WASTED YOUTH. GLAMOROUS DECAY.  THE END OF EVERYTHING.  THEY'VE SPENT YEARS
CHRONICLING FIN-DE SIECLE DECADENCE.  NOW, FINALLY, THE REST OF THE WORLD HAS CAUGHT UP WITH SUEDE

A small moment to illustrate the popular notion of where suede are at.  It comes, of all places, from Paul Calf's Video Diary - the one-off TV mockumentary showcasting the travails of Steve Coogan's first major comic character, a muleted, badly mustachioed, proto-lad butcher from Sheffield.

It's the local Christmas disco and Paul is pissed up and miserable.  The object of his affections, Julie, has shunned him and no one will dance with him either.  Worse still, the DJ has rejected his repeated requests for something by Queen.  But as Paul wobbles and blinks before the DJ stand, the light of inspiration slowly creeps across his face.
"Got any suede?" he asks the DJ.
The DJ smiles, nods and produces what looks like a copy of 'Animal Nitrate'.  Paul reaches across the decks, takes it out of his hand and smashes it to bits on the side of the console.  He gazes blankly at the chunk of vinyl left in his hand for a moment, before looking up with another request.
"Got any Nirvana?"
In  a living room in London, suede's bass player Mat Osman watched all this with tingling disbelief.  His friends were sniggering, unsure of how he'd take a gag which said fairly unequivocally that suede were a load of nancyish student nonsense, a smalltime sideshow in the then-moribund world of indie rock.  But Mat laughed his head off.  He thought it was brilliant.
"Anyway what a vote of confidence," adds Brett Anderson.  "How excellent, to be something that someone hates."

Being something to hate has done suede some strange favours - the strangest being that, for all their deliberate apartness, they arrive in 1999 more loved and valued than ever, and more in tune with their times.  'Never deviate' has been their bloody-minded rule.  They've always written about the same people in the same ways, of wasted youth getting still more wasted to the sound of big glam rock.  They've remained immune to the Nineties showbiz undertow that demands a show of blkish normality from every celebrity (suede don't want to be normal).  And if their focus moved from bedroom hermits to Doved-up ravers, it was only to keep propagating Anderson's vision - that the high life is in all of us, waiting to be set free.  Grunge, Britpop and Dadrock have come and gone.  As the Nineties binge staggers to its final phases, they're revealed as the only band whose take on this decade (and the next) is truly their own.
Suede release their fourth album next month.  Head Music is blazing, heroic twenty-first century rock'n'roll of a type that's made nowhere else in the world right now.  The three- and four-minute pop punches that comprised Coming Up - the 1996 album which finally took suede into the hearts of the people theyr write about - are only the foundations here.  Head Music is full of poisonous celebrities, Stone Age men, and a girl who's "the shape of a cigarette".  It's as hungry and angry as before - with cybernetic Hendrix on 'Electricity' and a straight-ahead punk metal oblivion called 'Can't Get Enough' - but newly heartfelt.  Suede's old melancholy has taken on a more adult cast in tracks such as 'Down'.  They also have a new producer: Perfecto's Steve Osborne (dance) replaces Ed Buller (indie rock), and all of suede's hookiness and petulant power are filtered through radically different sonic sensibilities.
Last year, Brett Anderson said he was interested in making a record that was colder and less emotional than previous suede music.  In fact, the music is probably more vivid than ever, but there is something unmistakeably darker coming through his lyrics.  The lovers in 'Trash' were the litter on the breeze, dizzy and delirious with freedom, but the ones in 'Electricity' have a love 'like a violent mind' and it only comes from 'the bright white lines'.  Brett's always written about remote, alien women with a kind of frigid romance to them, but now, in 'Savoir Faire' and 'She's In Fashion', they've become dumb, cruel, narcissistic, soul-dead.  The bad, bored and bony girl from 'She' is no longer 'injecting marry-ju-ana' - she's cooking up crack to give you a heart attack.
"I am quite obsessed with feminine power," Brett says.  "Being a man, you are very aware of the power that women have over you.  But a lot of it is just to do with the fact that I love the sound of the word 'she'.  When I write, I often sing nonsense and then rationalise into something that make sense….
"But some of the new songs are quite negative, yes.  I've always shied away from that before because I've wanted to express a vision that life can be a great experience.  But then sometimes I do feel incredibly down, and it's not a sin to express that either. 'Crack In The Union Jack' is quite a bleak song and I couldn't have written that before."
Do you think that might have anything to do with getting older?
"I suppose so, but it's not a negative thing.  It's quite good to be able to express negativity when you begin to notice it."
What are you doing for the Millennium, Brett?
"Nothing.  I'm going to bed early.  I don't like having this… thing imposed on me.  All over London, there are these clocks counting down.  It scares me.  It's like being reminded of your own mortality while you walk down the street.l  All it's saying is that time is ticking away - and I refuse to adhere to that rubbish.  Time is not ticking away.  We have all the time in the world."

