Suede (known as The London Suede in America) helped
kickstart the Britpop music revolution. Singer Brett Anderson and bassist Mat
Osman, childhood friends from West Sussex, formed the riveting English rock
band with Justine Frischmann on guitar in 1989.
It wasn’t long before Bernard Butler signed on as lead
guitarist and Simon Gilbert became the permanent drummer upon the advice of future
comedian/actor Ricky Gervais, who sent a Suede demo out to record companies. Frischmann
and early Suede drummer Justin Welch would depart to form Elastica.
The toast of the British music press before releasing first
single “The Drowners” in Spring 1992 (Morrissey covered B-side “My Insatiable
One” on tour), Suede’s audacious self-titled debut album emerged the following
year. Reaching No. 1 in the U.K., it snagged the prestigious Mercury Music
Prize and was certified gold.
Exquisite sophomore effort Dog Man Star replicated the
U.K. sales status. Butler exited and was replaced by 18-year-old guitarist Richard
Oakes. Gilbert’s cousin Neil Codling fleshed out the Suede sound on keyboards
for a few albums. Coming Up proved even more popular at home.
By 2003, Suede had racked up more than a dozen top 20 U.K.
singles, but Anderson decided to break up the group. After reuniting for a Teenage
Cancer Trust charity concert in 2010, the musicians rediscovered the joy of
playing together and have released several impressive studio albums in the
interim. Autofiction, the latest, rivals the striking sounds of the old
days albeit with more grit.
The quintet’s co-headlining North American tour with Manic
Street Preachers (each will rotate closing sets) starts this week and marks Suede’s
first major U.S. and Canadian routing in 25 years. Both acts previously toured Europe
together in 1994.
Rock Cellar checked in with Osman via phone from his home in
London.
Rock Cellar: What are your thoughts on doing this rare
U.S. tour?
Matt Osman: I really don’t know what to expect. It’s
quite strange. We play Europe and Asia all the time, so you get into a groove
with those places. You know what they like and what they don’t like. This is
weirdly uncharted territory for us, which is quite exciting.
Rock Cellar: When I saw the band’s last U.S. performance
at Coachella 2011, you weren’t onstage. I was surprised. What happened?
Matt Osman: My visas always used to take months to
get through. We just couldn’t get it in time, so Neil stood in for me. And no
one seemed to notice! He said it was quite insulting to me and quite insulting
to him.
Rock Cellar: These November shows will be your first here
since 1997 then.
Matt Osman: I come over there a lot, but yeah - it’s my
first time playing since then.
Rock Cellar: Many American fans have been chomping at the
bit to see the band perform.
Matt Osman: I did a book tour for my last novel. One
of the reasons I’m so keen to come back, especially in Los Angeles, is that I
just met so many people who had photos from the last time we were there and
recordings, getting me to sign stuff. There seemed to be a real wellspring of
love for the band still, so I’m hoping they all come out and drag themselves
out of their old people’s homes for it.
Rock Cellar: Around the time Autofiction came out
in September, Suede did some promotional club and record store shows in England
and Europe where you played the new album front to back. How did the songs go
over with fans?
Matt Osman: It’s been amazing. The thing is - it was
written to be a live album. We’ve had a couple of [recent] albums that were
quite orchestral and complicated studio things. [This one] was deliberately
written to be something that sounded like five people in the studio; five
people in a rehearsal room. We didn’t have that thing where we’re like, ‘How
are we going to translate the orchestra and spoken word pieces and field
recordings into a rock ‘n’ roll show?’
It’s just built for it. We didn’t intend actually to go out
and play the whole album in the entirety. We wanted, especially after covid, to
do some shows that were properly ‘in your face’ - where you could see the
whites of the audience’s eyes; you could have a bit of community and contact.
We spent a month in tiny little venues where I wasn’t able to move onstage. I
was stuck in one place; otherwise I’d get hit by Brett.
Rock Cellar: The band initially wanted to take a hybrid studio/live
recording approach for this album. That didn’t work out because of covid. Are
you satisfied with what everyone accomplished?
Matt Osman: Yeah. I love how the record sounds. Every
time we do a record, we go and play it live and then after six months, we go, ‘Why
didn’t it sound the way it sounds live with people there?’ Part of that is the
adrenaline of having an audience. The original idea was to hire a space, play
for a month and [invite] people down every night to have that highwire feeling
that you get with a gig. Then record that and turn it into a record.
