story by Tom Lanham

Spotlights slice through the London chill in daggers of indigo, purple and aquamarine. Hundreds of pop fans huddle together for warmth, eyes fixed on a single figure. It's another December concert at the Roundhouse on Old Chalk Farm Road, a surreal stone venue that resembles a medieval castle turret and is currently as cold as your average igloo. Onstage, clad in skin-tight black shirt and trousers, Brett Anderson doesn't seem to notice the cold as he leads his chart-topping ensemble Suede - for legal reasons, still known Stateside as the London Suede - through it paces. With serpentine grace, he wraps himself around a mic stand only a tad thinner than he is, flicks lopsided Oscar Wilde bangs from his forehead, and proceeds to jog through the rock posturing manual, page by preening page.

Voice wheezing with nasal Diamond Dogs allofness, frontman Anderson launches into "Trash," the opening track fron Suede's new LP, Coming Up: "Maybe, maybe it's the clothes we wear/The tasteless bracelets and the dye in our hair/Maybe it's our kookiness... But we're trash, you and me/We're the litter on the breeze..." Teenage guitarist Richard Oakes - who replaced founding member Bernard Butler last year, amid a flurry of tabloid controversy - lays down nettle-sharp riffs, throwing his entire body into every chord. At stage left, the latest band addition, keyboardist Neil Codling, conjures tandem ethereal passages - again - straight out of the Bowie catalog, this time circa Heroes.

The best way to summarize the evening? Two words: Suede's back.

And when Anderson sits down to discuss the record a few weeks earlier, you can tell by his sly smile and assured manner: He's confident that he's just completed a modern-rock masterpiece. "Trash" is merely the first whiff; the rest of the album follows suit, centering on the seedier aspects of London street life in gorgeous, flowery anthems such as "Lazy," "Filmstar," "Beautiful Ones," and the subtle drug allusion of "The Chemistry Between Us." "And the decadence I celebrate is quite ordinary, I suppose," he notes, never having shied away from his own hard-partying lifestyle in the press. "This whole record was meant to be an ordinary celebration of low-rent life, really honest, quite unglamorous, and very much based around England. Most of the songs are about my friends and the way I see life, and coming from a much more ordinary perspective than the last record {Dog Man Star}, which was written from an estranged, sort of ivory-tower perspective. This was written in a London flat with a couple of friends around me and a cat and stuff like that - it wasn't this big sort of paranoid pseudo-rock star thing."

Anderson has had reasons to be paranoid, however. Suede's fey self-titled debut in '93 set the band up as overseas chart saviors; a year later, critcs slavered like hungry jackals around Dog Man Star, gnawing the gossipy bone's of Butler's departure. Butler had co-written all the material with Anderson, they reasoned, so this surely must foretell the end of the outfit. Recalling tohse predictions, Anderson leans back in his studio-couch seat and chortles. "The whole build-'em-up, knock-'em'down thing in Britain - everyone knows about it, it's a shitty thing that happens, but the one good thing you can say about it is, if you survive its difficult machinery, actually avoid the knives and daggers that are thrown at you, it actually makes you stronger. And I'm a strong believer in the power of change - the band, in its previous life, had gone as far as it could. I think it just changed naturally, and I'm glad it has."

In the next room, engineers are polishing the final mixes of several B-sides, to beef up the latest U.K. single (as well as the long delayed U.S. release of Coming Up). Anderson - again dressed in all black, bangs drooping dangerously over one eye as he puffs a customary Silk Cut cigarette - cocks an ear, nods to the beat, then continues on the paranoid theme. Late one evening a few months back, he relates, a gaggle of Suede boosters discovered where he lived and came knocking. Apologizing, he turned them away and stumbled back to bed. "And the next day, there was graffiti up and down the street with my address written on it," he shudders. "The local tube station had my address on it, and they even handed out flyers giving my address out, saying 'If you wanna hassle this guy, this is where he lives.' So you sometimes get fucking lunatics and fucking pricks, and it was a real pain in the ass - I had to move because it was so difficult.

"The thing is, you musn't let things like that fuck you up, because that's all too easy. I've been through phases of paranoia where I basically walk 'round London in a disguise - a baseball hat, a pair of sunglasses and a beard. But I though 'Hang on! I'm not going to live my life like this, running awat from everyone.' People have a problem with you, then fuck it - let it get to you and that means you've got a problem with yourself, and you've got to get over that kind of crap." And now that Suede has fallen into favor again, Anderson is regularly invited to this or that A-list soiree, begged to join this or that secret stars-only club. "But I don't consider sitting aroundwith a couple of people from some indie band a particularly privileged position,' he sneers. "I don't hang out with those sort of people - I could, if wanted to, but it's not my sort of scene. I hang out with real people - that's why the songs I write have a touch of reality to them."

For Coming Up, Anderson often strooled through his hometown sans disguise, microcassette recorder in hand to track his thoughts as each journey progressed. And when he sings about "the kids getting out of their heads" who are "high on diesel and gasoline, psycho for drum machine, shaking their bits to the hits" on Coming Up, it isn't intended to have any negative connotations. "It's not supposed to be a fucked-up record at all," Anderson wants to clarify. "It's not supposed to be like 'Oh my God, I'm so fucked up and isn't the world a fucked-up place' thing. It's actaully meant to be a quite happy record, but quite a realistic record as well. And it's saying that it's too easy to say life is shit, and that the key to life is to try and be optimistic about it no matter what shit is thrown at you.

"There's a lot of shit going on, alot of sadness in the world, and to actually get something out of it, I think, is the key to life. So trying to find a community within a fucked-up world is quite a goal for me. Lots of the songs are about other people, because I find the warmth of other people quite a commendable thing to strive for." And the 'diesel' he mentions? Sounds like fuel for a decadent thought. Anderson takes another puff and grins wickedly. "Lots of it is in kind of an altered state, maybe. But that doesn't make it any less valid!"

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