I meet suede as they are being photographed in a studio in east London.  They've brought their own music and the only concession to indie rock in Brett's big pile of CDs is the Black Box Recorder album.  Otherwise, it's Lee Perry, the Red Hot Chili Peppers, Cameo, Seal and Tupac.  Prince's 'Cream plays loud and suede natter and wander, studiously not dancing.  The only lines they sing along to are the falsetto bits.  Brett's copy of George Michael's Ladies and Gentlemen still bears its £17.99 sticker from Tower Records.  Not only do they buy their own records, they pay full price for them.
It's a nervy week for suede.  Next Monday, Steve Osbourne rejoins his Perfecto partner Paul Oakenfold in the studio with the newly reformed Happy Mondays.  They have only this week to complete the mix of Head Music.  Brett is on and off his mobile, issuing frequently abstract instructions, pacing around the studio in an odd combination of silver parka (warm) and loose, white V-necked T-shirt(cold).  "Keep the guitar spidery," he implores of engineer on the other side of London.
The dressing room is crowded, but suede seem to enjoy the novelty of being stuck in a tiny room together again.  They mock Mat for his uncharacteristically revealing cap-sleeved T-shirt ("Where did you get that?" asks drummer Simon Gilbert. "The wardrobe box for Boyz Unlimited?") and jostle to see the proof of Peter Saville's cover for their new single 'Electricity'.  Simon reckons this will all wear off as soon as they start touring.  "We've been terribly sensible while we've been making the record, but it'll be right back to getting off our faces once the boredom kicks in," he says.  "We will become Drug-Fuelled suede again."
"I'm only alcohol-fuelled," says guitarist Richard Oakes.
"Actually," says Simon, "I think we stopped doing so much drugs because of the boredom.  Certainly not for health reasons.  I still smoke about a thousand joints a day."
"I don't think your body's your temple at all," Richard declares.  "You keep it good so that you can abuse it later."
One by one, suede slowly drift into the kitchen to talk.
Mat Osman tells me that the current suede only really became a band after they made Coming Up.  They'd rehearsed the songs to death but had yet to develop a real relationship with one another.  It was only on the seemingly endless, 14-month Coming Up tour that they realised they were enjoying being in suede more than they ever had.  Playing in Singapore was particularly entertaining, it being a totalitarian country and in need of a certain release. "It was mad, the show was a complete riot and we were playing through this pre-Soviet equipment…. I've never experienced anything like it. [Manager] Charlie [Charlton] had to sign some thing guaranteeing that none of us would impersonate a woman while we were there.  Which is quite a fine line when you're talking about suede."
Mat says he spends all his money on CDs.  He sometimes buys 20 at a time in the certain belief that there will be at least one song in there that he will treasure and want to play to the rest of the band.  "Two hundred quid for a record you are going to have for the rest of your life and always love…" he argues.  "That's a good deal, isn't it?"
keyboard player Neil Codling is cheerful, somewhat spacey and hypnotically well-spoken.  He is fond of using such non-pop-star words as 'mnemonic' and 'addendum'.  It is very clear why a sizeable section of suede's female fanbase - and a smaller but no less significant group of male fans - are hopelessly fixated on him.  Codling has a kind of asexual beauty, a little bit Brideshead, a little bit The Man Who Fell To Earth.  He's like someone from a suede song.  Neil was never formally invited into suede, he says.  He had hung around during the Coing Up recording sessions because he was Simon's cousin and because the band felt he was a suede type of person.  Only later did they realise he could play keyboards.  So Neil joined the band joined "by osmosis'.
His interests are esoteric and he doesn't like to talk about them.  Later, I learn he has a dreadful on-line bookstores habit.  Neil orders obscure fiction, medical and philosophical texts, anything he can lay his hands on, and then gets the band's manager to pay for them because he doesn't have a credit card.
Simon Gilbert loves The Clash and records all he can of suede's activities on a camcorder.  Occasionally, these mini-movies are released on suede CD-Roms.  He has about 300 hours of suede-verite at home and he wonders if it's getting out of hand.  At least all the editing gives him something to do after he's recorded the drums on a song.  A couple of years ago, Simon had the unsettling experience of finally meeting his father, whom he'd never met.  Simon's sister had tracked him down and, to Simon's surprise, he turned out to be a sound technician at the BBC.  Simon immediately started worrying about what he'd think of the band's sound quality.  As suede's openly gay member - which isn't as token or statutory as it sounds - Simon often gets people coming out to him by post.  "It is quite a big thing when they do that," he says.  "It makes me feel funny but quite honoured.  If I write back to them, it's usually just to say, 'Oh, that's good….' I'm not very political with it.  For me, it's always been like, 'I'm gay - so what?'  All of us in the band are just individuals and I think that's one of the reasons people can relate to us."
Richard Oakes has stopped dyeing his hair black to fit in with the band like he used to.  Today, he has rustic sideburns.  Richard is now 22 and has been in suede longer than Bernard Butler was.  He thinks Coming Up was a bit straight and boring - he likes the fact that Head Music has turned out colder and less immediately attractive, and he thinks joining suede has opened his eyes to music he would never have previously touched.  Even music apparently opposed to the suede way of doing things, like Black Box's 'Ride On Time'.  "At the time, I thought it was the most annoying record ever made," he says. "But now I realise that it's brilliant.  I wish we could do things as simple as that."  Richard finds it funny that the first band he ever saw was suede at Poole Arts Centre, and then, two years later to the day, he was playing at the Royal Albert Hall with them.  The rest of suede are convinced that his unflappable confidence and competence foreshadows a catastrophic nervous breakdown when Richard is about 35.
Later, it emerges that suede have declined to wear the clothes that the stylist has brought for them.  They prefer to wear their own.  Apart from Neil, who wears a fetching dark tan jean jacket, this means lots of black.  "Black is the furthest away from being naked," observes Richard randomly.  Is it?
"Well, when you've got no clothes on, you are a very light colour, so I suppose we wear black to …. Cover our hidden selves. 'Cause we're pasty white boys and we look ill."
I watch them as they're photographed.  They resemble a drawing of a pop group, too angularly cool and varied in appearance to be real.  Brett, Neil and Mat in particular give good cheekbone.  They look like they were born for shadow.  After a couple of test shots, however, it is clear that something is wrong.  Neil and Richard are not quite tall and angular enough.  Phone books are found to bring them up to suede height.  Neil needs two; Richard, three.

