‘Splitting up was the best thing we ever did – it made us respect what we lost’

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sunshine
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‘Splitting up was the best thing we ever did – it made us respect what we lost’

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September 16, 2022 7:00 am(Updated 10:34 am)
Suede: ‘Splitting up was the best thing we ever did – it made us respect what we lost’
Brett Anderson and Mat Osman talk finally owning their legacy as Britpop pioneers, squandering it all – and Suede’s resurrection as family-focused post-punks
By Shaun Curran
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East London’s Moth Club, a revamped working men’s club turned music venue, is fizzing with excitement. A few hundred people are packed in to see the live debut of Crushed Kid, a mysterious new band with just one song uploaded online and a shadowy, arty Instagram account to their name.
Or so it would seem. Inside, everyone is in on the secret: this is an intimate surprise concert by Britpop pioneers Suede.
“Hello, we’re Crushed Kid,” singer Brett Anderson smiles after the band hustle through the crowd to reach the stage. “Welcome to our first gig.”
They then unleash a furious 11-song set entirely comprising Suede’s ninth album Autofiction, a stripped-back reset record that reconfigures the alt-rockers into a noisy, taut, high-wire post-punk band, angular guitar riffs and driving bass lines powering Anderson’s midlife anxieties. It has been many years since Suede sounded so exhilarated.
The next morning, a relaxed Anderson is sitting in his west London flat, slightly concerned that his ears are still ringing. “It was so loud,” he says surprised, playing with his ears. He enjoyed the experience: the sticky carpet, the low ceiling, the heat, the racket. “It had the feel of 1992.”
Suede perform a secret gig, under the band name Crushed Kid, at Moth Club, London Credit: Paul Khera Provided by dave.palmer@dawbell.com
Suede perform a secret gig, under the band name Crushed Kid, at Moth Club (Photo: Paul Khera)
Back then, Suede actually were a new band – and a vital one at that. They emerged in London that year, via residential Sussex outpost Haywards Heath, in a flash of brilliant songs that tapped into an English underbelly of urban sleaze and squalid glamour, all council estates, bad drugs and depraved sex.
Armed with stomping anthems and the flamboyant, androgynous Anderson, they were called the best band in Britain by Melody Maker before they had even released a song; debut single “The Drowners” proved to be a Year Zero not just for Suede but for British rock.
“‘The Drowners’ was the first Britpop song,” Anderson states. “It changed a lot of things for a lot of people. And I think the first Suede album [1993’s Suede] was the first Britpop album.”
He seems to have made peace with an association to a scene he has previously described as toxic, laddish and nationalistic.
“I do have a complicated relationship with Britpop. But I guess I’m proud that we kick-started that whole movement. And if there’s anything good that came from Britpop, it was people singing about the world they saw around them, rather than some sort of American fantasy.”
“I’m really glad that we had the quite shallow experience of being a phenomenon,” bassist Mat Osman tells me later. “You’d have to be really joyless not to enjoy it when you’re 25 and on a private jet to a Swedish festival. Everyone should try it once.”
Thirty years on, Suede are reconnecting with that spirit of newness. “Crushed Kid isn’t just for these gigs,” Osman says. “It was a state of mind for the whole record.”
After 2018’s elaborate The Blue Hour, featuring monks, choirs, orchestras, spoken word and field recordings, Autofiction is back to basics, summoning the energy and attitude of Suede’s pre-breakthrough years.
“At times, you have to rip it up, burn it down and start again,” Anderson says. “I don’t want to become too predictable.”
Unlikely reboots have been a theme of Suede’s career. “Usually it’s because of some horrific disaster,” Osman says with a knowing smile. Indeed, 1996’s million-selling Coming Up, featuring signature hits “Trash” and “Beautiful Ones”, followed the bitter departure of original guitarist Bernard Butler during the making of grandiose second album Dog Man Star. And 2013’s Bloodsports was an exercise in reintroducing the band as a creative force a decade after they split to widespread apathy, a husk of their former selves. With Anderson in recovery from crack cocaine addiction, 2002’s weak misfire A New Morning sealed an insipid decline.
