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blast from the past
reprinted here in its entirety for your pleasure is an oldie but a goodie.

easily suede
report by dylan jones
photographs by david bailey
they have been called the future of rock’n’roll, the latest manifestation of the british teen dream. but can suede live up to the hype? and can their lead singer, the androgynous brett anderson, come to terms with his sexuality?

as brett anderson shows me into his tiny ramshackle west london flat, the strains of acker bilk waft up from his record player. “do you know anything about vera lynn?” he says, stepping over a pile of decidedly shabby coats. “i tried to buy her version of the white cliffs of dover today, but i came back with this instead.” he nods his fringe at the stereo as stranger on the shore fades into nothing. perhaps anderson has discovered irony; one doesn’t expect the lead singer of suede to have such peculiar weaknesses. but then maybe one does. “i like anything,” he says, rather petulantly. “pop music has become all about cool, about kids wearing sunglasses. we were never like that, suede were never cool.”

it is a cold, rainy february night, a monday, just a little after seven, bedsitland. these three small rooms are where anderson, 26, has lived for the past two years, during which time he has unwittingly – some would undeservedly – become the most idolized pop star in britain. he has recently acquired a larger home in north london, but for reasons of convenience we are sitting here in notting hill, crouched on ricketly chairs, drinking instant coffee from cocktail glasses and trying to ignore the intermittent comings and goings of his neighbours. tonight, like many before it, anderson is surrounded by paper-thin walls.

without so much as a backward glance, suede have earned themselves a place in the pantheon of great british pop groups. and, like all good things before them, they seemed to come out of nowhere. two and a half years ago they were just another low-rent-glam-rock group looking for a place to play, just another bunch of naïve hopefuls named after a fabric (felt, corduroy, denim, etc.). then, almost overnight, after a few good live reviews and the releases of their first single – a shrill declaration of independence called the “the drowners” – that music press descended upon them like a pack of rapacious bloodhounds. in just six months suede – purveyors of modern glam-rock – got the covers of the melody maker, nme, q, select and almost every other music magazine n britain. there were 20 covers in all. although the press were more than keen, with hindsight it was deemed to be a highly orchestrated campaign by the group’s publicist, john best. so successful was best’s assault thought to be that last year he won the music week award for press campaign of 1993. the judges said it “took suede from obscurity to being hailed as the best band of the year”. given their enthusiasm it is likely that the music press would have written about the band anyway.

these four skinny white boys were called the last great british pop group, the saviours of rock, the finest british pop group since the smiths… four louche young men who have, according to one particularly smitten rock journalist, “single-handedly revitalized our faith in sexy, provocative english guitar pop”. they has so much coverage that one began to suspect that very little else was happening in the british music scene. this was not altogether true. even considering the tyranny of youth, these days pop phenomena are few and far between, and suede arrived at a time when the other icons of modern cutting-edge pop – morrissey, the stone roses, primal scream, etc, - were absent from the scene.

according to sheryl garratt, editor of the face, “they came at a time when the music press were desperate for something to write about, so they smothered them with praise. the problem for me is that i’ve seen it all before. but then suede are not aimed at me. they’re aimed at 19- and 20-year olds, who haven’t. brett’s feyness was certainly appealing to those who’d never experienced david bowie.”

suede’s music is certainly distinctive, if a little derivative. brittle, overwrought guitar pop, it demands attention. as does anderson – unquestionably the group’s leader – who employs the same strident mockney tones used in the past by the likes of anthony newley, bowie and cockney rebel’s steve harley. the sound of suede is the sound of bedroom doors being slammed, and all the youthful market-town angst that goes with it. this is rock which is intended to mean more than life itself, to teenagers, anyway – music to get you through adolescence, however arch and mannered it might be (typical song titles: so young, breakdown, sleeping pills, the next life etc). trying to find something which sounds uncontrived or unaffected in suede’s songs is like trying to find an afro-american in a woody allen film. yet the fact that they sound insincere does not necessarily mean they are.

