Gabba gabba fey! Fresh from the school of hard knocks, BRETT ANDERSON returns older, wiser and ready to wreak revenge on Britpop - which he reckons he invented in the first place! VOX gets elegantly pasted with His Lordship as he debates the fickle price of fame, French fries and, naturally, the new SUEDE album...

 "The last album was very specific in terms of the way I wrote it. I rented a house in Highgate for 'Dog Man Star'. It was this old Victorian. Gothic gaff. It was this flat in this house , and the rest of the house was owned by this strange set of Christians called Mennonites.

 "There was a lovely big garden, and I had this studio to write in. Didn't ever see anyone because no one could be bothered to get their arse up to Highgate. So I started writing in a very isolated way. We drove past the house the other day. and Richard was in the car, and I said: " Look, that's my old house, that's where I wrote the whole of the last album..' and he goes: 'It reeks of "Dog Man Star!' And it did. It was this kind of dark, classical place."

 Did it have chandeliers covered in cobwebs?
 "It wasn't quite like that, what's that fucking Dickens book, Great Expectations? It was bordering on that. It did reek of 'Dog Man Star'. Now I've moved to a new place, where I've been writing the new album, and it's back where I've always lived in London, in Ladbroke Grove, and it reeks of the new album, which is more communicative, more part of real life."

FOUR YEARS of watching him swish like a feather boa through the melodrama of an histrionic pop existence, and the first words Brett Anderson says in the flesh are: "Oh 'ello. I'll be with you in a minute." Four years of gender larking, Byronic-posturing, apocalyptic fretting, drug-guzzling, arse-slapping, scrapping, bitching and trilling gorgeously and the first words are not "Daaaaahling", or "Sweeeeetie" or even "Delighted". Just "Oh 'ello. I'll be with you in a minute. Like the sodding dentist. Or some bloke in a chip shop. Oh well, you can get people wrong.

The trim to the point of the skinny, but healthy looking 28-year-old who bustles around the smart W1 offices of his record label, Nude, is definitely a bloke, see. Nothing about him screams. The airs and graces are limited to the modulated Kenneth Williams-from-the-chip-shop cadence of his speaking voice. And in his black cords, DMs, pastel shirt and 24-hour stubble, he comes on kind of like a roaming PhD student who's lost a crucial text book. The hair is a geometric mod-fop collage, hut the fags he clutches are just fags, not Sobranies. And for the Champion Androgyne of 1993, his sense of melodrama is noticeably on holiday.

In search of a quiet space to conduct the first Suede interview in over a year, we pop into the empty offices next door. A barren, harshly lit white room presents itself as a possibility. It looks promisingly like an Orwellian interrogation cell. Anderson puts his leather jacket down, then picks it up again. "Er... let's go back next door,' he says, pragmatically. "You can pretend we did the interview in there."
 
So we trudge back next door and pile in between the mountains of post-Suede, Suede-esque and subconsciously Suede-shaped demo tapes which cling like fungi to every surface of Nude's mini-A&R department.

Surrounded by a prodigal inheritance of so-so bands, Brett puts his feet up on the desk, leans back and eyes the cassette stacks like some exiled Prince who's come down from his castle to check on developments among the peasants. This time, however, Castle Highgate and the ivory tower rock of 'Dog Man Star' might have been permanently left behind.

 "Smaller! Who the fuck are Smaller?" shouts Brett as the A&R dude vacates his office.
 "You don't need to know, but there's a tape there if you want it," says Mr A&R.
 "Smaller! Hahahahahah!" he cackles. "It's not one of those names that inspires confidence is it! It's like that band Midway Still. What a name that was to choose! It's like, 'Oh. We're still half-way there.' Hahhahahah!"