What question do suede fans ask you most often?
Mat: "Where's Brett?"
Simon: "Where's Brett?"
Richard: "Is Brett around?"
Brett: I don't know… all kinds of things.
Neil: Oh, "What's your favouite film?" and stuff like that.  They don't really ask about the music - they know that inside out.  They want your mind instead.

Head Music will be a first for suede in one respect at least - they are releasing it into a world which is no longer waiting for them to fail.  In a past life, with fret-fetishist Bernard Butler as guitarist and musical director, suede were first the over-hyped 'best young band in Britain' and then the over-stuffed, over-long harbingers of a new prog rock.  They wore jumble-sale blouses, they shrieked, staggered, moaned, looked wretchedly sallow and effeminate and sold a million copies of their debut album.  To the long-sleeve T-shirted majority whose lives had been remade by dance culture, however, suede seemed to be speaking a dead language of glam guitars and gender-meddling histrionics.  And what was all that sexual ambivalence supposed to be about anyway?
When Butler quit the band in 1994 and Oakes, then 17, replaced him, Anderson's announcement that suede were "stronger than ever" just sounded like the cocaine talking.  Suede duly sat out Britpop, but the record they made, Coming Up, turned out to be their magnificent triumph.  Oakes and the other new member, Neil Codling, proved themselves writers of inspired, full-on rock headbangers and acute ballads alike, all with unerring pop appeal.  The band that previously arrived in morose colours now announced itself loudly in the technicolour riot of Peter Saville and Nick Knight's sexually-charged sleeve artwork.
Did the success of Coming Up make them feel vindicated?
"It was quite… satisfying," concedes Brett.  "It was frustrating when people counted us out, because I thought we had achieved quite a lot already.  I know that musicians are very fond of trumpeting their achievements now, but it pretty much was suede that got music in this country off its arse again.  If we came across as so arrogant and distant, it's probably because we were the only ones who had it in us to do anything that was any good, to be honest."
But there was another reason why Coming Up struck a chord.  Of all the landmark British records of this fame-dazzled, chemically-altered decade, it was the only one to wonder if any of this stuff is real.  What if all the good times you experience are ultimately counterfeit, drawn from a bag or a wrap or a song?  Does that mean your youth is counterfeit too?  Or just your feelings?  This is the territory that suede revisit on Head Music.

