I just don't know where to begin.  I could start with David Bowie or with A Clockwork Orange, with glamour and foppery.

We could talk about the pernicious influence of America and how suede are out to put an end to it, or I could just talk about their fringes.  We could mull over the sick mess of indie rock or mourn the death of style.  The options are endless.

But the best thing to say is this;  of all the bands in the world, the one least likely to say 'Motherf**ker' or develop a boring drug addiction or turn up onstage in a baseball cap are suede.  Oh dad, they're driving me mad.  Come see.
 

VERSE
suede are four lanky streaks of piss with not a discernible arse between them.  They could all do with a haircut and they get through a packet of Benson & Hedges far too quickly for their own good.  They think they're God's gift and, uniquely of all the boys who believe this, they might be right.

Suede's entire recorded output to date is one measly single and yet they are the band you have to have an opinion about.  Now, you can be a damn fool about this if you like and say words like 'hype' and 'fey' and 'Flowered Up' and 'contrivance'.  Or you can face the incontrovertible fact that suede are the most exciting English guitar band since, well, whenever, and they represent the answer to our prayers.

suede are the kind of group you despaired of ever hearing again: a heady, preening, flamboyant mix of the visceral and the cerebral, the gentleman and the savage.  They're the stimulant after the depressant, the storm after the calm.

Do a band who have only made one record deserve to be on the cover of NME?  Well, that rather depends on the record, doesn't it?

'The Drowners', suede's only record to date, remember, is a sublime reminder of what pop music can be like when it gets up off its knees and stops being embarrassed about itself.  Alone among the indie guitar records of recent months, it is neither chummy nor bouncy nor fixated with the bone-headed slob culture across the water.  It is mysterious and daring and egocentric in the way that all great English pop has been from Bowie to The Smiths.  And, buried away on what used to be rather quaintly called 'the flip' was a song called 'My Insatiable One', a song you can call a classic even at this close proximity.

Very soon after you read this, you will be able to buy a new suede single, 'Metal Mickey', which will confirm your worst fears.  A bunch of opinionated, passionate, self-possessed dandies are at large and making records.  And one of them is called Brett, for God's sake.
 

CHORUS
When I arrive at the recording studio, a lovely converted church in Islington, three-quarters of suede are watching Countdown.  In the corner a phone is permanently ringing Brett's home number where we think he languishes asleep.  We are terrible at the numbers game and none of us realise that 'GIRLCHEAT' is an anagram for 'LETHARGIC'.

Yesterday, a Japanese journalist asked suede why they are obsessed with grammar.  They thought about it for half an hour.  They may be obsessed with grammar, but they are very bad at Countdown…

Deh-de.  Deh-de.  Deh-de-de-de…. Pooooong!!

Upstairs in the pub is a lounge with book-lined shelves and sumptuous leather armchairs.  Very English, very appropriate.  Brett has arrived and he and Simon and Matt and Bernard sit around me expectantly.  Suede are not bored by interviews yet and they exude a certain quiet, nervous intensity lightened by flashes of extravagant zeal.  I don't think I can possibly match the question about grammar, so instead I ask Brett whether suede were formed out of enthusiasm or despair.

"Contrary to popular belief, we didn't form as a reaction to anything.  Well, not a deliberate reaction anyway.  We just looked around us and knew we could do better.  Suede are a reaction to endless hours of watching Europe on Top Of The Pops, not Northside or Slowdive or whatever."

Matt the bass player is even more extravagant.  "To us it was just the most perfectly natural thing in the world.  I assumed that everyone wanted to be a pop star in the way that some people assume that everybody wants to be a first division footballer.  All my life has been a succession of buying instruments and stuff.  Ut we're not musos.  We're very…. Home-made.  Maybe that's why we're so interesting.  But we've never wanted to be graphic designers or actors or whatever.  It was either this or working in a shipping office.  This or a paper round."

Hold hard!  Not interested in anything else.  Surely if you weren't interested in anything else, your records would be crap?  What do they know of pop music that only pop music knows, to paraphrase Rudyard Kipling.  Brett is adamant.

"Oh, we're aware of other art but for us any other kind of art would be a failure.  I studied architecture at college and it was just the biggest yawn.  It wasn't creativity, it was merely about ladders and getting on.  The strength of good music is it works immediately.  It doesn't have to be dealt with theoretically.  We don't play games. We're very straightforward.  I often write whole lyrics in the studio.  The idea of sitting poring over a typewriter bores me.  For a supposedly cerebral band, we're really quite thoughtless," he concludes brightly.

Ask suede about the misconception that surrounds them and they breathe an audible sigh of resignation.  Matt articulates.

"That we're a deliberate reaction against shoe-gazing.  That we specifically set out to supplant the Blurs and Rides of this world.  That we know what we're doing and we created this beautiful thing to piss everyone off.  We don't know what we're doing.  Our early interviews were gruesome, tortuous affairs because we haven't sat around thinking this through.  In that sense we're four ordinary people just doing something we know is right."