Anderson might well laugh. If Suede were to rename themselves based on their mid-'96 position, they'd have to call themselves Karmic Surplus. When they first emerged from the punter-free cellars of ignored early-'90's Rock Garden gigs to storm the next year's chars, the young, vital indie-rock hopefuls list consisted off Ned's Atomic Dustbin, Senseless Things, Mega City 4, Carter, The Frank Nad Walter, and the aforementioned Midway Still.

That any of them would inspire a British pop renaissance,, and somehow re-introduce the languid, E-comedown, post-baggy teenage masses to the concept of buying singles was as likely as Bovine Encephalitis getting hip. There was, of course, the touted Kingmaker who Suede were supporting as the Brett-brat's media profile sky-rocketed in the summer of '92. But as the NME live review understated it at the time: "Brett is a man capable of putting some drama back into the chars" Melodrama, actually dahlings. Because Suede went all the way, shoed a generation how it could be done, then simultaneously lost their guitarist and half the plot.

Quite how far the sexy, sing-a-long drama of chartbound Suede kicked open the doors for the ensuing Britpop soap opera is a moot point. There is, however, currently a bullish mood around the Suede camp which asserts that now they've returned from a year's absence with a new line-up and 25 flouncy'n'bouncy tunes stacked up, it's time for the karma bank to cough up its debt.

Earlier, at the preview of six spanking, untouched by the hand of Bernard Butler songs (more of which later), Nude boss Saul Galpin had hopped around his office like a born-again fan. "It's payback time for Suede," he said. "They fuckin' deserve it, mate."

 So, in keeping with the in-house mood of optimism, I plonk a bottle of champagne in front of Brett, who's sipping coffee and showing no signs of being a Moët without his Chandon.
 "Coupla glasses of this and we'll be in court," he says, lifting the first one to his flexing lips.
 Have you ever felt like suing anyone?
 "Yeaasss. But I can't go into it at the moment. There's lots of times I've been on the phone to my fucking lawyers and said blah blah blah. There are lots of people who have said things about the way I live my life which have been completely libellous, but you start slinging mud about and you get very dirty. You've got to keep a bit of fuckin' dignity."
 Do you bear grudges?
 "No, I'm not that sort of person. There's lots of people I'd like to see horribly mutilated. But... you know."

The blooming Brett Anderson sitting here today shows comparatively few signs of bitterness. Comparatively, that is, for someone who, in a short four years, has been initially adored and then critically pulled apart, accused of making fake bisexual claims, picked on for gaining weight, dumped in acrimony by his original guitarist and accused of being a heroin user by his ex-girlfriend's new boyfriend, Damon Albarn.

Having already made his 'I am not a heroin user' statements, he is not today feeling obliged to glorify old rumours with direct comments. There are, however, plenty of Chass'n'Dave -type digs at the author of the allegations, Damon. And when talking about his other major personal irritant, Bernand Butler, he appears to have an ongoing problem pronouncing his name. In Suede-speak '96, Butler has become 'The Bloke Who Left.' Not that Brett's giving any sign of still being cut up about it.

 "There was a huge period of comedown," he says of the split with Butler. "But it was more around the time we were touring. We decided to carry on because I felt there was a spirit to the band. I made that decision instead of calling it a day with Suede."
 Was that ever a consideration?
 "Yeah, at the back of your mind it's got to be. Of course, something has died about the old formation of the band because one of the blokes has left. But I made the decision.
 "We were promoting an album, and it was like playing a load of cover versions almost. Even though I'd co-written the songs - and they were completely written down the middle between me and him.
 "It's difficult when you're playing some bloody festival in Finland and you're knocking out the old tracks and you're just thinking: 'Fucking hell, I can't wait to get back home and write a fucking great album.' As soon as the songs started to flow, you know there was something incredibly exciting on the horizon."
 You're saying writing songs with someone else was liberating?
 "Definitely. The whole shot in the arm thing. It's like a re-birth. Like some born-again Christian feels."
 The new Suede line-up that graced the stage of London's Hanover Grand earlier in the year was indeed showing few signs of suffering from Butler's absence. His pretty boy replacement, Richard Oakes, may not yet be up to Butler's Neil-Young-Of Indie standards, but playing half a set of new songs (which, for the first time, he actually had a hand in writing), he was coming more into his won.

