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issue 1 june 2004

why didn’t he move up earlier? “conditioning, i guess.” having finally overcome his inertia, anderson moved to london – after a two-week sojourn at manchester university – to study architecture at university college, in the mid-1980s. the next stage of reinvention was forming a group, which happened when anderson and osman (who had also moved to london) put an ad in the classified pages of the new musical express. they enlisted gilbert, a female singer who later left, and then butler, who was soon to become to anderson what keith richards is to mick jagger.

“it wasn’t like some film where one day i picked up a guitar,” says anderson. “in hindsight i suppose i knew what i was doing, but at the time it felt accidental. singing was even an accident when i started playing with the band. i thought i’d be a guitarist or something, i certainly never thought of myself as a singer. i just wanted to… be different.” and then they suddenly were. 

a man who looks more like wynona ryder than any self-respecting pop star has a right to, anderson is not as obsessed with his looks as one would imagine. “i’m pretty vain,” he says, “but people mistake that for being narcissistic. it’s more self-critical. i’m not violently confident about the way i look.”