Afternoons With the Blinds Drawn

by Brett Anderson

  Thinking that he could inject some of the off-kilter pop sensibility present in his work with Beck and Air we had met up with Tony Hoffer and got on really well. Tony is a very smart guy, extremely talented and diligent and great fun to be with but, to put it simply, he just wasn’t right for Suede. Sometimes these things just don’t work out despite how much everyone wants them to. For a session that was to end so disastrously though there were plenty of light episodes along the way and the mood was surprisingly jovial. A bizarre moment came when Tony thought we should fly in a big-shot LA keyboard player to nail a part. Once an agreement was made and flights were booked the musician’s management duly presented ours with a surreal contractual requirement stipulating his need for ‘twenty-four-hour access to roast lamb’, something that still makes me chuckle to this day. The levity of the session belied a creeping sense of panic though. Tony’s musical language was very different from ours: he spoke in much more technical, less song-based terms and it always felt that we were pulling in different directions, him trying to tease out some sort of light, modern groove-based pop sensibility and us being too set in our ways to be able to respond properly resulting in an incompatible mesh of ideas. To be fair to Tony his remit from the record company was probably to try to stretch the band and drag it towards unfamiliar territories but I think Suede is one of those bands that evolves incrementally and on its own terms, and so putting on such unfamiliar clothes was always going to come across as a bit like a middle-aged man trying to dress like a teenager. Looking back it’s incredibly sad that we all felt such a burning need to subvert our oeuvre. It’s almost that by this point we had become a bit embarrassed by what we had done in the past, so much so that it seemed we were trying to wriggle away from it like a squirming child trying to escape the suffocating clutches of their grandmother. We wanted to distance ourselves so much that we went about what effectively amounted to a campaign of self-sabotage, coming up with mawkish, deliberately saccharine songs like ‘Positivity’ as attempts to confound the fan base and to somehow realign and reinvent ourselves. I recall writing the lyrics to that song in a rehearsal room in London and being filled with a strange kind of truculent, bloody-minded rush knowing that what I simplistically saw as the archetypal Suede fan would hate its sentiment, seeing its values as being diametrically opposed to the conventional mores of our canon. It almost got to a strange point where when making judgement calls we would ask ourselves, ‘What would Suede do?’ and then proceed to do the exact opposite regardless of whether the decision was actually the right one or not. By this time it felt like we were wandering through a wilderness of mirrors, trying to catch a glimpse towards the right path within a bewildering barrage of reflections. And round and round we went getting tighter and tighter up to the nail, submerged within that strange bunker mentality which drifting, untethered, unmonitored residential-studio time can often instill. More cumbersome hybrid songs appeared – sensitive acoustic pieces like ‘Untitled’ and ‘When The Rain Falls’ – which we ruined by trying to drag them into a territory into which they just didn’t want to be dragged, adding synthesisers where they weren’t needed and drum machines where none were required, frantically trying to force them to adopt some sort of modernity like a tragic dad trying to dress like his son. By the time we had struggled back up the M23 and cleared our heads and listened to the monitor mixes everyone felt that the mess of ideas pointed to the fact that we had got it all horribly wrong.

  We took the dizzying, drastic step of deciding to start again from scratch, reconvening at Townhouse Studios and this time hiring Stephen Street as a safe pair of hands to try to guide us back towards the shores of sanity. Stephen had of course worked with the Smiths on most of their seminal records and so collaborating with him was in many ways an exciting experience for me, embedded as those records were within the very fabric of my childhood. His track record speaks for itself and I very much enjoyed his clarity and drive which were utterly galvanising. In many ways though it’s a shame that his work with us coincided with our career nadir as I feel that the failure of the record prevented any further journey together. By this point we had possibly become tired of the songs and even Stephen’s great skills couldn’t quite tease out in us that wild-eyed excitement that is always required as we dutifully ran through what were in some cases the third or fourth version of the same track, a dulling, colourless process that I think bled through somehow into the final recordings. When assessing that album I’m always slightly sorry that yet again we ignored the real gems from that period – ‘Simon’, ‘Cheap’ and ‘Oceans’ – and instead bewilderingly decided to include insipid trudge-throughs like ‘One Hit To The Body’, the sort of song that wouldn’t have even been considered as a B-side in the early days, our acuity muddied and our perspective utterly clouded. Looking back with the self-righteousness of hindsight it seems staggering to me that somehow a track like ‘Simon’ didn’t make it on to the album. It was arguably the last great song we wrote during this period and even though conceived as more of an interim piece in terms of quality and ambition and sweep it was a completely different beast to most of the runts that did end up making the cut. I suppose we saw its inherent baroque grandeur as too much part of the Dog Man Star sort of sound-world we were trying to disown. Sadly by this point even though we thought we knew what we didn’t want I don’t think we had any idea of what we did want. When I look at this period I sometimes think it’s more a failure of curation rather than a failure of creativity: we had allowed the manifesto to dictate the form, replacing good songs with weaker ones because they fitted the remit of the record better. Whenever we have released albums there have always been moments of quiet panic that have consumed us and those around us and distorted our judgement. At these times we have tended to lack the bravery to let the more delicate material speak, deciding instead to give the more formulaic songs a platform: the singles, the meaty-sounding rock tracks, the kind that have worked for us in the past. Unfortunately with this record the ones that fitted that description were, despite exceptions, decidedly weaker than on previous albums which meant that below-par rockers like ‘Streetlife’ had pushed aside wistful tracks like ‘Cheap’. Also I think that my continuing, unpoliced meddling in the musical side of things had real consequences in weakening our work. The songs I wrote for Head Music and A New Morning just don’t have the same blend of melody and tension that those written with Bernard and Richard and Neil have. I didn’t understand the importance of what has become known as ‘the Suede chord’ – that moment of unexpected, jarring drama that lots of our best work contains. Instead my chord sequences tended to be anodyne and simplistic, often just polite accompaniments to the narrative and the top-line melodies.