The fan club-only audience screamed, the new songs buzzed with the usual '70s rock dynamics and kissy tarantula romance. It was like the old days, only Anderson's shirt didn't get ripped to pieces and there was the stalky, epicene presence of the new keyboardist-cum-backing singer, hanging out stage left, like some kind of Brett-sanctioned fashion accessory.

 "He's just an incredibly Suede person," says Brett of new guy Neil Codling. "There are some people that are Suede people and other people that aren't. When you find them, you might as well hang on to them."
 The story does that Neil is drummer Simon Gilbert's cousin. He'd been at drama college up North and was subsequently in London going for auditions. One afternoon chez Brett, the singer was airing some demos when young Neil, who happened to be round there, started playing along. It turns out he can sing, play piano and recite the Encyclopedie De Musique backwards in Swahili, so he's invited to rehearsals and swiftly ingested into the band as an official permanent member. He has co-written two songs so far ( working titles 'GBH' and 'Tiswas'!) and Brett can't praise him highly enough:
 "He's becoming a really key member of the band," he says. "I've got a lot of expectations for him."

Since Anderson's no stranger to machiavellian activities, it's possible that the addition of another young, malleable member is a good way for him to bolster his position as post-coup commandant.
If so, he ain't letting on. In fact, he takes great pains to stress the importance of the contributions of everyone from bassist Mat Osman to producer Ed Buller.

 "It's not some dictatorial situation at all," he says. "I'm firm friends with all of them. It's just that I focus it all."
 There's even a first songwriting collaboration with Osman, titled "Europe Is Our Playground", lined up for a B-side. But with the Butler battles of Epic-Tending Guitarist vs Camp Pop Camp behind him, it's hard not to view the new Suede as Brett's baby.

 'Democratic' is the word he uses to describe the new writing process, but he's keen to stress that in the past he was a lot more in control musically than people might thought.
 "All the vocal melodies I write are hugely instrumental in the musicality of the songs," he says, baulking at the suggestion that Butler did all the tunes.
 "My musicianship is something I always underplayed for political reasons, but now I'm not willing to underplay it. But I don't want to talk about the past. It's been analysed and diagnosed enough."

 But do you thing 'Dog Man Star' went a bit off track?
 "Yeah, I do. There's a lot of things I'd change about it. Suede was getting to a period with the last album where certain sides of it were getting obscure. Obviously, we never farted into a tape recorder or anything like that. But with this album I felt that the songs really had to speak for themselves again."

 Maybe it was just the side effects of that big ol' house on the hill. Whatever, the new album Anderson wants us to know, is a damn sight less grand and more connected, and more... Well, the sleeve designer thinks it should be called 'Ultra-Suede', put it that way. The year they took out to write it was, reckons Brett, a necessary regenerative period.

 "You need that sort of fallow period. It's like crop rotation. Like the Middle Ages! You have to leave a field fallow so that it can get strong again. We've been staying out of the silly little egg and spoon race, and just building up an arsenal of songs.

 "I don't think there's anyone else who makes the sort of music that we make. I certainly don't have any ambitions to make the music that many of my contemporaries are making. I feel as though all the rest of them are trying to make one sort of song and I'm trying to make another sort of song. And there's not much intermediate space where we meet, and I like that."

 If the first Suede album was a kinky London strip show, and the second one a doomed global ballet, the their third one is shaping up to be a saccharine, fast-food pop feast. The rockstar-on-cocaine psychosis schtick which hung over 'Dog Man Star' has gone. The songs are fitter, punchier and more effective. And the patented Anderson tales of dizzy-city-kid-in-love are streamlined. Less guitar wank. More vocals. More fun, in fact.