And literally the minute we were like, ‘OK, we’ve got some
songs, we could do this,’ covid happened. We were left with the worst idea for
lockdown. I think the spirit of that lived on. I suppose the good side of covid
for us was that we were in our rehearsal room and no one else was there. We had
no crew, no extra musicians or anything. We squirreled ourselves away and tried
to treat it like we were a brand-new band. Just the five of us, trying to make
the songs sound exciting in a small space.
Then we recorded at Konk Studios, Ray Davies’ place up in
Crouch End [London]. You know the way those Kinks records sound? You can hear
the sweat and you know that they can see each other as they’re recording. We tried
to keep that kind of live spirit all the way through. The record’s full of
mistakes. The tracks speed up and slow down like nobody’s business. But I think
there’s a real charm to it because of that.
Rock Cellar: A rough ‘n’ ready approach.
Matt Osman: That’s a polite way of putting it.
Rock Cellar: Ed Buller has been at the production helm
for six of your nine albums, including Autofiction. Do you almost consider
him like an unofficial member of Suede? If Ed suggests something, do you know instinctually
know exactly what he’s talking about?
Matt Osman: Yeah, I think he’s been with us long
enough that he’s not [concerned about being] polite at all. There’s always that
thing when you work with a new producer and they’re too polite to you. Ed
spends most of his time going, ‘That’s awful! You’ve got to have written something
better than that!’ He really pushes at it. Especially when we wanted to make a
record that had the feeling of when we started in ’91-’92. He was one of the
few people that saw us in front of 20 people. Before ‘The Drowners,’ he came along
and saw us play live. He knows the kind of ramshackle, exciting theatrical nature
of those early shows. He was always gonna be the guy for this record. He knows
the DNA.
Rock Cellar: Brett’s lyrics on Autofiction are some
of his most personal to date. What did you think when you first heard them? Are
you still amazed at what he comes up with?
Matt Osman: I am! Over the last couple of records, he
actually said to me: ‘I’m going to start writing a little bit about family, about
my kids and marriage and all these things.’ I was initially terrified because
those generally tend to be very sentimental. I think it’s difficult to write
about your kids and write about real family relationships with a really
objective air. But bless him - he’s just incredible at dragging the tension,
the fear, and the complexity out of those things.
One of the things he said, which I think is really
fascinating about this record, is that rock ‘n’ roll is always about the
beginnings of relationships or the ends. It’s always, ‘I’ve just met this girl
and fallen in love’ or ‘We’ve just split up.’ But it’s never about the fear of
having kids or the terror of growing old. All those things. I’m really proud of
what he’s done, which is to marry a really youthful sounding record with an exuberance
to lyrics that aren’t youthful rock ‘n’ roll clichés.
There’s no point of us pretending that we’re 25 anymore. I
do love the fact that he sings about what it’s like being a 55-year-old man,
but because the songs are steeped in loss, fear, love, and longing, I think you
can still understand them.
Rock Cellar: They are universal.
Matt Osman: Yeah, totally. The song ‘She Still Leads
Me On’ is a very personal song about his mother and about how she’s still a
beacon for the way he acts. I talk to people for whom it’s a love song about
their girlfriend or partner, and that’s fantastic. I think without even knowing
what it’s about, you understand there’s a yearning exuberance to it that people
just get.
Rock Cellar: There are two songs on the new album where
the bass really plays a prominent role in the sound. The first one is “Black
Ice.” What did you think when you first heard Richard’s demo?
Matt Osman: I absolutely love it. It’s really
interesting – when Richard joined, we gave him this incredible listening list.
It was important he understood where we were coming from as a band. Ed was playing
him T-Rex and Roxy Music. We were playing him Kate Bush, Pink Floyd and all
these things that he might have missed.
Because he’s such a good musician, he took them on board
immediately. In a weird way, this feels like the first record that comes from
the heart of his teenage years when he was a huge fan of The Cure, The Fall, The
Banshees and Magazine. People like that. One of the things I loved about ‘Black
Ice’ is that we always talk about The Fall as being an influence on the band,
but I think it’s the first time you can hear it. He came to me with that, and I
thought, ‘Fucking hell; that’s great.’ It’s like a Fall track. I didn’t change
a bit. It’s fantastic.
Rock Cellar: Then there’s the slow building closing track
“Turn Off Your Brain and Yell,” with a “Peter Gunn”-style repeating bassline.
It almost didn’t make the album, right?