At the offices of Nude Records near Euston station, all of suede's gold an dplatinum discs are still in their protective wrapping, propped against the orange walls like a student record collection.  Nonbody has got round to hanging them up, but someone has Sellotaped to the wall a fax from Brett of a large letter 'H'.  This is A Collector's Item.  Suede decided in a moment of larkiness to announce the title of Head Music one letter at a time.  By the time the second letter came out, the music papers were all convinced that the fourth suede album would be called something like 'Heroin is Lovely'.  There is no evidence to suggest this was suede's intention but, as Brett says, "It's always nice to wind people up… we do hae a sense of humour, but it's quite well hidden."
I wonder aloud if there are any really embarrassing suede items in the room.
"Yes," he says brightly. "Me."
Brett has just returned from a holiday in Barbados (suede fans will be horrified to learn that he has an actual suntan) where he got into some top-of-the-range pretentious pop star reading: The Outsider by Albert Camus and Martin Amis' Time's Arrow.  He loved the economy of Camus' writing - he wishes he could achieve the same sort of thing in music - and the moral question in Amis' book, the story of a Nazi war criminal told backwards, from death to birth.  If evil is reversed, does that make it good?  Brett liked the fact that there was no simple answer.  That, and the fact that the idea was simple.  Just like a good pop song.  When he was a kid, Brett's favourite book was Animal Farm, for similar reasons.
"I got obsessed with that when I was quite young," he says.  "It was the romanticism rather than the totalitarian image, the fact that the politics is framed within human politics.  I thought it was really beautiful that there was a gritty reality but also a romance to it.  So I found myself wanting to write about real life and express it as a beautiful thing.  That's one of the reasons why it upsets me when people tell us we're not political.  I think what we're about is very political, in the human sense." Brett Anderson is now 31 and has led suede all his adult life.
Brett had a recurring dream as a child.  He had died and was in hell, and he had to persuade the Devil to let him live again.  The Devil had no face or shape - he was simply an enormous presence of evil - and Brett could come up with no rational argument for why he should be allowed back on Earth.  All he could do was plead and plead.
His upbringing, in the nowhere town of Hayward's Heath between London and Brighton, was "strange",  "a series of contradictions", "hard to pigeonhole" and "abjectly poor" (the latter certainly being a factor in his early disputes with Damon Albarn, whom Brett once described as "a talentless public schoolboy who's made a living out of patronising the working classes".  For the record, Brett now says he has "nothing at all against" Damon).  His mother named him Brett after Roger Moore's character, Lord Brett Sinclair, in her favourite TV show The Persuaders - a name which would also provide more than one suede headline in the future.  Brett's father drove taxis and was obsessed with both classical music and great historical figures like Nelson, Liszt and Churchill.  Brett loved his mother, played football for his county and was a committed natural athlete.  "But then you get to 13 and you discover sex and Carlsberg Special Brew…. As I grew older, me and my dad would have constant arguments, the same one every week: 'Is classical music is better than pop music?"
Now Anderson Senior plays suede in his cab as well as classical music.  Fans of the band occasionally track him down, and he sometimes lets them in to his council house to see Brett's old bedroom.  He has kept it as it was when his son left for London, complete with the mural Brett painted - a giant copy of the Teacher from the Pink Floyd movie The Wall screaming, "If you don't eat your meat, you can't have any pudding" ("That was another of my obsessions.").  Brett's mother died of cancer in 1992, but when he goes to visit his dad at Christmas, it rarely takes them long to get back to the classical vs pop debate.  "I always promise myself I won't start arguing." He says.  "But I always do."