Brett: "it's like this word 'glam' that follows us around.  We do like certain artists who perhaps fell under that umbrella in the past, but we aren't about cartoon glam rock.  However, we are about performance.  We are complete show-offs."

Bernard seizes on this point: "Yes, but we don't discuss what we're going to wear.  We don't brief the roadies about which song we're going to smash our guitars up in.  We're not studied."

What's wrong with being studied?  One of the reasons most indie music is so dreadful is that you know therse clowns haven't given it any thought or imagination.

"Yes," says Bernard, "but look at most indie bands - The T-shirts, the jumping up and down.  I don't want this to become a slag-off but look at Thousand Yard Stare and Mega City Four.  That's studied.  We're more natural than that."

As Matt suggests, suede do represent a violent shift away from what has sadly become synonymous with indie guitar pop; a cheery, sold by the yards, mediocre mateyness where the selling-point is 'Don't be afraid, we're just like you.  We're not special'.

"It's appalling.  It assumes that the audience are all the same.  It assumes that the audience are as dull as the band.  What an insult!  We're all morons together.  It's the lowest common denominator approach."

Bernard: "It shows a kind of contempt for your audience to work on the principle that they're all moshpit indie kids and cider junkies.  They're all different.  We're not interested in saying, 'I have a laugh.  Stay down there.  You can never be anything.'  Our performance is about extremes, not averageness.  I want to write good songs.  Why be uninspired when you can try harder?"

Brett: "It's not necessarily about jumping around or dressing up or being flamboyant.  It's just about having a certain depth, a certain presence.  Ian Curtis had it.  I think it's the height of arrogance to go onstage and not be extraordinary and brilliant.  It's the height of arrogance to make average music.  You know, people are listening!"

ask suede which interview cliché they abhor the most and the response is collective and instantaneous.  "We're just playing music for ourselves and if other people like it, it's a bonus."

As Matt says, "It wouldn't matter to us how brilliant our music was.  If other people didn't like it, we would stop.  There would be no point."
 

VERSE
"On the escalator, they took it out on him."   My Insatiable One

An outrageous thought occurred to me whilst listening to 'Metal Mickey' the other day.  Most bad English pop can be ascribed to one thing: that it is no longer possible in England to get your head kicked in for having the wrong haircut.  In The Third Man, Orson Welles comments wryly on the Swiss that in 400 years of peace they managed to produce the cuckoo clock.  Think about it; 13 years of Thatcherite economic miracle and no class conflict and what do you get?  Shoe-gazing.

Suede's bristling, sparky, flouncing antagonistic pop is an echo of a different age, when pop was more than just a bit of fun, when haircuts mattered.  Suede, by their own admission, have had "typically banal suburban English childhoods".  And yet their music reeks of British madness and the golden age of English violence.  Not the violence of the Uzi and the baseball bat, but that f**ked up, sexually repressed, behind the curtains, behind the bike sheds, quintessentially English violence.  Morrissey has taken to waving flags; suede are celebrating England in all its crackpot, febrile brilliance in an altogether more edifying way.

Brett: "We have a very strong sense of where we come from.  We are champions of ordinary life.  I find England strange and unique and beautiful.  And for me, London is the magnification and distillation of all that. 'All the love and poison of London'(a quote from a new song 'He's Dead'), I don't find America cool, I've never been remotely interested in the idea of American cool.

"It pisses me off immensely that America had kidnapped British music.  And I find the idea of British bands singing in American accents horrifying.  All great British pop artists from The Beatles to The Fall have celebrated Britain in some way.  Whereas to me, America is exemplified by some dullard like Bruce Springsteen."

Matt: "Let's face it, The Beatles were a huge one-nil.  I'm not anti-American but I've never been impress by it.  Never been impressed by James Dean or any of that.  I'm not remotely attracted by New York.  When I went to America, it was worryingly exactly as I thought.  I mean, all the streets are laid out in a grid.  Doesn't that say everything?  In Britain, it takes this convoluted, arcane knowledge to get from one bus stop to the next."

This is more like it.  The current English fixation with American rock is patently about as nutritious as cyanide.  Yeah, yeah, Nirvana are great.  But so are suede.  Greater, in fact.  For in place of all that mall-boredom and 'shan't tidy my room' vapidity, here's a band trading on a sense of mystery that's being stripped from pop.

Brett openly embraces that "claustrophobic stifled Englishness.  It's conducive to great art.  Compare an American cop show to a Mike Leigh film or an Alan Ayckbourn play.  Americans will tell you anything.  There's no secrets.  Whereas with the English, you can see it in their faces.  Their dark secrets.  It's not cop show cartoon violence.  It's that smashing up the dole office violence."

"Love in an Elevator", spits Matt.  "Life's not like that.  In America there's no tragedy, no failure, no impotence or premature ejaculation.  Los Angeles is the least glamorous, least interesting city in the world.  All it is is sunny!  God knows what you must have to be like to live there."
 