“it’ll sound pretentious if i try and describe it,” says anderson, “but suede for me is something very young and beautiful and vital. almost sort of silver. that’s the colour i always think of, silver, something very shiny. our music is the kind of music that should be listened to by one person in front of their stereo. it’s not a gang thing at all.

“there’s no arrogance with us, or even confidence, really. it just stems from an absolute love of music, and visions about how wonderful music can be. things just jump into my brain sometimes, which have a lot to do with sexuality and violence. i don’t know, i just get a vision every now and then. i’m not talking about william blake or anything like that. it’s only me.” aha.

anderson was even more melodramatic towards the beginning of the band’s career, and quotes like these endeared them to their rapidly increasingly army of fans.

flailing about in a hyperbolic fug, suede were the talk of the town. two more singles followed – metal mickey, animal nitrate – as did their fist album, called, simply enough, suede. months before its release it was hailed as the most eagerly awaited album since the sex pistols’ never mind the bollocks back in 1977. when the record finally appeared last spring it went straight to number one. since then there has been the mercury music prize (lp of the year), a live video and a somewhat unsuccessful tour of north america (where they were overshadowed by their support band, the cranberries, a group without the camp excesses of suede), along with preparatory work for the second album. their current single, the bombastic stay together, is an eight-minute epic; their first for a year, it has pushed the band back into the spotlight. suede are in a precarious orbit right now, and if the gods – or at least their fans – favour them, this year they could be confirmed as the most important group in britain.

but this begs the question: are they worth it?

“i think all the praise has been completely justified,” says anderson, sipping coffee, frowning. “it’s true, we’re underrated. we’re totally important. that might sound like loudmouth popstar talk, but people don’t know how good we are. we write truly great songs and have a depth that most people haven’t grasped yet. the weird thing is we’ve become a point of reference, which is difficult to grasp. but i still don’t think we’re appreciated as much as we deserve to be. everyone talks about hype, but if it had all been hype we would have been squashed a year ago. we got press on the back of the fact that we are a bloody good band. yeah, we’ve got good press officers, but they’ve got us.” aha.

steve sutherland, editor of the new musical express, is unequivocal in his support: “the band are totally underrated, and most of their press over the last nine months has been sniping and carping, a typically british sensibility. i’m not an apologist for them by any means, they just happen to make great records, and their new single is the best thing they’ve ever done. you don’t have to have cultural importance to make great music, but suede have it anyway. i can’t say whether or not they’ll be looked upon in years to come as a seminal band, as the music scene is more fragmented now than it’s ever been. but at the moment they are the best we’ve got.”

robert sandal, the sunday times music critic, has rather more reservations: “they are the most hyped band in the history of british rock, but that’s not really their fault. they’re good, but i don’t think it’s possible for them to become as important as they want to be. there’s a humourlessness about them that’s quite disturbing, as they seem to be devoid of irony. as a histrionic rock band, however, they’re great, if a little nostalgic.”

almost by accident anderson has become a spokesman for his generation (23-year-old bernard butler who, along with anderson writes all the band’s material, is the harpo marx of the group, refusing all requests for interviews). cheeky, garrulous, and belligerently uncynical, he has become an anti-establishment icon for disaffected youth. he is disarmingly attractive, studiedly introverted, and pointedly anti-consumerist. most pop stars during the 1980s aspired to designer lifestyles, fast cars, supermodels (the trophy wives of our times), holidays in monserrat and pop-cultural world domination. anderson aspires to nothing less than personal epiphany.

while it is a rare thing to be able to gauge someone’s true personality after only a few hours of their company, anderson does at least display the requisite celebrity persona. in order for people to want you, buy your records, chase you across crowded railway stations and throw flowers at you on stage, you must have charm and magnetism. so far he appears to have both in spades. in the flesh he is far a more masculine than he looks on stage or in pictures, yet the accoutrements are all there: black crew-neck sweater, black flared jeans, black socks, black clumpy shoes. black! the colour of angst. he sports two earrings (one very large, one tiny) and a blonde streak crawls from his trademark curtain of lank hair. he might sometimes talk like a stroppy undergraduate – hasty, tart, optimistic – but he looks like the consummate neurotic boy outsider, an impression exacerbated by the asthma inhaler on which he sucks repeatedly throughout our interview.