  There were a couple of moments on the album though of which I’m still proud: the barrelling, driving guitar rock of ‘Obsessions’, one of Richard’s many great lost pieces to which I penned a kind of modernised version of Gershwin’s ‘They Can’t Take That Away From Me’ and Mat’s only other great moment so far as a co-writer, the reflective ‘Lost In TV’, a song that extended some of Dog Man Star’s themes of disintegrated lives lived through television programmes and fictional characters. But it was all too little and all too late. By the time we had put the desultory finishing touches on the album we were so exhausted by its onerous, enervating gestation that we had simply lost all enthusiasm, our energy ground down by a kind of ‘song fatigue’ whereby we had become so familiar with the music that it had lost all meaning, rather like the phenomenon of repeating the same word over and over and finding that you can no longer really hear it in the same way as before. With the clarity of hindsight A New Morning should never have been released. To be fair to Saul he did have serious misgivings but by this point his influence had waned as Nude had folded in a kind of post-nineties hangover and we had been acquired by Epic Records, his role reduced to that of ‘consultant’. I wish we had had the bravery to just stop and breathe and reflect but instead we steeled ourselves and don
ned our masks of brittle optimism and pushed onwards, responding to the ever-present need for ‘momentum’: music business-speak for a kind of blind panic, a condition that renders everyone infected bullish and myopic and temporarily bereft of wisdom. Also by this point we had wasted so much money on the album’s meandering genesis via recording and re-recording that we couldn’t afford not to release it, Suede Ltd needing the touring income and all of the other financial incentives that releasing records triggers. Of course it was a fatal error for us to put business decisions before the sanctity of our work, a mistake I have since vowed never to repeat, but to be brutally frank maybe by this point we sadly just didn’t care enough.

  After the drama of the last chapter it’s hard not to make this final part feel slight and inconsequential. I have to admit that this is the episode of my career of which I am least proud and for which it feels that even the back story is slender and lightweight; a strangely incommensurate and underwhelming coda to a dramatic tale. There is only a small handful of songs of which I’m proud so it feels slightly silly going into detail about the birth of those pieces I feel don’t deserve that respect. In many ways I wish we hadn’t made this album. Even the artwork feels incongruous next to the visual narrative we had been carefully developing for a decade; a simplistic, featureless sort of logo image. Whereas previously we had created record covers that triggered our looming, polar themes of sensuality and sadness, the sleeve to A New Morning was soulless and blank and oddly corporate, bereft of any real personality or human content, perhaps a strangely appropriate reflection of the majority of the songs it clothed. Even though it now sounds bizarre, by the time it came to releasing it I simply had no idea what I really thought of the album and so, caught up in the grinding gears of practicality, we took that step of blind faith that you often need to bravely, and sometimes stupidly, make when releasing records and allowed it to be ushered out into the world much like a child wandering off into the traffic.

  WHAT WILL SURVIVE

  OF US IS LOVE

  The mood in the back-stage dressing room of The Graham Norton Show was hushed and tense as we shuffled our way in and slumped heavily down on the plush chenille sofas. We were all lightly perspiring after the gestural pantomime that is a mimed TV appearance and so some of the band were cradling cold bottles of beer or sparkling water in crumpled plastic pint glasses and sipped them sullenly as I began to speak. My voice was quavering with the crushing emotion of the occasion that was being bizarrely juxtaposed by the underwhelmingly twee back-drop. This was the moment I had been rehearsing for over a year now. I had watched the band’s inglorious, ignominious descent from a once proud beast to a wan, pallid invalid and now it was time to put it out of its misery. We owed it this respect, this final dignity. At last the words made their way out of my mouth: ‘I can’t do this any more,’ I said, my voice sounding strange and high and shaky to my ears, ‘it’s over for Suede.’ As with Neil’s announcement to me a couple of years earlier I think the band immediately read into my flattened tone the solemnity and seriousness of what I was saying, and they knew that this was not the time for debate. I don’t even remember adding much beyond that – possibly they had anticipated this moment, possibly they felt the same way. I think deep down, despite the upheaval to our lives, despite the hardship and the fear of stepping out into the unknown we all knew it was the kindest thing to do. We knew it was the right thing to do.