CHORUS
When the suede backlash(currently pencilled in for next March) kicks in, you just know what the accusations will be.  That the emperor's new clothes are, in reality, a big girl's blouse.  That the testosterone levels are way too low.  All that mincing and banging the mike against your pert little behind,  I mean it's hardly Ice-T, is it?

If these sentiments strike a chord in you, then you are mad and sick and you should be shot like a dog in the street.

Brett: "I'm sure that already there are plenty of people who are mortally offended by what they see as our feyness.  And there is, unashamedly, an element of that to us.  People like that will never like us.  But there is no element of dishonesty about what we do.  Believe me, if we wanted to be glam or fey or whatever, we could do it brilliantly.  Quite often, we have tremendous ideas along those lines but then we check ourselves.  Usually by saying, 'We're not Pulp, you know.'"

Matt is only semi-joking when he says, "You want authenticity, mate?  We lived in emotional and physical squalor for the year-and-a-half that everyone ignored us.  We were despised.  By fans, venues, bands and journalists.  It was typical for Brett to borrow a quid in the morning - 50p for his dinner an d50p for the cat's."

Brett groans.  "Oh stop, you're beginning to sound like that Monty Python sketch."

MIDDLE EIGHT
Someone Just looked over my shoulder and sniffed, "suede eh?  I'm very suspicious of anyone that gets everyone coming in their pants so readily."  These are clearly the words of a lunatic, but there may just lurk the tiniest smidgen of a point.  Suede themselves are beyond suspicion.  But I don't relish the thought of lots of little suedes running around this time next year.  Neither do they.

Bernard: "That will inevitably happen to anyone who's any good.  Look at the aftermath of The Smiths.  They effectively wrecked English guitar pop for five years because all these terrible imitators came along.  Bands who copied the sonic blueprint but who hadn't understood anything of the idea.  We didn't have anything like that to work from gladly.  Just lots of afternoons sitting in my shed trying to write 'Pantomime Horse' and getting terribly depressed about the indifference we faced.  We were very much the runts of the litter."

Brett: "We avoided the microscope that's trained on the London indie scene by being basically excluded from it.  Our apprenticeship was served playing the Rock Garden to 20 people and supporting funk bands at the Amersham Arms.  And it was intensely frustrating because we knew we were so much better than all the were having all this attention lavished on them.  How does it go, how could they see the love in their eyes and still not believe us?"

He really must stop saying things like that.
 

GUITAR SOLO
Bernard the guitarist is ostensibly the most intense of suede, his voice often trailing off in sotto voce exasperation as he seeks to make his point.  Bernard clearly loves his chosen role so much that, more in sadness than in anger, he bemoans the lack of ambition against his fellow musicians outside suede.

"I'm not saying that people should be terribly musicianly, but I'm saying they shouldn't be satisfied with what they do.  Why go in for all this aimless strumming when you can try, actually try, to write a great riff, a great chord change, a great song?  Why do all these people want to be Birds Of A Feather when they could be Fawlty Towers.

"All those shoe-gazing bands getting described as beautiful and ethereal.  This was the ultimate triumph of effects over talent.  These sounds are created at the push of a button.  These sounds are not the product of talent or ingenuity but the product of Yamaha.  How can that be beautiful?"

There is something refreshing and invigorating about this righteous indignation.

"Brett sings.  Actually sings.  You could play his vocal lines on a piano because they're actual tunes, not some mumbling and whispering."  He thumps his palm against his chest, "It's coming from here.  Those f**king bands with their guitar lines you can't hear and their lyrics about nothing.  It's fear.  Fear that someone will find out that they've got nothing, absolutely nothing to say."
 

REPEAT CHORUS TO FADE
At the end of my evening with suede I was drunk.  It would be poetic to claim that I was drunk solely on possibilities and drama and mystery.  But it also had a lot more to do with the lager and the Southern Comfort.

We played a stupid game that involved making up band names and Matt proved himself invincible with efforts such as DAD, vigorous Storage, Mugger Anonymous, Lung and Venomous Unit.  Then he lost his bag, and all his money and we had to have a whip round for the cab.  Affable drummer Simon uttered not one word during the interview, but as he left he whispered in my ear, "You don't think I hogged that, do you?"

It had been a profitable evening but one nagging doubt remained.  What of the Japanese journalist and her question about grammar?  It was so intelligent, so abstract and thought-provoking.  What did she mean?

"Oh yes.  It was a fascinating question.  We really mulled it over.  Tried very hard to apply what she was saying to the music.  But we couldn't so we asked her to elucidate and she said, "You're obsessed with grammar.  I mean, you very grammarous".

Four lanky streaks of piss with not a discernible arse between them.  And the most exciting new guitar group in Britain and hence, by implicit implication, the world.  Another ray of hope.  At the moment, your appetite for them should be insatiable.