The Britpop revival is in full swing, with Pulp and Blur reforming amidst much hype and finding that they’re playing to bigger crowds than ever, as well as a whole new audience of teens and 20-somethings who were too young to appreciate them the first time around. Perhaps one of the first bands to experience the dizzying heights of the Britpop phenomenon were Suede.
Featured as cover stars on the now defunct music rag Melody Maker in 1992 under the headline “Suede: The Best New Band in Britain” before they’d even released a single, the band were one of the few bands that lived up to the hype. However, by 2003 the band had run out of steam and broke up with more of a whimper than a bang. Jim Murray caught up with front man Brett Anderson to compare haircuts and discuss the band’s new ‘Best of’ record.
It’s an obvious question to ask ‘Why a ‘best of’ now?’ Considering he’s probably been asked the question a million times in interviews in the previous days, luckily Tone Deaf gets off lightly. Anderson chuckles “Well luckily for you, you’re actually the first person I’ve spoken to today otherwise I might have reached down the phone and slapped you. It felt like the right time. We’ve put on a lot of shows up here… But I s’pose it was just to reactivate the legacy of the band really, isn’t it? I think a lot of people have probably forgotten the good work we’ve done over the years and we just want to remind them of the records.
A quick perusal of the track listing of the two CD set not only demonstrates the depth of the band’s back catalogue, but also shows an understanding of the band’s high points – the track listing wasn’t randomly drawn up by a record company staffer. As Anderson explains, it was selected by the band. “Yeah it was definitely sort of band led. I mean that was kind of the whole point of this compilation… the 2 CDs. The first CD we picked, and then the second CD is kind of fan favourites in a way… the fans’ favourites and the band’s favourites… a bit more obscure songs and lots of B-sides… a bit off track if you only know one side of Suede, I wouldn’t know. Some of my favourite songs that I’ve ever written are in that collection. ‘The Asphalt World’, those kind of things… more obscure things. And that’s the side of Suede that I’d kind of urge people to listen to. The brash single side is kind of an entry point, but it’s always been about the kind of darker more melancholic sort of side of the band.”
Suede, like The Smiths (whose drummer Mike Joyce briefly considered joining the nascent Suede), were highly regarded as a singles band, with the B-Sides of similar, if not equal quality to the A-sides. Indeed, one of Suede’s most popular releases was a compilation of B-Sides, entitled Sci-Fi Lullabies, released in 1997, which was a firm fan favourite.
Did the fan reaction to that compilation influence the new Best Of? Anderson is unsure. “Well I’m not sure about the reaction to that… I mean Sci-Fi Lullabies is… ironically it’s not my favourite Suede album… it’s definitely up there with one of my favourites but well it’s not really so much an album as a collection of stuff. But it’s very beautiful, you know… very proud of it… of that collection of songs. But yeah, I ‘spose B-sides are very important in the whole thing about Suede. It’s a nice kind of concept. Nowadays the concept of B-sides is very redundant… there’s no such thing. So a whole lot of new listeners will be slightly confused about why we’ve got all these kind of songs that aren’t actually on the album… it must be a very strange concept to them… that there used to be these things called B-sides back in the day… and for some reason that kind of mattered to us… it mattered to us that when we released a single that is wasn’t just… you know we cared about what people thought about the other side of it… it was a very complete attitude we had… so we made sure the B-side was as amazing as the A-side if not better sometimes. Looking back on it it’s quite wasteful because there’s lots of songs that end up as B-sides that I would have loved to have been on the album like My Insatiable One, The Big Time and This Time… the list just goes on and on. But we didn’t, and that’s just the way it goes… for better or for worse, that’s just what happens… you can’t beat yourself up over it.”
It’s not exactly a mistake to put such good songs on singles as B-sides though, is it? Anderson reflects “ Well it isn’t, is it? It’s probably a bad business mistake, but I certainly don’t think it’s a bad like you know… I think it’s got some artistic validity, and I like the sense that it… because of that it means to a lot of people that the band is very special, because of the hidden side to them … and that’s kind of what gives the band that kind of cult, obsessive following or something.”