Their first single 'Trash' races past in a scree of Babycham guitars and strings with a helium-high Brett vocal, crooning: "We're thrash you and me/We' the litter on the breeze? We're the lovers on the streets/Just trash me and you/It's in everything we do..."
 "It's a very simple romantic song,' explains Brett. "You could almost take it as autobiographical and I quite like that.'

Of the album tracks so far previewed, there's the tiger-slash guitars and kitschy stomp of 'She'. It's almost glitter-rock with extra fangs and a vocal which goes "She-heeeeh walking like a killer/She-heeeh another night another pillow? Nowhere places, nowhere faces, no one wants to see? No education, it's the arse of the nation..." ('She' is about female feline power. It's dark and quite sexual and sinister." Is that your type of woman? "I don't know what my kind of woman is, really.")

'Saturday Night' is a chandelier-gazing semi-ballad with beautifully plucked, swooping guitars, lavish strings and Disney harmonies. 'Lazy' has a great crystal-shards guitar riff which could almost be The Cult, and a dizzy love-song lyric "You and me all we want to be is lie-zeeeey" ('Lazy' is the same song as 'Trash' really. Just two people off their faces one morning and they look out of their window and there's this procession of people going by.")

'Filmstar' is a pure T-Rex rock-out with a falsetto "yeah yeah yeah" motif and a kind of blank lyric about how easy film stars make it look. And the classic 'The Beautiful Ones' has a delectable riff, a 'Starman'-esque outro and an inspired lyric about "Fag acts, drug acts, suicide,, tattoos? Shaved heads rave head on the pill" ( "It's like a song about most of my friends all these washed-out people trying to enjoy their lives. It's a 'rise up' sort of thing.")

These tales of flamboyantly wasted young lives were inspired by Brett's everyday experiences in London, a city which, judging by the glowing way he talks about it (sunset on piss-pot high street), he's far from bored of.
The straight transference from 'the streets' to the studio was brought about by a great deal of wandering about town, getting deliberately lost (in Dollis Hill!) and all the while clutching a dictaphone to grab the fleeting impression of trash on the breeze.

 Didn't Brett worry about being mown down by a double-decker bus, mid-harmony?
 "I'm pretty fucking blind, actually," he says. "I can imagine myself going that way!"
 Is 'Trash' your way of looking for beauty in crappy existences?
 "I suppose so, but I don't feel I have to look too hard to find anything particularly beautiful. I feel as if I've grown up in that way. I'm not searching for some sort of Aubrey Beardsley, wonderful opium-addict stance on life. It's a lot more real than that."
 Are the people in 'The Beautiful Ones' really your social set?
 "Definitely, yeah. I've got quite a small collection of friends, but they'll always be my best friends. They all work in chip shops."
 Are you sure?
 "They do! I assure you . I can name the chip shop if you want."
 Are they good chips?
 "They're not, actually. Well my best best-friend works in this chip shop in Oxted called Fishies."
 They'll get Suede fans turning up now for the Suede chips.
 "Suede chips! Yeah. Become a Suede person, eat Suede chips!"

 The picture of His Thin White Lordship stalking the streets of London with a tape recorder, popping into the occasional chip shop to nibble diet-consciously at a couple of Suede-fries might be an endearingly eccentric one.
 But quite how far Brett's poignant and rose-coloured A-Z of London life will fare up against the kiddier cartoons of post-Suede, ex-indie stars like Pulp and Blur, is another matter altogether.
 The last two years' internal changes within the band have been matched by the scene restructuring Britpop upheavals outside, and judging by his 'egg and spoon race' observations earlier, the returning Brett is less than enamoured with what he sees.

 "Scenes are gangs of people running in other people's slipstreams. It's a more personal thing with me, because I feel that Suede are responsible for a lot of it. I think it's perpetrated some abysmal music and some pretty good music. But I do feel quite close to it. Strangely close, because we're not part of the pack, but I do think that Suede initiated it by virtue of the kind of songs we were writing two years before anyone though of the term 'Britpop'".
 Does it worry you how you're placed in a football league of successful bands?
 "Yeah," Brett muses, "but I'm more worried about the general obsession with number and this Americanised obsession with success. People have got into this numerical mind set, with adverts in the music press that say: 'Five million record sales worldwide', as though that means anything. Turning music into mathematics! It's absolute bollocks!"