the four members of suede are true suburbanites: while bernard butler comes from leyton in east london, and 28-year-old drummer simon gilbert from stratford-upon-avon, brett anderson and 26-year-old bassist mat osman grew up in haywards heath, a drab dormitory town 40 miles south of london, five train stops from brighton. it is almost generic in its dreariness, the most intoxicating thing about the place being the backlit perspex shop signs along the high street. the son of a taxi driver (confounding stereotype, one who listens devoutly to liszt, mahler and berlioz), and an artist who painted right up until her death in 1989, anderson grew up on the end of a short terrace of council houses, next to a disused rubbish tip which has slowly turned into a small wood. it was an atypical existence: tchaikovsky and berlioz were rarely off the sitting-room turntable, there were aubrey beardsley prints on the hall wall. “i had classical music force-fed me as a kid and i absolutely hated it. [his father wanted him to train as a classical pianist.] i was saved by dirty loud music,” he says now. it was in this little house, up in his room listening to kate bush and the sex pistols, his walls covered with pin-up posters of bowie and morrissey, that anderson first began defining himself, that he first started to believe that he could have an effect on things beyond his flimsy bedroom walls.

“it seems like a doll’s house, thinking back,” he says, “the ceilings were so low. it was quite sweet. it wasn’t in a desolate wasteland full of junkies or anything. i go back quite a bit now and spend more time there than i have for years. for a while i just couldn’t go back, because i’d only recently escaped. i don’t really have friends there, i only really see the people who came with me. i hate to think of friendship as a memory, you know – you remember being friends with people but you don’t actually enjoy their company. do you know what i mean?”

his sister blandine was always a friend. she was named after liszt’s daughter (“my father is complete obsessed with liszt,” says anderson). four years older than her brother, she is inordinately proud of him. a ceramic artist (“you couldn’t really call her a potter, as she doesn’t make pots”), she too has escaped, and now lives in devon.

“it was a tiny life,” anderson says. “hanging around 7-11s, you know, rural aimless youth. there was nowhere to go, absolutely nowhere. there was a lot of sitting around in parks, alienating yourself, deliberately. there was one place, a playground, where we used to go and take drugs. it was full of grannies and their grandchildren, and we used to go there and just kind of revel in the fact there we were so out of place. that was the interesting side of it. there is just nothing to do in those kinds of places.

as a boy anderson often dreamed of leaving. “i used to love the smell of trains, loved the fact they would take me to london or brighton. i was obsessed with them, train stations were a very important part of my youth. london still holds a lot of fascination for me, and i’ve still got very strong romantic notions about it. i just love it; there are so many possibilities here. i’ve lived here for a long time now and i still get really excited walking down the street. everything is here.

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.”

due to the modern appetite for seeing those blessed with talent cursed with torment, much has been made of anderson’s sexuality, though this has largely been the fault of the singer himself. his demeanor, his lyrics, even the way he smacks his backside with his microphone when singing, swanning about in his hipster trousers and a tight black leather jacket, exposing his milky white chest – they all point to a sexuality that is not quite heterosexual. but there have always been male pop stars whose appeal rests in part on their mulish asexuality. the sex pistols; john lydon was one, as was the walkers' scott engel, joy division’s ian curtis, and, of course, morrissey. his sexuality is something about which anderson has been deliberately oblique in interviews. in a famous quote he claimed: “i see myself as a bisexual man who’s never had a homosexual experience.” he has – like morrissey before him – tended to flaunt his asexuality, leading critics to assume that this is nothing but a pose, and that underneath it all anderson is just another boring hetero.

even the comedians newman and baddiel felt compelled to comment. their recent shows at wembley included a suede spoof, with baddiel (the short, plump one) cavorting about on stage in an obscenely funny parody of anderson. “rock stars are always trying so hard to be sexually ambiguous,” baddiel said by way of introduction. “but one of them is just trying too hard.” the song commences: “hello sailor, whoops, cheeky, isn’t that what they say?”

