Brett Anderson, 50, is the lead singer of Suede. He formed the band with Mat Osman and Justine Frischmann in 1989, and they were joined soon after by guitarist Bernard Butler. They had their first hit in 1993 with Animal Nitrate. The band’s sound – sleazy, sweeping, darkly romantic – was immensely influential, along with Anderson’s outsider lyrics, and was credited with starting Britpop, though Anderson always distanced himself from it. The band went on to make five albums, three of them reaching No 1, before splitting in 2003. Anderson continued to write and perform, sometimes with others (Butler, Stina Nordenstam), sometimes solo. Suede reformed in 2010 and have since made two successful albums. He is married with a son and stepson.
Why write this book?
I wrote it for my little boy, that was the main motivation. But I really did love doing it. I couldn’t stop writing it, I was a very bad husband for six months, always crouched over my laptop. I love making records, but it’s incredibly fucking hard and it gets harder as you get older. The synapses don’t fire in the same way. When I was in my 20s, songs would just pour out of me. And now it’s like being constipated.
You stop Coal Black Mornings in 1992, just as Suede is beginning to get some success. Why?
Tone, really. I think the book is about failure, that sense of struggle, and as soon as you drift into the success years, you lose that. And I wanted it to be about my relationship with my dad, a familial story. I’ve got real ownership over that. From 1992 onwards the story isn’t really mine.
Let’s talk about your dad. He was an unusual man…
He was an infuriating mixture of vulnerability and arrogance. Which is the definition of most people in bands. But he was a taxi driver with an infuriating mixture of vulnerability and arrogance. He was incredibly cultured, he was just born into the wrong class and the wrong age. He should have been an art historian living in Hampstead. If you’d seen where we lived! It was just hilarious, this tiny little council house with a grey, tiled fireplace, and this big naval, Napoleonic sword above it, and pictures of George V and velvet-framed pictures of Horatio Nelson…
Like a stately home…
Exactly! That’s what it was, a stately home. The walls were midnight blue, and there was a brass rubbing of Sir John d’Abernon [a medieval knight] on the wall. And next door, the teenagers were playing Status Quo at full volume.
Now you’re a parent yourself, which bits are you interested in retaining from your own upbringing?
I think about that a lot. The culture that we were exposed to, that was wonderful: the art and music. But my father was an intense person. He never laid a finger on me, but he was still a brooding, terrifying person. If he was angry, you could feel it in the air in the whole house, you had to tiptoe around him. I try not to project that on to my little boy. If I’ve got shit going on I’ll take it somewhere else.
You talk in the book about the image that you had when Suede came along. People thought you were fey or slightly gay at the time, but you define it as a search for lost femininity.
When I look back on what I was doing with androgyny, that’s the only way I can rationalise it, because I genuinely wasn’t trying to do some sort of titillating, 1970s homage thing. It felt like a search for something I felt was lacking in my life. My mum had died [when he was 21] and Justine had left, it was a very strange time.
Are you defined by your 20s?
One’s 20s often end up defining you, because you’ve got all the energy of childhood and adolescence, but you haven’t still found your place. And you’re skint. There are wonderful things about being 50 years old: I’m glad that I’m never, ever going to have to stand in the queue for a club again. But that sense of adventure, when you go somewhere and you don’t know where you’re going to stay that night. It’s beautiful, that.
What kind of band did you think Suede were?
We always wanted to be a band that inspired loyalty. And we were always outsiders. Because I didn’t ever feel like my family fitted in. We were incredibly poor and we lived on a council estate, but mum was an artist, my dad was into classical music, we had a piano in the kitchen. I didn’t fit in with the people on the estate, and I went to a comprehensive, and I didn’t fit in there, so I didn’t ever have a tribe. I was always looking to manufacture my own tribe, really.
We should talk about Justine Frischmann. You nail her charisma very clearly in the book...
One of my favourite things about Justine is the fact that she’s so interested in everyone. She’s not aloof in any way. It would be easy for her to be, given what she has and who she is. But when she’s talking to someone, she really cares about what their answer is. She’s fascinated and fascinating. I love that combination. And yes, I’m still very, very fond of her.
She leaves you, and that’s devastating. But then she leaves the band, and that’s liberating.
In lots of ways, it was a brilliant thing. Without it, I might be sort of working in some planning office in Darlington. But I was very happy, living with Justine. We had a fantastic time together, and young love is amazing. But it’s not conducive to creating interesting, tormented, passionate music, you know? I needed some sort of motor to get myself off my arse and have something to write about. The time between us splitting up and her leaving the band was a really odd, sticky, strange thing. Because she was asking lots of questions about the band, and there was a kind of disunity because of that. She wanted Suede to be a different kind of band. And as soon as she left, it suddenly just… it’s like magnets. It wasn’t the missing piece, it was the removal of the piece. Suddenly we just linked, and all four of us, it became a little bit telepathic.
It still took Suede some time to take off...
That’s because we were terrible. I mean, we were such bad musicians – apart from Bernard [Butler], who was brilliant. We weren’t even able to emulate the hit bands at the time. We couldn’t even sound like, you know, My Jealous God. Or Northern Uproar. And we were so bad, the only style that we could adopt was this funny thing that became us. So even when we were getting good, and we had songs like The Drowners and To the Birds, the A&R men ignored us, because we were out of step. Our songs were completely against the grain. So finally, when people did start paying attention, we’d been ignored so much that we’d had quite a lot of practice. We were the longest overnight sensation ever.
Did you enjoy doing interviews?
Actually, pretty much every foreign phoner we did between 1993 and 1999 was Mat pretending to be me. We used to call him Bratt. “Bratt has got a phoner with… ” He got me in trouble a couple of times. Slagging off the Barenaked Ladies because he was bored. We turned up in Canada and the Barenaked Ladies were going to come to the show and lynch me. I’m like, “Thanks, Mat.”
Do the meanings of your old songs change for you as you get older?
There’s no absolute meaning to songs. There’s no absolute meaning to art. It’s like the way that you can re-read a book. I have a few books – Birdsong, Nineteen Eighty-Four, Atonement, The Collector and a couple of others – that I re-read every couple of years. I know every word of each of these books, but they always feel different to me, because you’re seeing them through a new phase of your life.
Where do you live?
Between London and Somerset. My family, we live in Somerset. And then I have a flat in London that I use to work. I live in the country most of the time. We’ve got a large garden. But I don’t think I’ve ever really cut a flower or anything like that. I’m more like a general in the garden, pointing at things. “That needs to be done, over there.”
I can’t imagine you in the country…
It’s quite boring in the winter, but that means I get to write… I need to create some sort of virtual reality for myself. It’s either writing or getting addicted to Call of Duty. I’ve got a dark blue writing room, exactly the sort of room that my dad would have loved. And I’ve got lots of his things there, pictures of George V and his ceremonial sword, but all in this nice big room with a fireplace that looks out on to a nice garden. My stepson is starting to play the drums and we do a good version of Anarchy in the UK.
