Time to get Wilde in the streets with Suede's Brett Anderson By Tom Lanham

Brett Anderson has been rummaging through a London studio for five minutes, looking for a match, a lighter, anything to fire up his Silk Cut cigarette. Finally, success. And the slender, black-clad bohemian poses coolly in the rec room doorway, blowing smoke rings at the ceiling. Now where was he? Oh yes. Offering helpful hints to young, would-be songwriters.

"My advice is, always carry a Dictaphone [that's a microcassette recorder to us Yanks] around with you because your best ideas will undoubtedly come when you're sitting on the bus, in line at the supermarket or walking down the street. Some of my best songs and best ideas I've actually come up with walking down the street, so I have to sing into this machine and people look at me like I'm fucking insane."

Far from it. A good deal of Anderson's concepts for _Coming Up_ (Columbia) - -- the street-smart new album from his fey glam-pop combo Suede -- was scripted on several of the singer's long walks through his hometown of London. The record is easily the group's strongest, full of creaky powerchords (courtesy of new teenage guitarist Richard Oakes, who replaced the departing Bernard Butler), sponge-fluffy keyboards (from new keyboardist Neil Codling) and histrionic, faux-Bowie crooning from perfect showman Anderson. "Trash," "Lazy," "The Beautiful Ones" -- it's Anderson's decadent, drug-taking g-g-g-generation, captured in their native nighttime habitat and in all their youth-swaggering glory. Like the best romantic poets, he sees decadence as something to sing about, while HITS' own foppish Tom "Who You Calling Oscar Wilde?" Lanham merely wallows in it.

Q. You've always adored decadence in history.

A. The artists I've been into have always been the ones that I've seen a darker side to. I don't know why, but I can't really take an artist seriously if they're squeaky-clean. I always like it when you find out a bit of dark thing about them. And it's always these kinds of really straight stars who've actually had these really trashy lives...which is quite interesting.

Q. And now you've graduated to trumpeting on your own decadence in tracks like "Lazy."

A. The decadence I celebrate is quite ordinary, I suppose. This whole record was supposed to be a quite ordinary celebration of low-rent life, really honest, quite unglamourous, and very much based around England. Most of the songs are about my friends and the way I see life. They come from a much more ordinary perspective than the last record, which had an estranged sort of isolated ivory tower perspective.

This album was written in a little flat with a couple of friends and a cat around m. It wsn't this big paranoid, pseudo-rock star thing.

Q. It sounds like you're also analyzing your own stardom.

A. I've always analyzed it from a cause-and-effect view. It's impossible to think of yourself as a star...the people who actually think of themselves that way are deluded idiots. They're the kind of people who just aren't stars at all or who are completely insane. As soon as you think of yourself like that, you just become absolute crap. And when I've written about stars, like in "Heroine" on the last album, it's been from the perspective of someone who's exploded from stardom and is fascinated by how it affects them. "Heroine" is supposed to be a double-take on pornography and film stars and that obsession and intensity they create. And "Filmstar," on this album, is very much about that -- just a kid looking at a screen and the kind of emotions that it drives out of him.

Q. Within decadence, of course, lies the pursuit of pleasure.

A. There's a real difference between America and Britain in that respect. America's going through this almost Puritanical thing in pop culture -- all these bands at the moment are denied any sort of hedonism. Everyone's going to rehab and admitting their sins, saying, "Oh, I've been bad, and now I'm gonna try to be good." And everyone's saying, "I don't wanna be a star, I just wanna be a normal guy, play the guitar and earn millions of dollars." And I find that quite false.

In England, there's a real acceptance of hedonism at the moment, the whole "loaded" and "lad" culture. There's a real club-oriented culture where everyone just wants to have a good time. I look around London, and all people wanna do is get out of their faces. And basically, it has to do with the type of drugs people are using. People in America are using heroin, and it still has such a taboo connected with it. But in England, people are generally using ecstasy and coke, which is much more recreational. So they can feel like they're not entering into a lifestyle, even though they are.

Q. How important is that type of pleasure to you?

A. I don't know. It's difficult to say, isn't it? It's very important when I can experience it, but when you're in a band, it's just impossible to actually enjoy yourself half the time. You have to have really strict control over yourself. This image of people in bands lying on the floor, drugged out of their face, rolling into a recording studio and shouting something into a microphone, then rolling out again...it's just complete nonsense. That might be true for people who don't sing their own words, but with Suede, I've always had to maintain an edge and a control.

Last night, for instance, I went to bed early and didn't even have a drink because I've got studio work at the moment. I have to concentrate on these things, and there's no way anything would get done if I spent all my time in some drugged-out stupor. I work really, really hard, and working hard means being quite strict about yourself. And I guess the pleasure thing fits into that, because you just need a safety valve. You need to just switch off sometimes. And sometimes, after working so fucking hard, I need to just obliterate my mind and reach some state of natural calm. And the only way to do that is to virtually disconnect your brain and your body -- get a pair of pincers out and fucking snip the cable so you don't actually think. I like to experience a state of stupidness sometimes.

Q. Don't you ever worry about going too far? Or worse yet -- killing yourself?

A. Not at all. Death is the least worrying thing that could possibly happen in your life. You reach this state where you just don't have to think anymore. That's the quest most people are after, and why they take drugs...to actually turn your brain off. I don't have a quest for death at all, but I don't have a quest to escape death, either. If it comes, it comes. If it doesn't, it doesn't. I don't really care. There's nothing I'm scared of at all.

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