“i don’t regret the bisexual quote,” says anderson. “it certainly got us noticed. i was interviewed so much last year that i started to make things up. then when you start lying you get into trouble, talking a lot of crap which people take seriously. i did get slated for that remark, though. i was trying to describe the way i write songs. it was a spiritual idea about not writing too specifically, about not everything being a page from your diary. it was about writing through other people. i could write about a downtrodden housewife on valium, but i don’t have to be one to do it. i can imagine what it’s like, and i know people who are like that. not everything is written in the first person.”

there again, everyone in the entertainment business has a certain amount of the ventriloquist about them. anderson has been adamant about this in the past: “my songs tend to come from my experiences and the experiences of people who are close to me. the songs that specifically revolve around the gay world, like animal nitrate, are written because i’m involved in it through my friends – about 50% of whom are gay: they are love songs for their feelings. when people say i’m just using gay imagery it depresses me, because my friends go through emotional turmoil. i’ve felt that on their behalf, and written songs for them. the idea of gay love songs being tender seems alien to most people. i want to redress that.”

ironically the only openly gay member of the group is the drummer simon. “the whole discussion of my sexuality got way out of control,” says anderson today. “in britain it’s not so bad, but in america we were labeled as the gay glam rockers, that gay band suede. but i don’t care, that’s how i am. i’m quite effeminate, and i do want to portray a certain amount of feminine grace. maybe that comes across as camp, but i con’t want to be seen as someone like kenneth williams. i probably took it too far by wearing a blouse. but that’s just the way i am, there will always be a part of me which has a sense of femininity.”

this kind of talk is a pop star’s prerogative. as the legendary pop producer phil spector once said: “i’m dealing in rock’n’roll. i’m, like, i’m not a bona fide human being.”

suede could obviously become victims of their own success and, as others are continually pointing out, need to save themselves from death by explanation. but behind all the pink smoke lies a band with real talent.

andrew harrison, editor of the hip music magazine select, says: “of course suede are still relevant, and i’m very much looking forward to their new album. the problem initially was that they were loaded with so many expectations that they couldn’t possibly please everyone. they’ve become so big because there are so few pop stars around at the moment. they’ve benefited from that, but at the end of the day they live or die by their records. and their records are very, very good.”

anderson remains unfazed, as a fitting dénouement for suede seems a way off yet. “the character that press are moulding from the little piece of plasticine you threw them is so distorted that you really don’t feel that it’s you anyway,” he says, “so it doesn’t matter, it really doesn’t matter at all. i don’t like being fitted into this lineage thing – being compared to bowie and morrissey – because in a way it almost predicts your final resting place. the beatles were pioneers, but everyone who came after – even suede – we’ve all been fingered. it’s all too post-modern. you’ve got to jolt yourself out of your inheritance. but i don’t honestly find it a pressure, all this stuff. i’m quite comfortable with it. rock’n’roll is no big deal. i haven’t seen the horror yet.

“i’m much happier than i was 18 months ago. my ambitions have completely exploded, you know. i used to aspire to something quite bohemian, some kind of microscopic englishness, but now i have no desire to entertain any of those things at all. it’s got al lot to do with flying around the world. i’ve never traveled before, and experiencing all those different cultures has changed me completely. one of the most beautiful things about success is that it makes you really generous. when you haven’t got success it makes you want to defend your own little personality, create your own little thing. i think my ambitions are a lot healthier, more optimistic. i’m not feeling so tortured now. i’m definitely waiting for something…”

and still looking, one presumes, for vera lynn.

dylan jones, “easily suede,” the sunday times, the magazine (march 6, 1994): 30-36. photographs by david bailey.