The mathematics of Suede's career are actually more supportive of the band's ability to outlive the arrivistes than the superficial signs might suggest. When they were the talk of the town back in 1993, their debut album, 'Suede', sold 275,000 copies. A year and a half later, with Butler gone, 'Parklife' and 'Definitely Maybe' hogging the charts, and a backlash looming, the somewhat high-falutin' 'Dog Man Star' still sold 235,000.

Suede's position as a giant cult band with loyal fans, may prove to be preferable to the shaky, tabloid 'n' football stadium status acquired by the likes of D***n. Once again, Brett can't resist a dig:
 "Our position at the moment is quite false because out trajectory was interrupted," he says.
 "I challenge any other band that's doing well at the moment to lose a key member and carry on and make great stuff. It requires a fuck of a lot of believe in yourself and quite a lot of talent as well."
 Would you  like to be playing football stadiums?
 "I wouldn't like to be playing football stadiums if what I was playing to the assembled masses was a load of my-old-man's -a-dustman crap, pretending that you come from the fuckin' East End when you're a fuckin' member of the landed gentry. I find that obscene."
 You're talking about Damon Albarn, of course.
 "I find it incredibly false," he says. "People throw the word false at us and we've never been false about anything we've done. I've never tried to come across as anything I'm not. I find this whole inverted snobbery thing about music incredibly condescending to the working class. But at the end of the day, the music's shit, so it doesn't really matter.
 "I come from the background that these people are talking about. Every penny I have I've spent the last ten years sloggin for. When you come from a very poor family - which I do - you try and better yourself. It's not trying to pretend that you buy your clothes from jumble sales."
 Are you more comfortable with Oasis?
 "Yeah, they're just a bunch of blokes having a good time out of it. There's nothing wrong with what they do."
 How do you rate Noel as a songwriter?
 "I think some of the songs are good."

 The boorish new world that Suede return to has gone through a zeitgeist shift, where (with the possible exception of the Maniacs) the meekly chart-pleasing and the plain macho have taken over. For all that, Brett may now wish to set aside the art-rocker/sexual chameleon tendencies so successfully summed up by 'Dog Man Star's homoerotic/consumptive poet LB sleeve; the lingering impression that they're a bit poncey for the times may prove an impediment. Two years ago at Glastonbury, a stoned, beer-sodden field of lads looked on incredulously as Brett put on an outrageously luvvy show of rockstar flouncing. With the skinny, camp outsider angle now being covered well by Pulp, who provide a kind of student-friendly, comedy version of Suede, it's possible that in the Soccer Rock second-half of the '90s their 'bohemian' past has queered the pitch.