Brett now lives in a cluttered house in Notthing Hill Gate with bare floorboards and a studio at the bottom of the garden.  I tell him I find that strange - I'd always imagined him living in stark modern simplicity - but he says he tried it and hated the emptiness of it.  "I actually love rummaging through stuff.  I'm always buying loads of old crap.  And when I'm in an environment that's not nice to be in, it affects me quite badly.  It's almost like a weakness.  I don't go for things that are camp and kitsch, like models of Bambi an that kind of thing…. I've been getting into buying quite modern things lately, bits of equipment and machinery.  I got these very nice pair of orange perspex speakers, which I've kept as an ornament.  They're very Japanese and quite Sixties in a way."
It's better than his last place, which did not suit his working methods well.  Brett says he will sometimes play a single song continuously from 10pm until noon the next day to try ad get it right.  Once, when he was working on 'Lazy' for the Coming Up album, he rewound the tape and heard loud banging on the door.  It was a neighbour asking him to please turn the music off, for God's sake - his mother had just died and he'd been knocking for an hour.  For a few days afterwards, Brett felt deep unease at the fact that the last thing the woman had heard was his delirious, stupid-happy, summery song of freedom and the dole.

Peter Saville and Nick Knight's sleeve artwork for Head Music, says Brett in a rare bout of swearing, is "fucking brilliant… sort of karmic… even more electric than Coming Up".  It will feature a suedeboy and a suedegirl side by side, their minds physically connected in the way that the band seems believe their fans, those disparate suedepeople, are connceted too.  The boy and girl aren't models but Brett's girlfriend Sam and, surely the archetypal suedeboy, Neil Codling.
Brett is proud that this vision of their music has never really changed.  He's still inspired by the same friends that he's always written about, the ones who live a life of social and chemical match.  The only trouble is, the older he gets, the more he sees that life go wrong.
"I've had to come to accept the very bleak side of drugs and overdoing it," he admits.  "Not just, 'Oh, you've been doing too much coke and you feel a bit shit,' but in the sense that things like smack damage lives.  I have seem people's lives crumble and I've come to terms with that.  A lot of our song ideas used to be pure hedonism.  There was no anticipation of the consequences.  Now…. It's boring to say it but I have grown up a bit.  I do seriously under stand the evils of certain drugs."
How do you think the people you write about will cope with getting older?  They've come through more heavy-duty self-abuse than any previous generation…
"God, I don't know what they'll do.  They'll all become cabbages, I assume… Depends on how much they've been banging it, doesn't it?  I do think people have begun to be able to incorporate quite extreme hedonism into everyday life.  I hope the suede people will have the headset that they can do that.  They'll use the extremity of their experiences in real life.  I don't think it's as simple as a big crash.  I'd like to think not, but I don't know what the actual…. Medical facts are."
Brett's own position on serious drugs has often been hard to fathom.  In 1996, Damon Albarn told a music paper that he "knew for a fact" that Brett was taking heroin.  Brett made no response but, much later, told another magazine that he had never injected the drug.  It seemed odd that he could be so candid regarding Ecstasy or cocaine, but less so with heroin.
"It's because there is such a taboo around it," Brett says slowly.  "It is possibly the only drug that is actually, seriously, genuinely evil, because it's so subtle.  When you take it, you think it isn't such a big deal, but it's like a song on the radio that you don't particularly care about - after hearing it 50 times, you suddenly realise that you can't get it out of your head."
Should we therefore take it that you have used it?
(Pause) "Yes."
Did you use it often?
"Yes.  I've been through a period of having a problem with it.  But I've realised that it is probably one of the most evil things in the world and I have no intention of ever touching it again ever.  I hate it when you read people preaching, saying, 'Oh, I've done it, but don't you try it - it's terrible….' I find that so fucking horribly self-righteous.  I have personally decided for myself that it is an evil thing, and I would advise people not to have anything to do with it.  But it has to be their own choice in the end."
How long did you do it?
"On and off for a couple of years, I suppose.  I don't know.  It's one of those things that you do, and you manage to get off it, but then you do it again… It's a horrible thing.  I would really rather prefer not to talk about it any more."
Do you think it affected suede's music?
"Yes, I think it did, but I don't think I should get specific about which songs and how.  Anything that affects your life affects your music, so it is bound to have affected the music."

