Happy 30th Anniversary to Suede’s debut album Suede, originally released March 29, 1993.
Every couple of years, Peter Anderson, father of two, would drive his decrepit Morris Traveller all the way from his home in West Sussex, England, to the town of Raiding in Austria. Formerly part of Hungary until World War I, Raiding was the birthplace of Peter’s hero, Hungarian composer Franz Liszt. On every pilgrimage to the town, Peter would extract a small clump of soil to wear in a vial around his neck. Such was his intense love for the maestro.
Had he lived during the Romantic period, Peter’s obsession would have been edgy, even hip. Liszt’s thunderous performances and raven-haired good looks ushered in an 1830s phenomenon since dubbed “Lisztomania.” Liszt would play so hard, he’d even break piano strings—something audiences would wait for with bated breath. But in drab, everyday 1970s and ’80s Sussex, Peter’s fusty Lisztomania caused his son Brett no shortage of chagrin. Later, however, as Brett became steeped in the making of his own music, he would recognize how his father’s obsession had shaped his own: “The bombast of my father’s music was inescapable, and even though I would often balk at its pomposity, I can’t deny that I was subconsciously always trying to capture something of its drama,” he writes in his memoir Coal Black Mornings.
The first time I became aware of Brett Anderson, and his band Suede, I was sitting in a wood-paneled Bavarian Gasthaus, not that far from Liszt’s grave in the German town of Bayreuth. I was a ’90s teen, an American living in Germany, and every winter and early spring my family would go skiing. Sadly (and scarily), the day before on the slopes, an old man had died of a heart attack two T-bars in front of me on the ski lift. I needed a mental-health day.
So there I was, bingeing on MTV Europe and VIVA in the most Bavarian hotel room you’ve ever seen when, suddenly, this androgynous, raven-haired, black-clad man with cheekbones for days starts moaning against crushed velvet all over the TV screen. Talk about the drama. And the guitars were sublime—angular and glittery and raw and melodic. Suede’s video for “Animal Nitrate” was infused with a grey-concrete, British council-estate gloom, offset by the dazzle of a slithering Brett Anderson. Weirdly, though, I forgot about it—likely due to the trauma of seeing someone die the day before—until months later when I was rifling through my friend Shana’s CDs and saw the self-titled Suede album with two androgynous figures kissing on its cover.
Shana was a big Suede fan, an early adopter. In a strange twist of coincidence, her sister Shawntel had a boyfriend Shawn (yes, really), who looked almost exactly like Brett Anderson. He was forever angling his head to accommodate maximum curtaining of his asymmetrical jet-black hair. He even had an earring. I’m not sure if Shana’s Suede obsession arrived before Shawn, or after Shawn, but I always suspected that the two phenomena were somehow intertwined. Eventually, Shana would tell me about Anderson’s now-famous declaration in some magazine: “I’m a bisexual man who’s never had a homosexual experience.” We turned that over for a while, trying to discern its (obviously very edgy) meaning.
Eventually, the press would earmark Suede as the very first Britpop album (and the fastest-selling debut in UK history), but if that term was bandied about in the still-early ’90s, we had no clue. Both Shana and I had enough recent albums from British artists between us—The Cure’s Wish, Morrissey’s Your Arsenal, The Charlatans, The Sundays, The La’s, Radiohead, et al.—that Suede, although excellent, didn’t seem to stand out, Britishly, in any sort of wildly divergent way. Suede was another “alternative” album in an explosion of alternative music—on both sides of the pond. Personally, I liked Suede because they brought high drama, dark fashion, and writhing passion back into a world where those things had been rendered excessive by grunge.
Brett Anderson grew up in a cramped house without central heating in a rundown estate outside Haywards Heath in West Sussex. The family foraged for mushrooms and nettles, and caught birds and rabbits to supplement their meager food budget. “We were dirt poor, existing in penury in a cheap council house,” Anderson writes. His father Peter was an ice-cream man, a window cleaner, and a swimming-pool attendant before settling into mini-cab driving. Having attended art college, his mother Sandra painted prolifically to insulate herself against the bleak surroundings. Which is how a portrait of Franz Liszt ended up hanging next to a painting of Brett standing in a field, wearing a tracksuit and munching on crisps. Brett himself was always painfully aware of a world beyond. “I used to go to the railway station and just look up the tracks to where London was,” he said.