 "I definitely think it was to its detriment," says Brett, reflecting on the effects of telling the world of his latent bisexuality. "The thing is, I wouldn't change it. I have no regrets about anything I've ever written or said. At that time, the things I was writing was the way I felt.
 "It's been proved by current musical trends that it's very difficult to stick your neck out an actually remain... Everything now is friendly, isn't it? There's no sense of danger with anyone's writing.
 "As soon as you write about sex, you just get marginalised as 'risqué'. It's so boring because you close so many doors for yourself. So many of our singles have been frowned upon, because they've mentioned some sort of token sexuality. The people in the know marginalise you as some sort of 'clever' writer with some sort of take on sexuality. The people not in the know never get to hear it in the first place, 'cos it doesn't enter the mainstream.
 "Lyrically, this album's a lot less sexually obsessed. Looking back on it, the first album is rampantly sexually obsessed. I guess I'm a lot less sexually obsessed. Probably quite a good thing, though. I'm sick of marginalizing it."
 Do you think the rise of laddism has made it harder for you?
 "We have marginalised ourselves in that way," he concedes, "but I can't write in a different way. And, yeah, our whole stance on life is unfashionable, but what can you do? My face looks like this, this is the way I am, I walk this way... my toes are funny. There's very little you can do about it."
 You can dress like Liam.
 "I wouldn't really want to. Yeahh, you can put a sheet on someone's head, but you whip the head off and you're still the same person."
 The same narcissist?
 "No. I think a lot of people have mistaken narcissism for lack of confidence in what I look like. When I look in a mirror I'm not saying 'Wow you're beautiful!' I'm saying 'Fuckin 'ell, what's that?' I'm fey, and I'm quite effeminate and I really can't do much about it.
 "You do get manipulated a lot by the media, though. Every fuckin' photo shoot I turn up at there's a fuckin' feather boa in the corner! And it's like, 'For fuck's sake!' The only reason there is always one there is because I've always refused to wear the fucker."
 So your life has been plagues by feather boas!?
 "It's not that I've been plagued, but there's been a  kind of misinterpretation that we're quite image-conscious, which is very far from the truth.
 "I probably used to be, but it gets quite boring after a while,. You get people going: 'I've never heard any of your things, but I saw you were in some magazine.' It's like: 'What's the point? I'm not a model and I don't ever want to be."

So we're sitting here with the cigarettes mounting up in the ashtray and the alcohol going down in the bottle, getting closer to some truths about Brett Anderson, and none of them appear to be simple truths.
The bloke holding court in the prosaic little A&R office was never going to swan in wearing a boa, pat me on the arse and scream something from a Vivien Leigh biog. Even the poster of Alex Renton, junkie hero of Trainspotting, which hangs on the wall behind him seems like some sort of unreal, ghostly image.

Brett hasn't even seen the film. Drugs, huh. Whatever adventures Brett's had with the bad honey, they've been writing the context of a highly controlling ego which is too firmly structured to dissolve into a bingeing loser mush. Get his on the subject of substances, though, and the pragmatic hedonist instantly steps forth.
 "I think a lot of people have had a good time and thrown away lots of inhibitions and discovered a new side to themselves through Ecstasy. It's one of those drugs that opens similar doors to something like acid. It's given a sense of friendliness to going out.
 "Anyway, everyone does it. You can't go anywhere in London without people popping pills of some kind, and that's probably a good thing."
 That would be considered controversial in some quarters.
 "It might be considered controversial somewhere, but not to me. When drugs or any sort of off-the-wall lifestyle is part of your life and part of your friends' lives, then it's just... life. It's not trying to be big or clever or 'God isn't everything incredibly cool, and I'm living in this Velvet Underground fantasy.' It's just you go to clubs and everyone's taking drugs and having sex and that's just the way it is." Have you tried any new drugs recently?
 "I have, actually. But I can't really go into it now."
 You're not going to give me the crack revelations, then?
 "No, I can't. I've learned that old one. It's worth a little kick in column inches, then you just regret it. It's a very short buzz, that one. It's a bit of a poppers job, talking about drugs. Sniiiifffffff. Aaaaaaargh. Euurrgh. It's not worth it.
 "Do you want another glass? I'm starting to feel quite pissed actually. I haven't had a drink for three days."

However much diplomacy goes into Anderson's self-explanations, two basic facts shine through. The loss of Butler did sober up a band who were beginning to lose it. And Suede's recent sabbatical has considerably strengthened and stabilised the singer. It's pertinent,, of course, that at the time of 'Dog Man Star' Brett was not only playing Lord Laudanum in Highgate, but was also involved in a girlfriend scenario of much volatility.
 "The last album was pretty much a love song to the same person. This albumen isn't," he says.
I'm more standing back from it."

