They kicked the door open for Britpop. So how come we stopped listening to Suede? Krissi Murison catches up with her teenage heartthrobs and hears why due for a summer of Suede
I really don't want the 90s to happen again. I was promised a future and I demand what's rightfully mine." So NME's reviews editor punched angrily into her Facebook status update box recently. The catalyst for her frustration was the fact that she'd just been subjected to the new album by Britpop-aping rock conservatists Brother for the third time that afternoon. And while that was undoubtedly the tipping point, it's not hard to see why a proliferation of 90s nostalgia might be an increasing frustration for many of today's younger music fans.
Here, for instance, is a random selection of things I did between the ages of 14 and 16 in the mid-1990s: watch Pulp at a number of major UK festivals; eagerly await news of a new Blur album; follow up persistent rumours of a Stone Roses reunion; read headlines about Liam Gallagher's on-tour antics on a near daily basis.
This summer I will not only do all of these things again, but add these to the list: watch Upside Down, a feature-length film about Creation Records which comes out on DVD this week; see Primal Scream perform Screamadelica in its entirety at Glastonbury; and get seriously sentimental over Suede, who are not only reissuing all five of their albums, originally released between 1993 and 2002, but also headlining dates at the O2 arena and the Latitude festival.
So while the rational part of my brain emphatically agrees with my colleague that this obsession with trying to relive our teenage years is as culturally dangerous as it is futile, I'd also be lying if I didn't admit that when I was asked if I'd like to interview Suede, it was among the most exciting requests I'd ever had.
There was a time when Suede meant everything to me. And last year ? in spite of the fact they spent most of the Noughties being one of the most unfashionable bands you could be into ? I discovered I hadn't been alone. When they reformed to play the Royal Albert Hall in aid of Teenage Cancer Trust, it seemed as though everyone I knew was once again proud to stand up and call themselves a Suede fan, sharing stories of the profound effects the band had on their teenage psyches. Apparently it wasn't just me who'd been sat at home in 1995 doused in glitter and eyeliner watching Performance on repeat and painstakingly rendering monochrome portraits of singer Brett Anderson for my art GCSE coursework (A*, thank you very much for asking). Everyone was at it.
So why had we been quiet for so long? Despite sparking Britpop (their self-titled debut album of 1992 is widely seen as the genesis of the whole movement), and being hailed as the best new band in Britain by Melody Maker in their first cover feature, they were the one band we all left behind as soon as the 90s finished. Overnight it seemed we stopped listening to Suede, the music press stopped writing about Suede, no new bands ever name-checked Suede. It was almost as if we'd been collectively hypnotised into erasing them from history.
Then with last March's Albert Hall reunion, a generation's regressive therapy kicked in. Suddenly it was much easier to remember not just why Suede had become so nail-bitingly naff in the last days of Britpop, but also how sublime they had been at its start. On the negative side there was the two-dimensional synth-pop that increasingly dominated their sound after guitarist Bernard Butler quit in 1994, reportedly unable to keep up with Anderson's inflating ego and drug problems; the terrible promo videos, including one in which keyboardist Neil Codling subversively fed a mushroom to his pet goldfish; the crack cocaine and heroin addiction that subsumed Anderson in later years and presumably led him to write lines such as "She lives in a house/she's as stupid as a mouse" (from 1999's "Savoir Faire").
But on the positive side was the anthemic guitar-pop of Suede's first album and its towering, romantic follow-up Dog Man Star; the literary references to Byron and Wilde that doubled the size of our bedroom bookshelves overnight; the time they crashed the Brit Awards to perform "Animal Nitrate", a song about gay sex in council flats; and, of course, Anderson himself ? a scuzzy, louche glamourpuss with aristocratic cheekbones and a propensity to say things such as "I'm a bisexual man who's never had a homosexual experience" in interviews. And if us girls got Brett fever bad, then the boys had it worse. My boyfriend at the time was grounded for a month when he was caught sneaking out for the night in a sheer cut-off blouse and black mascara. A work colleague remembers how all the boys at his school started snogging each other at parties when Suede got big. Not since Bowie before him had anyone been as responsible for raising awkward questions between parents and their sons as Brett Anderson.
"Wow. What an effect! I think there'll be a whole legion of people currently describing these experiences to their psychiatrists and blaming me," laughs Anderson, now 43 and sipping ginger tea on the patio of his splendid Notting Hill house, cheekbones still intact.
"There was this weird thing because you suddenly saw this gang of people who were unconnected before we came along who got connected by the band. Like three or four in every school who suddenly had something to rally around," says Mat Osman, long-term Suede bassist and one of Brett's oldest friends. "I remember the second time we played in LA and my wife, who'd spent a lot of time there, walked into the gig and was like: 'Where are all these people from? I've been here a month and I've not seen one person who looked like this, and suddenly there's 3,000.'"
What did they look like?
"Slightly ill," replies Brett. "But that was one of the things I wanted to do with the band ? to create a world like lots of my favourite bands in the past, like the Pistols or the Smiths had created, a very strongly defined world. You could dress like them and watch the same films as they watched and read the same books and that's what I always wanted to do ? to kind of establish a lexicon, almost ? and that can obviously drift into self-parody at some point."