Brett would form punk and glam-rock-inspired bands—one known humbly as Geoff, the other lavishly christened Suave and Elegant. His sister Blandine (named after Liszt’s daughter, naturally) brought home a guitar from college, and taught Brett how to play a bit. She also gifted him a cheap turntable that would further influence the way Brett heard, and would eventually make, music. “Because the stereo was so thin sounding, I guess I learned to not listen to the bottom end in music,” he writes. “I became oblivious to any subtlety in music. This eventually fed into how I started to write—forever stumbling around searching for the big, billowing chorus and the coup de grâce of the simple, killer hook.”
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Surprisingly, music wasn’t his favorite subject in school, and he excelled instead in math and science. So when it came time to apply to university, Anderson decided to pursue the only arts-oriented course having to do with math and science, Town and Country Planning, and was accepted at Manchester. However, he struggled to find his niche at the university, and dropped out to join his high-school friend Mat Osman, with whom he had formed Geoff, in London. (“He was very tall and strangely fascinating despite a kind of gauche Gothiness,” Anderson writes of their first meeting. “His presence was magnetic and compelling.”)
Anderson would think similarly of Justine Frischmann shortly after enrolling in University College London. He met her in an architecture class, and was taken by her beauty, offset by her scruffy clothes and biker boots. The first time they spoke, he thought she had a speech impediment. (“The reason I found her voice unusual at first was because I’d never really come across an accent that was the product of an expensive education before.”) Despite the stark class divide, the two became friends, then lovers. “Justine was a huge influence on me in terms of who I became as a person,” Anderson said in the documentary Suede: The Insatiable Ones. “If I hadn’t met Justine, I possibly wouldn’t be sitting here, and absolutely definitely in terms of what Suede became.” “She pushed Suede really hard,” Osman agrees.
Soon, Anderson, Osman, and Frischmann were making music as The Perfect—with Mat on bass, and Brett and Justine on guitar. Neither Brett nor Justine were very skilled, and so they placed an ad in the NME for a lead guitarist, listing among their influences The Smiths, Bowie, and Pet Shop Boys. A young man named Bernard Butler answered. “The shocking quality of his musicianship exposed our ambition as the empty, groundless folly that it was,” Anderson admits. Still, Butler stuck around, and they eventually bridged the gap in ability.
The band bought a secondhand drum machine, a nod to the early-’90s trend of blending indie with electronica, inspired by the acid house craze. They began searching for a more suitable name, when one night Anderson turned to his bandmates and said, “What about Suede?” It had no meaning beyond the fact that “I liked the way it sounded and I liked the way it looked and sometimes, in music and in life, that’s all that really counts,” Anderson writes.
Around this time, Anderson’s mother Sandra was diagnosed with an aggressive form of cancer, and given six months to live. She came to visit Brett and Justine in London, and her son barely recognized her, she looked so frail. When she died, he fell into a deep depression. “I didn’t eat and I didn’t wash and I developed shingles,” he recalls. Justine was his constant throughout his heavy grief. The seismic life change was what eventually inspired him to search for a lead guitarist, and ultimately find Bernard Butler. And it would continue driving him forward in his crazy, but maybe not so crazy, four-year pursuit of turning Suede into a world-class band.
After the drum machine broke one night in the middle of a gig, Suede started looking for a drummer. For a while, they found one in Justin Welch (who would later join Justine in Elastica), but he was the kind of guy who played with tons of bands. So they placed another ad in the NME, and a Mancunian named Mike answered. Only when he showed up did they realize he was Mike Joyce, formerly of The Smiths. The gap in skill was obvious, but Joyce stuck around and jammed with them for a while, even playing on a couple of demos the band recorded. He then went off to play with PIL, and Suede continued their search. Through a mutual friend (Ricky Gervais!), they found Simon Gilbert, the missing element. “I’ve always loved Simon’s style of drumming: never too fussy, always primal and powerful, and obviously hugely influenced by all the rough, angry music I first fell in love with,” Anderson writes.
Just as Suede began coming into their own, grief struck Anderson again when Justine left him for someone else. Suede had played a gig with emerging band Blur (which, along with Oasis, would eventually give Britpop its laddish reputation—in stark contrast to Suede’s studied androgyny). Blur frontman Damon Albarn couldn’t peel his eyes away from Justine, and began relentlessly pursuing her. “The breakup was nasty, horrible even, full of endless fraught phone calls and long tearful evenings that melted into lonely coal black mornings,” Anderson writes. Weirdly, after the breakup, Frischmann remained in Suede for a while, while Anderson began infusing the songs with ever more tortured lyrics about lost love. “It was pretty awful, this really heavy feeling in rehearsals,” Frischmann recalls. She left the band, and would later form her own Britpop sensation, Elastica.
