*as it's a rather long piece of interview, we are going to show it in 3 parts, please watch out as next update*
 
 

In celebration of Suede's new beginning, Brett Anderson agreed to a lengthy interview.  The following is the pick of a 150-question, three-hour marathon, the edited version of which still represents his longest published interview to date.

Record Collector:  The initial membership of Suede was unsettled, as most groups tend to be when they're finding the right people.  Was it difficult in any way being in a group with Justin Frischmann, who was then your girlfriend?
Brett Anderson:  Not really too difficult.  I don't know.  It was all right.  I'm good friends with Justine, I always have been.  We weren't the sort of people to have any conflict when she was in the band.

RC:  Mat Osman says that the early suede line-up would never have been successful if they'd continued.  Do you think he was right?
BA:  Definitely, yeah.  Losing Justine that early gave us a kick up the arse.  It made us go away and regroup and rethink what suede were about.  That was quite an important thing to do, really.  It's almost like shedding a skin and coming out as something else.  You can draw a parallel between what's happened with Bernard now, losing him and going away and regrouping to make this latest album.

RC:  Mat also said of Justine: "We were never any good until we kicked her out", whereas she says that she quit because you and Bernard wouldn't consider playing her songs. Which account is correct?
BA:  Oh, God.  This is really dredging up the past.  I don't know.  If Mat said that.

RC:  Well you were there, it was at that panel that the 'NME' put together…
BA:  I'm not sure Mat actually said that, to be quite honest, but I don't know.  It's getting a bit close to the bone, isn't it?  We've always been good friends with Justine and it just wasn't very different visions, that's all it is… I think she wanted to split off and do was Elastica was doing.
 

MUTUAL
RC:  But did she leave of her own volition?
BA:  I think she didn't want to be in the band any more and it was pretty much a mutual decision about it.  It seems strange talking about this, because it's such a long time ago now.  I actually can't really remember the exact historical events of what happened really.  Do you know what I mean?  I can't really remember how it happened.

RC:  It makes me think: is anybody, apart from yourself, indispensable in suede?
BA:  I don't know.  I couldn't answer that because I wouldn't want anybody to be indispensable in this band.  So it's a really unusual question.  We're pretty united as a band for the first time and pretty single-minded, so it isn't a question.

RC:  Well, considering the various changes and the fact that you've always wanted  suede to change from album to album, perhaps, in one sense, it wasn't the ultimate tragedy that Justine or even Bernard left.  Could we go further?  I wonder if we could even envisage a suede without you…
BA:  Ha, ha!  That would be an interesting thing to see.  I'd quite like to see that.

RC:  Was the first suede gig at the White Horse, Hampstead?
BA:  Yes.  That was the first proper suede gig.

RC:  Did you get a little scene going there?
BA:  Not really.  There were a couple of kids that were going along there to see us…  we were playing with two band, the Prudes and the Ruby Tuesdays, and there were a couple random, floating indie punters there, who said they really liked us, so we took their addresses and sent them information about the band, in a very home-done way.  It was like a cottage industry.  It was so pathetic.

RC:  I remember seeing you at the White Horse and it was quit impressive.
BA:  What, not that gig!  We played about three gigs there.  We played that one, then we played a gig with the Divine Comedy, which was really good, and then we played a fan club gig there.

RC:  Prior to Simon Gilbert's arrival, Mike Joyce briefly teamed up with you.
BA:  It was really strange.  We put an ad for a drummer in the paper and Mike Joyce sticks his head around the door.  We were all massive Smiths fans and it was like 'Jim'll Fix It'.  He turned out to be a really lovely guy, and we've kept in contact.  I saw him about two weeks ago and went for a drink with him in this bar by my house.  He acted like a father figure to the band.  He helped us out as much as he could and acted like a real diamond.  A great bloke.

RC:  He told me that he didn't join because at the time it all sounded a little too much like the Smiths.  Was that your recollection?
BA:  It just would have been ridiculous, wouldn't it?  A band with no profile suddenly getting him as the drummer.  It would have been like 'Mike Joyce, featuring suede', so it wasn't really healthy from anyone's point of view.  It was nice to meet him and to work with him for a bit.

RC:  So, after Mike, Simon Gilbert appeared…..
BA:  No. Then Justin[Welch] appeared!  It's like a catalogue, isn't it?  It's mad.  If you added up how many people have been involved in this band, it must be something like about 20 people.  It's insane.
 

JUSTIN WELCH
RC:  So, you went from a drum machine to Mike Joyce.  That's wild.  Then Justin Welch, who later joined Elastica, and finally Simon Gilbert.
BA:  Yes.  I can't remember how I met Justin, I think it was another advert in the music press.  He was an absolutely great drummer, really exciting.  He played on that track "Be My God" with us.  Again, he was an absolutely diamond bloke.  I still see him and he keeps in contact with us.

RC:  So was it a matter of weeks between his leaving and your getting Simon Gilbert?  Or were there yet more drummers?
BA:  It was quite a long time, I think.  We went through phases where we were doing lots of auditions.  We were rehearsing for a while with a couple of people, semi-permanently, whose names I can't quite remember now.  It just wasn't happening.  And we finally found Simon.  We started hanging out together and never looked back.  Simon had been through a lot more of the grind than we had.  He'd been in 12 or 13 bands or whatever.

