (with added lashings of U2 for good measure). It suggested a band reinvigorated and briefly inspired an anticipation which recalled their early years: briefly because, the very next day (no pun intended) David Bowie made his unheralded and hugely shocking return, stealing the band’s thunder completely. It almost seemed like cosmic revenge for when Bowie’s Black Tie White Noise was released soon after Suede’s debut and met with largely unfavourable comparisons. Suddenly the band had that whiff of irrelevance around them once more.
Bloodsports, then, doesn’t arrive with quite the hullabaloo which the band probably hoped for but it’s a welcome release nonetheless considering they could undoubtedly have made plenty of money coasting on the old hits. As Brett Anderson has astutely noted, it’s very difficult for reformed acts to put out new material as the risk of interfering with fans’ memories is so great. If Barriers suggested a compelling update of Suede’s sound, however, it proves misleading: it quickly becomes clear that with Bloodsports they have tackled this problem of expectation by slavishly following the blueprint of 1996’s Coming Up (their most successful album). Bloodsports’ artwork clearly nods towards it while both albums have the same number of tracks. Most strikingly, the experimentation which marked much of Suede’s (previously) final years, from the electronica of Head Music to the ‘experimental folk’ of A New Morning, has been completely ditched: these are 10 no-nonsense glam-pop songs which swoop in, do the business and then depart before you have any chance to be bored.
Certainly as a Suede album it pushes all the right buttons: Snowblind and Hit Me, both rollicking numbers which blow away the cobwebs left by the lacklustre A New Morning, sound tailor-made for indie club dance floors while lead single It Starts and Ends With You is an endearingly catchy melodrama. The Suede ballad (almost a genre to itself) is more than adequately represented with the tear-stained and atmospheric What Are You Not Telling Me and Sometimes I Feel I’ll Float Away both recalling the ambiance of Coming Up’s Picnic by the Motorway. The band have never sounded so tightly cohesive and there’s a real sense that they’re working at a level where they could toss these songs off in their sleep.
Therein lies the problem, unfortunately. While nothing here is bad there is also little that feels truly inspired; instead we find a band offering efficient re-treads of what they have previously done much better. While Anderson’s lyrical palette has undeniably broadened in the past decade you never feel that you are being offered any insight, any reflection that these are men who have grown in the time they’ve been away.
As a result much of it feels like pastiche, albeit of an often very entertaining sort. Moments such as the brooding Sabotage and the layered escalation of Faultlines cause you to wonder what might have been had the band been more ambitious. As it is, this album seems unlikey to disappoint many people who were fans of Suede first time round – and it’s definitely a better close to their career than A New Morning – but it’s difficult to see what it has to offer new listeners in 2013.