  We had struggled on for a while, doing the kind of things bands do in the kind of places they do them and all the while behind the public mask I always wear I was wrestling with this torturous, torturous question. The band had become like a person to me: I had raised it and seen it grow and fed it and loved it and given it the best years of my life, and like a wonderful child it had given so much back to me and in turn seen me grow and without it my life would have been so different that I couldn’t even conceive of it not existing. I felt a huge responsibility not just to Suede but to the members of Suede too, knowing that they had lives that would be massively affected by my decision but knowing too that they understood that a band must be so much more than a haven for stability. It must prowl and snarl and challenge and thrill and terrify and if it begins to fail to do these things then it relinquishes its right to protection. Towards the tail-end of the album campaign we had played some shows at the ICA that reflected on each of our records: a retrospective assessment of our time together that I had wanted to do as I felt it was an important closing gesture. During our performance of ‘Saturday Night’ at the Coming Up show I had felt an overwhelming flood of emotion as the song took me back to all of those wonderful early guileless years together and during the second verse, overcome with feeling, I began to cry. And so after all the drama of our turbulent, thrilling voyage – the dizzying highs, the desperate lows, the moments of dead-eyed stasis, the passion, the scruffy inelegant struggle, the savage beauty – we had arrived at the predictable end point at which all bands will eventually arrive. There’s something so frustrating about inevitability – you think that you are immune to it and so to find yourself tripping and tumbling into the same traps that you assumed you would have had the nous to avoid takes on a second layer of distress. It feels like something or someone is mocking you, almost as if your failure is part of a hackneyed script and that your story, far from being unique, is just like all the others: one of youthful endeavour followed by a brief flicker of success and then the sour but familiar taste of defeat. Sadly it seems almost every band follows the same sort of career arc with the same points plotted grimly along the way like the Stations of the Cross: struggle, success, excess, disintegration and if you’re lucky – enlightenment. We were after all no different, nothing special despite our ambitions and pretensions, and our time ended, like a thousand other bands before us and probably like a thousand other bands after us, in the same unhappy rat-run of dead ends and disillusionment and bitterness.

  After all the sadness in these pages possibly the saddest part for me comes now. Charting the sorry, quiet collapse of a band that had once meant so much to so many is in a way a crueller fate than if we had exploded in a riot of notoriety and conflict. It was an ignoble end to a wonderful journey – a hushed finale completely out of keeping with the wild ride that had preceded it – but as I ruminate on the arc of our voyage and its muted denouement I understand that without it the band might possibly have never been reborn in the following decade with such spirit and élan and there might never have been the graceful closing act that was to come many years ahead. Sometimes it’s not the sparkling moments that define us but the darker ones leading up to them.

  CREDITS

  ‘A Poison Tree’, William Blake, Songs of Experience (1794) Five Get into A Fix, Enid Blyton (Hodder and Stoughton,1958)

  The Wicker Man, directed by Robin Hardy and produced by Peter Snell (Studiocanal, 1973)

  Platform, Michel Houellebecq (Vintage, 2003)

  Excerpt from ‘The Hawk in the Rain’, Ted Hughes, The Hawk in the Rain, copyright © Estate of Ted Hughes (Faber & Faber, 1957) reprinted by kind permission of Faber & Faber and Farrar, Straus and Giroux

  The Essential Martin Luther King, Jr: ‘I Have a Dream’ and Other Great Writings (Beacon Press, 2013)

  Excerpts from ‘Cut Grass’ and ‘An Arundel Tomb’, The Complete Poems of Philip Larkin, Philip Larkin, edited by Archie Burnett, copyright © Estate of Philip Larkin (Faber & Faber, 2003) reprinted by kind permission of Faber & Faber and Farrar, Straus and Giroux

  An Essay on Criticism, Alexander Pope (1711)

  ‘Pearls Before Swine’, Steve Sutherland, Melody Maker, 30 May 1992

  The Quiet Ruin, Cattle in Water, A Sketch, Evening by J. M. W. Turner (exhibited 1809)

  Charlie Watts, interview with David Hepworth, 1986

  The Portrait of Dorian Grey, Oscar Wilde (Penguin Classics, 2012)

 
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