The bulk of the ‘Best Of’ compilation is sourced from the band’s first three albums, which shall we say time has been most kind to – if anything they still stand up as some of the most vital releases of the 1990s. Anderson agrees with this diagnosis. “Well I think that the first three albums are to be honest the best three albums. When we were choosing the tracks I wasn’t thinking “Oh that’s from that album, that’s from that album”, we were just choosing the tracks we thought we the best. I’m kind of really proud of Head Music. It’s a strange album… it’s kind of underrated. There’s actually a lot of great songs on it. But what we were doing there is we were trying to… we were sort of searching for another style and because of that sometimes we kind of dished them out like… how we arranged some of the songs. And possibly they were overthought in terms of arrangement. But you know, what can I say… the first three albums… they’re very good albums. The body is… the best material comes from those albums.”
The collection includes the non album single ‘Stay Together’, which many fans consider to be the band’s high point, although in the past, unsually, Anderson is on record as disowning it – perhaps in part because it was released around the time of guitarist and founding member Bernard Butler leaving the band in an acrimonious fashion. Has time been a bit kinder to it in his view? “I’m not a huge fan of anything about it really. It’s weird… I don’t actually know what we liked about it… it’s an odd song. I mean it’s certainly the worst video that anyone’s ever made… and there’s obviously a lot of competition in that department. But I don’t know, it’s one of those songs you know? It’s gotta be some song that you wrote… you know, not every song you make you like. But you know, it’s okay. I don’t hate it… But I just think there’s a lot of better Suede songs.”
Reflecting on the band’s eponymous debut Anderson says that rather than the band trying to compress their whole musical outpourings to date in one album it was actually conceived as a standalone work of art. Anderson reveals “It’s got to be true, you know… But the advantage you have with the second album is that you have experience in making albums that you don’t have with making the first album. I never had a problem with writing… writing the second album for me was kind if in a way was kind of even more than writing the first album – you kind of know how to do it by then. Me and Bernard were working incredibly well together at that point artistically. We had a kind of very strong vision for the second album. But there was never any sense of like “Oh, we’ve run out of ideas,” it was quite the opposite actually. We had so many ideas that we were so sort of flowing with a kind of energy. That’s why we kind of ended up deciding that all these good songs should be B-sides. There was no kind of fear that it was going to dry up, and it didn’t, really. Even after we had made the two albums, it didn’t dry up. He left the band, but even when he’d left we were still writing really well together. It was kind of like about… we didn’t split up because we’d run out of ideas at all.”
After a gap of almost 20 years since their first release, it’s perhaps the gothic grandeur of their second album Dog Man Star, which still has the most impact, even though the critical reaction to it at the time of its release on the wake of Butler’s departure wasn’t unanimously positive. Would he see Dog Man Star as his strongest album in retrospect? “I don’t know. I mean it’s a very good album. I’m not sure the word strongest really describes it. But it’s probably the best… the most complete kind of realised vision of what an album can be. The first one… the debut album is very strong in a very different way. The singles are very strong, but as an album it holds together less coherently than Dog Man Star. Dog Man Star was a very strong concept of a journey and it introduced the band in the first song, takes you through some sort of journey… sort of story about isolation and that sort of thing… isolation being the main thing… and ending with ‘Still Life’.). So it’s a very kind of conscious journey through a sort of ravaged psyche.