“When we coast, we produce shit work,” Anderson says. “I do regret the end of the 90s because we squandered our mainstream position through complacency. But splitting up was the best thing we ever did. It made us respectful of what we lost.”
Suede’s reunion – initially as a one-off gig at the Royal Albert Hall in 2010 – has been uncommonly successful. Their three post-reformation albums have been of high quality, while also shifting their artistic parameters – a tough tightrope to walk.
“It was clear when we reformed we weren’t the same band any more,” Osman says. “And that was good for us, because we weren’t chasing anything. I see bands now so desperate to be relevant, and be who they were at 25. It’s tragic.”
In need of something new to kick against, Anderson has turned on middle-aged contentment. He is nearly 55, and ­Autofiction is what he calls “punk through a Suede lens”, its hard musical edges matching the simmering discontent that he no longer feels young. “That’s because I’m not,” he says, laughing.
Songs such as “Shadow Self” and “Personality Disorder” reflect how, as a fifty-something man, he engages with his roles as parent, husband and artist. “It’s not me pretending to be 25 again, singing about council estates. That would be self-parody.
“We have a tendency to think that as people get older, they become more comfortable. And I don’t think that’s true. You just find neuroses in different places. And as you hurtle towards old age, there’s a fear there that I wanted to reflect.”
“When Brett first said he wanted to start writing about family, I can remember thinking: ‘Oh God…’” Osman says, rolling his eyes. “But it’s amazing the way that he hasn’t become sentimental as he’s grown older. That can be the death of older artists. He can’t see a silver lining without finding the cloud.”
Like his recent songs, Anderson’s conversation is full of high ideals, theories, self-examination. His commitment to the Suede universe is total: he has precious little interest in talking about anything else. “I don’t want to get infected with politics,” he tells me, visibly wincing when I bring up the subject.
But he will dissect his art at length. He quotes the American novelist Mary McCarthy when I ask about Autofiction’s title. “She said writing is like putting real plums into imaginary cakes. I think that’s brilliant. That’s what I’ve always done: used characters to explore real truths. All art is on the spectrum between truth and fantasy.”
“That Boy on the Stage” picks up a theme of his second, post-fame memoir Afternoons with the Blinds Drawn: the creation and dismantling of the “Brett from Suede” persona, cultivated during Suede’s imperial 90s phase.
“Your persona is established early on. There wasn’t a puppet-master telling me what to do, but there’s a feedback loop with the media that just subconsciously ignites it,” he says. “But as you get older, you move away from it. I don’t let the Brett from Suede character enter my home life.” And when it’s time to slip back into it on stage? “He is part of me, the Brett persona. He’s not alien. I don’t feel like an actor.”
Autofiction also contains real heart. Soaring single “15 Again” uses Anderson’s teenage relationship to convey unfettered optimism.
The album’s emotional centre, though, is “She Still Leads Me On”, a song reflecting how Anderson’s mother, who died in 1989 when he was just 21, provides a moral compass. “I didn’t arrive at that point for many years,” he says. “But after many decades of someone being dead, you have to gain something positive once your grief has faded. I wanted her life to mean something in a contemporary sense, for me, now. To give me an example and a guiding light.”
Suede open with it at Moth Club, where they sound brutish and thrilling. It really is like those early days again: backstage before they went on, the band were listening to 6Music when “15 Again” came on. “It was the first time the whole band was sitting somewhere and heard one of our records come on the radio since ‘The Drowners’,” Osman says. “And it’s still the same excitement. It’s ridiculous, I know. But the songs being out there and a part of people’s lives is still a magical thing.”
Autofiction is out now

https://inews.co.uk/culture/music/suede ... 1663329339
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