As with his mother’s death, Justine’s departure gave Anderson a renewed sense of drive. For a fresh start, he moved into a crumbling flat on Moorhouse Road in Notting Hill (before the neighborhood became Hugh Grant-ified circa 1999). “Everything was broken and grimy and second-hand, but magical and charming, and slowly this fascinating duality of faded elegance and harsh, stark poverty began to seep into what I was writing about and the vision that was forming for the band,” Anderson remembers. His single status also allowed for the emergence of sex in Suede’s growing repertoire (“Something at the core of the music: the pounding rhythms, the primal guitar parts and my increasingly unruly delivery as a singer.”) His anger and gnawing jealousy further fueled the fire: “It felt like at last we had found ‘the power.’” Suede attracted the attention of Saul Galpern, who had just begun to establish a small indie label called Nude Records. Then, suddenly, Melody Maker featured Suede on its front cover, and a breathless review in the NME followed. Their audiences grew, and even Morrissey came to see them play.
As if aware that there would be a nostalgic pang for the album and the era, Suede opens with “So Young,” a glam rock-leaning track of shimmery melancholia that combines hedonistic invincibility with frailty, studded with tinkling piano interludes. “We were young—unbelievably [so],” guitarist Bernard Butler muses. “The more time that went on in the group, the younger I felt that I got. I just felt so overwhelmed by what was happening.”
Next up is “Animal Nitrate,” which Butler says was inspired by “Smells Like Teen Spirit,” particularly its unforgettable opening riff: “I wanted…that riff that just started and you knew it straight away.” Although the lyrics refer to amyl nitrate, found in poppers, the song actually references Anderson’s Ecstasy use (and the band did cocaine prior to shooting the video).
“She’s Not Dead” is intricate and ethereal, with lacey guitar trills and spooky synth. It was inspired by Anderson’s blond-bombshell aunt Jean, who was found dead in a car of carbon monoxide poisoning, with a man presumed to be her extramarital lover. Meanwhile, “Moving” is pounding, driving, and indeed moving—a rocker about young love between two tough kids.
Next, “Pantomime Horse” was inspired by The Smiths’ “That Joke Isn’t Funny Anymore” and written in 6/8 waltz time. “The final scream of ‘Have you ever tried it that way?’ is born from the torment of sexual jealousy,” Anderson writes, “but it’s also intended as a probing, haranguing question about class and poverty and privilege.”
“The Drowners” is another Suede classic, swaggering in its euphoric-melancholy shimmer and opulence. “Slow down, slowww dowwwn / You’re taking me over / And so we drown,” Anderson sings, alternating between relationship claustrophobia and beautiful submission. “‘The Drowners’ was supposed to be ‘Children of the Revolution,’ something with big block chords,” Butler explains. Meanwhile, the next song, the sweeping ballad “Sleeping Pills,” is an anthem for bored housewives on Valium.
“Breakdown” was inspired by the death of one of Anderson’s best friends from his teens, and it features a sad, searching first half and a cathartic, cacophonic second half. Conversely, on “Metal Mickey,” the band was going for a “joyous, teenage rush.” The song is set in the seedy grit of early-’90s London, an attempt to capture its zeitgeist. Oddly, its riff was inspired by Cher’s “The Shoop Shoop Song (It’s In His Kiss).” “I just loved the beat,” Butler says. “It had this sort of Motown drumbeat that I always wanted to do on something.”
Singsong-y rocker “Animal Lover,” on the other hand, is based on a riff Butler wrote when he was 15. “The Next Life,” featuring pensive piano, is about Anderson’s mother’s death. “I wrote it as a general meditation on loss, but I realized years later [the lyrics] were so crushingly obviously about my mother,” he divulges.
“He’s Dead”—“with all the love and poison of London” in its lyrics—is another track capturing the city’s sordid glamour. The album ends with “Where Pigs Don’t Fly,” inspired by Barrett-era Pink Floyd. The lyrics capture Anderson’s teenage years, a nostalgia for doing magic mushrooms with his friends in Haywards Heath. It’s an appreciative glance back at where he came from, at where it all really started.
Suede would earn Suede the 1993 Mercury Prize, the group donating the entire £25,000 prize money to cancer research. Although the album captured a Britishness and a zeitgeist, Anderson doesn’t enjoy having it lumped in under the genre of Britpop. Instead, he feels that Suede was an animal all its own: “This was London in the early ’90s, hugely different from the popular ‘Cool Britannia’ revisionist myth that media hindsight has over-simplistically projected on that whole decade.”
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