Dog Man Star was written by Anderson living in a gloomy gothic mansion in Highgate in North London, a feeling which pervades the album. Was living in that house as big an influence on the album as it’s made out to be? Anderson agrees. “I think so, yeah. It was quite a crazy place, you know, living quite an unusually lifestyle. So yeah I think it was. North London is very different from West London. The feel of living in North London… and I think really here in Dog Man Star, that it was made in North London… it’s got something about it. A dank kind of ivy covered sort of sepulchral sort of sense that Dog Man Star has which the first album doesn’t have.” Rumours have been floating around for years that there is a very different version of the album around, which was mixed to Bernard Butler’s satisfaction, which fans are desperate to get their hands on. Anderson is quick to dismiss the suggestion. “No, that doesn’t exist. That’s one of those rumours. I mean you know, it’s something we’d maybe do in the future, but it doesn’t exist yet.”
However, with all the Suede back catalogue set to be re-released, Anderson reveals that all the band’s albums and singles have been remastered and tweaked in the studio. “Well yeah, there was a lot of work went into remastering. Early nineties mastering techniques were very different to how they are now. When you hear songs that were made in the early nineties and the eighties and stuff like that, they were songs that were kind of like mastered… but just in terms of volume… simple volume compression… it was done very differently. You need to compete with modern music a bit. Especially with the first album… it’s quite thin sounding I think and we kind of were quite keen to give it bit more body. A lot of the stuff we did was with the first album, so yeah.”
The striking cover art for the compilation is a portrait by New York artist Elizabeth Peyton, who made a name for herself in the fine art world by producing luscious watercolour portrait of ‘pretty boys’, particularly favouring Britpop stars such as Liam Gallagher, Jarvis Cocker and of course Anderson. Was there any particular reason the band chose an Elizabeth Peyton painting for the cover?
If the reason was because Anderson was flattered by her painting his portrait in the 1990s, he’s not letting on. “I sort of wanted an illustration really… I don’t really know why… I was just trawling through pictures and I quite like her work… there’s something quite spontaneous about it. I quite like the sense of it… it’s quite powerful in that it works in quite a small way and I think you have to really think about artwork these days. Years ago you had 12 inches of space to command people’s attention and you have to kind of like think in terms of thumbnails and things like that now, like think that it’s going to look like on itunes music store. It’s a very very very different kind of approach I think. I like the simplistic kind of image – it seems quite powerful, even when it’s quite small. Her work’s quite interesting.”
Suede’s relationship with its fans has been a very close and loyal one over the years, and the band has many times gone out of its way to do things to reward fans for their loyalty, such as playing fanclub only shows and issuing fan club only releases. Is there anything else that Suede has done which has encouraged this incredible loyalty in fans?
Anderson attributes it to a number of factors. “Ultimately it’s kind of about sort of… well I guess if the songs we wrote weren’t very good and we didn’t perform them very well, then they wouldn’t really care about it, would they? That’s the ultimate thing. But on top of that… behind that I think we’ve always sort of involved our fans… obviously it’s a strange relationship with bands and fans but we always try and be creative. Back in the nineties we used to meet the fans at club gigs and there was a sense that there was a real sort of community with the fans… that fans of the band could be part of something. I ‘spose there was a bit of a gand mentality. I wanted to create a bit of a kind of world that I wanted people to be part of… members of a sort of army of obsessed… waifs… wandering around the world.”
Unfortunately Suede have no plans to tour further – at least not Down Under, although Anderson himself is embarking on a solo tour in the UK later this year. “There aren’t any plans for that, no. The last show we have is headlining a festival in Germany in September. After that last show that’s it for a while, I mean I have a solo record coming out at the end of the year, and I honestly don’t know what’s happening after that last show. “I’m doing some shows in England in October, and that will probably grow, you know, I’ll definitely be touring that.
Alas Australia is simply not on the horizon for the band. “Well I don’t have any plans to come to Australia, so there’s not much chance. We don’t have the right offer… we don’t have any problems per se with playing Australia, it’s kind of like an expensive place to tour because it’s such a long way away. Touring is about economics – lots of fans don’t realise that. It’s a very hardnosed business decision to tour somewhere, because you’re going to make money out of touring there – it’s as simple as that. Anyone that tells you differently, don’t believe them.”
Suede – The Best Of is out now on Warner Music Australia
