SUEDECRAZY - Magazines (The Face)

The Face

What are you gonna do for the millenium, 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. 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."
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?"
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 a guarateeing 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
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 Coming 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"
Neil 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 these, because he doesn’t have a credit card
A couple of years ago, Simon had the unsettleing 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."
The rest of Suede are convinced that Richard’s unflappable confidence and competence foreshadows a catastrophic nervous breakdown when Richard is about 35.
"Black is the furthest away from being naked," observes Richard randomly. Is it? "Well, when you’ve got clothes on, you are a very light colour, so I suppose we wear black to ….cover our hidden selves. "Cos we’re pasty white boys and we look ill."
"Black is the furthest away from being naked," observes Richard randomly. Is it? "Well, when you’ve got clothes on, you are a very light colour, so I suppose we wear black to ….cover our hidden selves. "Cos we’re pasty white boys and we look ill."
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 favourite film?…and stuff like that. They dont’ really ask about the music - they know that inside out. They want your mind instead.
Brett has just returned from Barbados (Suede fans will be horrifeld to learn that he has an actual suntan)
When he was a kid, Brett’s favourite book is Animal farm,. "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 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 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 to plead and plead.
Damon Albarn, whom Brett once descibed as "a talentless public schoolboy who’s made a living out of patronising the working classes".
His mother named him Brett after Roger Moore’s character, Lord Brett Sinclair, in her favourite TV show The Persuaders
Brett’s father drove taxis and was obsessed with both classical music and great historical figurs like Nelson, Liszt and Churchill. Brett loved his mother, played football for his country and was a commited 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 better than pop music?’
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."
Now Anderson Senior plays Suede in his cab as well as classical music. Fans of the band occassionally track him down, and he sometimes lets them in to his council house to see Brett’s old bedroom. He kept it as it was when his son left for London.
Brett now lives in a cluttered house in Notting Hill Gate with bare floorboards and a studio at the bottom of the garden.
Head Music - features a Suedeboy and a Suedegirl side by side, their minds physically connected in the way that the band seem believe their fans, those disparate Suede people, are connected too. The boy and girl aren’t models but Brett’s girlfriend Sam and surely the archetypal Suedeboy, Neil Codling.
Should we take it that you have used Heroine?
Yes - Brett
Brett says to a shopowner that he works for a magazine called Loaded.
What’s your favourite possesion?
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 in 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.

NME Interview
Uncut Magazine
Back to main page