Soon afterwards, Simon arrives at the nude office.  It's been arranged that we'll all meet at Brett's favourite curry house behind Euston station (also Bjork's favourite curry house, not that that means anything in particular).  Brett wants to hail a cab, but Simon goes, "Naaaah…." And strides off into the rush-hour traffic, wandering serenely between effing lorries and blinding taxis.  We follow him, terrified.  "Is he looking a new singer?" asks Brett as buses cannon by and office workers do double-takes at the skinny man trapped on the central reservation.
A few doors down from the restaurant, Brett says, "Hang on a moment…." And darts into a shop.  He has made A Discovery.  Planet Bazaar stocks lewd Fifties prints, modular Sixties lighting, bendy Seventies furniture and tacky-cool Eighties art.  The whole Nineties look, in fact.  Brett is torn between two airbrush paintings.  One shows a tube of Signal toothpaste extruding a naked white girl.  another shows a Cadbury's Flake metamorphosing into a naked black girl.  They are both quite beautiful.  Brett umms an dahhs and then plumps for the Flake.  The owner, a woman in her forties, is delighted, and tells Brett he has a good eye.  Where does he work?  In the creative industries?
"Er, yes…. I work for a magazine," he says.
Which one?
Brett thinks for a minute and for some reason says, "Loaded."

What's your favourite possession?
Richard: My girlfriend.
Simon: Ooh, controversial!  You can't say that.  Mine's my dog George.  Not that I own him, of course. He is his own dog.
Mat: My CD Walkman.  No, the car.  I've got a Mercedes.  Very fond of that.  and the cats.
Brett: I'm fond of the things that my sister has made for me.  She's an artist.  She made me this perspex landscape out of resin and it's lovely.  And she made this embroidered cushion with (Laughing) a series of pictures of me on it.  all these images taken from Top Of The Pops, with my face embroidered nine times… it was sort of weird and Warhol-y and it made me laugh.
Neil: I've got loads of clothes that I borrow off people and never give back.  So they're my possessions in a way, but they're not really mine.
Richard: That was a joke about my girlfriend.

That Friday, the Flake girl is propped in the lounge of suede's Chiswick studio, still in her bubblewrap.  Today is the last day of mixing for Head Music and, although only Mat and Brett are present, the atmosphere is of quiet industry and only a little panic.  Everyone's more interested in Steve Osborne's next job, the Happy Mondays' comeback single, and whether or not they're really going to record a cover of Thin Lizzy's 'The Boys Are Back In Town'.  Suede think this is a terrible idea.  They are Mondays fans of old - a live shot exists, from back when Justine Frischmann was in the band, in which suede are wearing the bright colours and shapeless trousers of classic Madchester.  When searching for new producers, they got Osborne in partly because they loved Pill'n'Thrills And Bellyaches.  He recorded a trial version of 'Savoir Faire' with them and they made their decision there and then.
"Come on, Steve… the Mondays, what do you know?" goads Mat.  The bloodshot and stubbled Osborne holds up his hands, pleading that he doesn't know what the Mondays are doing himself yet.  Then, after further pestering, he cites client confidentiality and tells everyone to leave him alone.
Brett as to approve the T-shirt designs for suede's fan club shows.  They all revolve around puns on the word 'head'.  One reads 'Give Me Head' in a tangle of Seventies art deco typography. "Sorry," he sighs, "but this is one of the most disgusting things I've ever seen in my life.  Looks like…" His voice trails off.  Kula Shaker?  "Oh Christ, yes.  It's them, isn't it?
It is decided that instead there will be shirts with 'Head Boy' and 'Head Girl' on them.  Brett especially likes the design with the title spelled out by an arcing electric spark.  Mat thinks they should sell those shield-type badges that the prefects wear at school, except instead of 'Head Boy' maybe it should say 'Head Case'?  brett tells him his ideas are never usually that good;  Mat's reply is a lofy snort.  In a parallel conversation, suede's management are discussing the wisdom or not of commissioning remixes for the album.
"I know who'd be right," Brett suddenly announces. "Prince."

Charlie offers to play me one more tune from the album, a newly finished one to be called either 'Everything Will Flow' or just 'Flow'.  It's the kind of song that appears last on an album, swelling and emotive, with a core of certainty.  An anthem.  In fact it appears to be an anthem for inanimate objects.  To the sound of descending strings, car parks and hypermarts and starry skies come together in a way that makes no conventional sense, but which somehow says something affirming and enormously un-suede-like.  What the song says is: everything's going to be OK.  Suede have finally writtentheir religious experience song.  And what it stands for is what all the other suede songs have stood for since they very beginning - the liberating power of the imagination, the right not to have to make sense.  Suede's journey from youthful idealism to pensive old age has been played out in reverse.  As the song booms outs, Brett picks away randomly at an unplugged electric guitar and harmonises with himself, oblivious.
I hear 'Flow' just once.  A week later, it's still in my head, like a song from the radio that you can't get rid of.  They say you're supposed to write about what you know.  What do suede know?  Suede know you.