And it's pertinent that despite admitting to being "extremely bad at relationships", the "romantic flux" of '94 has been replaced by a steady involvement, which he won't, of course, go into. The lofty plot-losing phase has been healed by a certain amount of humdrum domesticity.
"I go to the cinema a lot," he says. "I look after my cats, and... boring things. And get angry with various property people because they haven't come round and fixed my stairs. And go and buy things and make gazpacho, and buy antiques."
Are you a good cook?
"I'm not a bad cook, actually. I make quite a good gazpacho. I can make some good homity pie."
 Sexual back-peddling, drugs obfuscation and homity pie may not sound like an ideal triptych for a the man to live by. Balanced, guarded existences, are not the one thing when you're the last reliable torch-bearer for the entire Bowie-Morrisey inheritance of British Rock (he's actually been listening to a lot of T Rex, Scott Walker and 'Here Come the Warm Jets'-phase Eno). But Anderson's ability to nurture then selectively reveal disparate, contradictory, balancing aspects of his personality is probably what makes him the survivor that he undoubtedly is.
 "you have to be a bit of an all-rounder to be in a band," he says. "You have to be a politician, a fuckin' orator, a musician, this that and the other... you even have to be a fuckin' accountant. It's like being a fuckin' housewife! Five thousand things you have to be excellent at to be any good at it. And I'm quite suited to that, really."
 So all that stuff about you not being able to cope was rubbish?
 "That's wasn't realistic at all. I'm incredibly resilient, actually. A bit too resilient at the end of the day because I have this ability to pick myself up all the time. Nothing really gets to me because it's the music I'm after.
 "People think that we've been lying in bed for the last year, but it hasn't been like that at all. There's a whole feeling that the band is united and incredibly strong again now. We've managed to turn that round and write some of the best songs we've ever written."
 So you're contented with your lot at the moment?
 I suppose so." he ponders, "but I'm not a pies and slippers man. There's a huge, huge, huge, demon inside me that's still driving like fuck and just has got to right a lot of wrongs. It comes down to that grotty word 'success', and ambition and all those other grotty things. Because it does matter how you're perceived; it's important that people take your work seriously. I hate the word 'respect', but it's there innit?"

 And you figure Suede fit well enough into 1996, then? Oasis, the lottery, Pamela Anderson?
 "I really don't know. Those are the things that are thrown into the mainstream. I don't know how you compete with fashion. It's too huge a force to compete with.
 "I feel as though we were sucked into fashion in the early days and from then on you can't ride the horse, because you just turn yourself into some sort of fuckin' caricature of yourself. You've got to exist between the lines. Everyone wants someone to be this huge omnipotent string-puller and at the end of the day people are just like pieces of driftwood on the tide. Litter on the breeze."
 Brett Anderson drains the last few drops from the final glass of toff's lager and checks himself in mid-poetic alco-flow.
 "I'm going for a piss, actually. I'm going to start talking a lot of nonsense soon."
 The studio is beckoning, final mixes on another swooping dashing, pithy London romance are calling, and he figures that's enough rifling through his trash cans for one day. After all, he hasn't nodded out in needle park, or penned his application for US citizenship or choked on his own feather boa. He's not been taking solo lessons from Bryan Ferry, or burying himself in a deluded opium myth.

 Brett Anderson has not, in the slightest, gone to the birds, His Lordship has simply come sown from the hill, without his Butler in two, and brought Suede back from the ashes, in time to remind us what's been missing from the status quo. Sometimes, it's what you haven't done that defines how big a star you are.
 Why do people around you refer to you as His Lordship?
 "I don't know," says Brett, stubbing out his last fag.
 "Because I've got blue blood in me! No, it's something my manager thought up, I think."
 Maybe it was spending that time in the big house in Highgate.
 "Yeah, it reeked of 'Dog Man Star'. And it rubbed off on me, like bad fucking cologne."
 He pauses, reflectively.
 "I don't know... It's because they're all a bunch of c***s.'
 Spoken like a gentleman, who's back in touch with real life.