As a rehabilitated junkie and veteran of the rock circus, Anderson is an astutely self-aware man these days. I remember first meeting him less than five years ago for an MTV interview shortly after the Tears (the short-lived band he formed with original Suede guitarist Bernard Butler after Suede had split up) had undramatically petered out. Back then he was prickly and defensive, witheringly rebuffing any questions about Britpop or Suede's role in it. Now he is all radiance and light, squaring up to old demons and quietly crushing difficult questions with humour and honesty. Like this one: isn't a reunion tour the worst thing that Suede ? a band built on the rhetoric of eternal youth, beauty and self-destruction ? could do for their reputation?
"But luckily we have no reputation left to ruin. Our myth is so shit!" laughs Osman.
"I felt our myth was quite tattered when we decided to reform," continues Anderson. "We split up on a very low note, because the last album [A New Morning, 2002] was a bit of a fuck-up. I think that seriously damaged our legacy. A lot of us reforming was about setting the record straight."
It is strange seeing Anderson, someone who spent the 90s cultivating a persona of decadent intrigue, being so pleasantly forthright. Part of me prefers the sulky version I got a few years ago. I ask him if he knows about all the GCSE art projects he inspired.
"Yeah, I actually got given quite a few of them on tour."
"Oh God, we used to get that constantly," laughs Osman. "Surely people realised the last thing Brett wanted was a huge collection of badly drawn pictures of him?"
I stop reaching into my bag to locate the A2 portrait of him moodily smoking that I was about to give him. Instead I ask: "Did it ever get scary?"
"I had quite an uncomfortable episode where people came to my street and vandalised the whole street by writing my name and address and spraying death threats everywhere. Obsessed fans who tipped over to the side."
Of course there was always the worry Anderson wouldn't be able to inspire such obsession this time around. I tell him that before I went to see Suede play their second comeback gig at London's 100 Club last March, my friends and I went for dinner and seriously debated whether it might be best to skip home early and avoid the onstage car crash that was surely to follow.
Anderson: "What were you imagining? That we'd waddle onstage with Zimmer frames? Well, yes, I was actually 15st before last February?" Osman: "It's the only reason we did it. It's cheaper than joining a gym."
In fact, Suede 2010 was probably the best example of a reformed band I'd ever seen: chiselled, charged and unafraid to pile through the hits, even if the guitarist who had co-written the majority of them but quit in 2004 at the height of Suede's popularity had decided not to join the party. After forming McAlmont and Butler with singer David McAlmont straight after he left Suede, Butler has more recently reestablished himself as a record producer ? most famously behind the controls of Duffy's multi-platinum-selling debut Rockferry.
"I know where Bernard's head is at a bit more now, and I think the last thing he wants is to join a touring band," admits Anderson, explaining why the shows all feature Butler's replacement, Richard Oakes. "His life is how he wants it to be; he's producing bands. And I've heard him say in interviews a couple of times he doesn't believe in reunions."
There may well be a generation of young music fans who have reason to agree with him. Doesn't Brett think he'd feel cheated if he was a teenager now in a music scene dominated by dinosaur bands from the 90s?
"Because there's no one speaking for their own generation?" he asks. "Yeah, I probably would. But there doesn't seem to be that restless, urgent need to depose bands. In the 90s the whole cycle of the way pop music worked was about opposing the previous generation. Now dads our age and their kids like the same music. When I was younger the idea of liking the same music as your parents would have been unthinkable. I don't get that sense now, and hence that's possibly why the latest generation hasn't clearly defined a movement."
But what about the enduring appeal of Britpop specifically? Isn't it strange that it's going to dominate the summer, even though the internet has given us all more access to new music?
"The only thing I can say about it is Britpop, whether you like it or not, and generally I don't like it, was a coherent movement and I don't think there's been a coherent defined movement for quite a while now," says Anderson.
Osman adds: "Suede existed in that time when bands were the gateway drug to everything when you were growing up. The radio didn't play anything like that, so you discovered culture through bands. Perhaps Britpop is one of the last movements when you relied on bands for that. And now you can get all that stuff. Perhaps you don't need that filter any more, perhaps you don't need to be in that gang."
Or perhaps that gang mentality is exactly what we're looking for in all of this nostalgia. Today we might be able to listen to more music than ever before, but does it still mean as much as it used to? I loved Suede not just for the songs, but also because of the sense of identity being their fan gave me. Anderson's right: I did live by his lexicon ? I dressed like him, read the same books as him and destroyed countless tables scratching his lyrics into them. Tribes are alluring things, and it's no coincidence the only artist in the world actively inspiring that kind of blind devotion today is also its biggest. Lady Gaga knows the seduction of a club better than anyone and has set about turning her Little Monsters into a sprawling gang of connected global misfits ? they might all be outcasts, but I bet they've got more Facebook friends than I have.
"I always thought of our band as the nation of Suede, like a country without a flag," says Anderson. "We give community to people who find it hard to fit in other places."
We might not be wearing quite as much eyeliner this time around, but the old gang will definitely be out in force to see Suede this summer. I might even start painting again now my muse is back.
Suede release re-mastered, expanded versions of their five studio albums, one per week starting with debut Suede on 30 May, on Demon Records. They play three nights at the Brixton Academy from 19 May
Source: http://www.guardian.co.uk/music/2011/may/15/suede-90s-britpop-music
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