RC:  suede had a lot of business hassles early on. "Be My God" was going to be released on RML, but that didn't happen.  What went wrong there?
BA:  We signed a dodgy record deal early on without any, or with minimal, advice, which I wouldn't recommend anyone to do.  It was a classic case.  He was a friend of Mat's, but even so we were signing record deals without really knowing what we were doing.  The guy's intentions were fine but I don't think there was really a huge amount of commitment, which was fair enough because there wasn't really the material to give the commitment to.  It all turned a bit nasty later on, because basically we were still partly under contract and after we had the success with the first single, he kind of crawled out of the woodwork.

RC:  One of the things that was most attracted me about suede was that they initially made an impact through three really strong singles.  I've always believed that the single is the lifeblood of pop, and you offered nine songs before issuing an album, so I assume you feel the same?
BA:  Definitely.  Singles have been something I've grown up with.  But singles being more tan just the A-side.  I pretty well grew up with things like punk, and later on the Smiths and stuff like that, and the B-sides were always important.  It was always such an important part of being into the band, rushing down to W.H. Smith's and buying this 12" thing, and probably putting on the B-side first because you already knew the A-side from the radio.  I always wanted suede singles to be much more than just an A-side with a couple of dodgy remixes.  I always wanted them to be mini-album in themselves.

RC:  That idea seemed to get lost between the 60s and the punk/indie era.
BA:  I think it's starting to get lost again now, because bands have got this pressure put upon them now of formatting records.  Basically, you're asked to produce four new songs for each single and it's actually quite hard work.  We've managed to do it pretty well so far and I think the quality control we've had on each formatted record has been excellent.  But it's just one of those things.  If you're competing in this marketplace, you've really got to compete, simply from a business angle.
All the early singles, none of them were formatted.  "Stay Together" would probably have gone to No. 1 if it had been formatted.  It's just a matter now of competing with everyone else in the marketplace, and formatting is one of those evils of being in a band that you have to deal with.  So I do think that the sense of the importance of the single has been obliterated again through formatting.
 

COMPILATION
RC:  Do you ever see  suede doing a "Hatful of Hollow"?
BA:  Yes, I'd love to do a B-sides compilation.  Definitely. *the interview was published at June, now we've got Si-Fi Lullaby.

RC:  There's probably enough material to do both a singles compilation of A-sides and a collection of B-sides and rarities.
BA:  I know.  It's something I'd pretty much intended to be the third album.  But because we lost Bernard, it didn't seem like something that we could really do.  But I thought about it a lot.  We actually compiled an album at one point.  I worked out the running order and what songs should be on it.  So it has been very close.  It's just a matter of deciding.  It's too backward looking at this stage.  But, it'll definitely happen.

RC:  suede's debut album was an amazingly accomplished work, which offered an almost enclosed world of small-town hopes, bored teenagers, consciousness-numbing drugs like Valium and barbiturates, and slightly sordid sex.  Did you envisage a fictional landscape for the entire album or was it just a collection of songs that fitted well together?
BA:  I suppose it is.  There's a different edge on it.  Even though there's an element of decadence, there's never a blind celebration of decadence.  It's like there's something a bit more there; something with a bit of an edge, I think.  Something a bit more interesting than just raising your hand and shouting, "Here we go".

RC:  Judging from the lyrics, you also seem to have a morbid fascination with car crashes?
BA:  I don't know why, really.  Lots of things I talk about are just images floating through my head.  I don't think I particularly have a morbid fascination for car crashes.  I've quite a fascination with cars, generally.  I don't know why.  It's a funny little environment, being in a car isn't it?  It's definitely part of urban life or suburban life, whatever.  I suppose it's the fact that I've never driven that gives me the morbid fascination.  I just sit in the passenger's seat and watch other people drive.

RC:  Do you still write in the studio or dictate onto tape as opposed to sitting down and burning the midnight oil?
BA:  I tend to write when my brain doesn't work.  I will do it when I get inspired.  I've actually woken up in the middle of the night.  The most inspiring time of the day for me is actually waking up.

RC:  Do you ever keep a notepad by the bed?
BA:  Oh yeah.  I always have a pad and a dictaphone, definitely.  And I carry a dictaphone around with me generally when I'm walking around London.  I get quite inspired just by walking about, whether it's a tune or a set of lyrics.

RC:  Has the writing process changed from working with Bernard to working with Richard & Neil?
BA:  Yes.  The way in which we're writing now is much more open.  Instead of following a formula, which is pretty much what we were doing before, now there's a lot of freedom in what we do.  Whatever it takes to get a good song, we'll do it.  I'll wander down to Richard's and just hum him a tune and he'll work out a guitar riff and he'll take it to the band, or whatever.  It's just really random ways of working.

RC:  You used the word "formula".  Do you mean that presumably with Bernard Butler, it was the music followed by the lyrics, like Morrissey & Marr?
BA:  Not at all, I've never worked that way.  My role in writing the songs has never been just as a lyricist.  That's something that's been vastly misunderstood about the band.
 

*next time, Brett's gonna tell how he worked with Bernard(yes, he calls him by his first name!), & about his departure, his feeling towards America, Richard's wages(huh?!) and so on….  See U* --
Maggie Sadie    Typing
Thanks to Andy for sending me this article