Matt Osman: It’s so weird. Until just before it was finished,
the last track was this real delicate ballad [‘What Am I Without You?’]. I
don’t know what we were thinking. Because the rest of the record was this snarling
thing. It was about to be printed and Brett said, ‘I’ve got this track and it
just feels like it should go on the record.’ It was such a scramble to do it.
Having said it was all done really live with the five of us
in a room, Simon had gone home to Thailand by that point because we thought we
were done. He recorded the drums basically in the jungle somewhere and the rest
of us went to Konk to finish it off.
In a weird way, it’s a summation of everything on the
record. It’s quite not like anything we’ve done before really. There’s a minute
and a half before Brett comes in. It has a slightly Cure, Public Image feel to
it. I think in a weird way, it might point to what the next record might be
like. For us, doing something like that, or ‘Shadow Self,’ with those long instrumental
passages, felt quite unusual for us. It’s one of my favorites. It’s fantastic
live. I can’t wait to play that live in The States.
Rock Cellar: Despite streaming music being more popular
than ever, Suede still takes an album’s running order to heart, making sure
there’s a real ebb and flow dynamic for those of us who still prefer physical
CDs or LPs. Does that remain true with all of the band?
Matt Osman: Brett is obsessive about it to the point
that I’ve given up answering emails about it. He’ll say, ‘Here are five
different track listings. Which one do you think works best?’ It always ends up
with me saying, ‘Brett, at the end of the day, you’re the one who’s thinking
about this the most.’
When we did [2016’s] ‘Night Thoughts,’ we were in a meeting
with some record company guy who was saying, 'Everything has to be front
loaded. The best tracks have to be at the beginning and the best bits of the
track have to be at the start of the track.’ I was like, ‘This is so fucking
depressing.’ You suddenly realize you’re trying to compete in a race you don’t
want to be in. At that point, we were like, ‘Let’s do something where it has to
be listened to as one track.’
We made it so everything flows into each other. It’s informed
everything we’ve done since. More than anything because we did it partly to be
bloody minded. But we found so many people got it. People say, ‘What I want
from a record now is to lose myself in it and for it to have a little world of
its own.’ We spend a lot of time thinking about setlists and track listings.
Just the idea that you get lost in it. That’s really important to us – that we
don’t make music for people who put music on in the back of dinner parties. It’s
made to be listened to.
Rock Cellar: Autofiction continues a long line of mysterious
Suede album cover images. Is the bed pictured on it an homage to past covers?
Matt Osman: Not deliberately. We saw a picture we
loved by a Danish photographer which was very similar, but the guy in it was
much younger. We were gonna use it and record company thought it looked really
dodgy. We tried to remake it. That’s Brett on the cover. I guess unconsciously
and literally, when I saw the picture, it was one of those moments you get when
you’re making a record, you see loads of covers and then everyone goes ‘Right,
that’s obviously it.’ It’s only later when you go, ‘Right, that’s the third
album cover with a mattress on it.’
Rock Cellar: With Suede covers, going back to the debut
album, you don’t immediately know what you’re seeing.
Matt Osman: What I love about a good album cover is
it’s like a lens for hearing the record through. It adds color and feeling. We
always knew we wanted this one to be black and white. To have a starkness to go
with the music.
Rock Cellar: Turning to some history: What was it like to
be in the eye of the media storm when Suede was the most buzzed about band in
Britain in 1992-93 and your first three albums were a big success there?
Matt Osman: You know what? I loved it. Obviously, we
went through some horrific ups and downs. We fucked up many, many times. Took lots
of meandering roads. Just the sense of being at the center of the culture,
you’ve got to remember at the time it happened, Britain had this incredible
music press where you had three weekly newspapers about music. There were
record shops on every high street. It was the last time a band like us were
shoved in everyone’s faces. I know loads of people absolutely resented us for
it and we probably should have been a bit less promiscuous about what we did. But
it was a blast. I look back on those days with tremendous fondness.
Rock Cellar: Suede released its first single when grunge rock
was still popular and Madchester’s dominance was fading. Do you think Bernard’s
unique guitar sounds paired with Brett’s androgynous, yet commanding presence
and realistic lyrics helped you guys stand out from the pack?
Matt Osman: Yeah. I think it was very much that
people recognized themselves and their lives in the songs. We were going
through a period in Britain where everything had become a bit floaty and dream poppy
and the lyrics were nebulous things. Suddenly, you had this guy who looked like
the people you know, talking about their lives that you knew, and it reached
people.
I have such a fantastic memory of the first time we played LA
and being there with my wife. We’d spent a couple of days in LA and everywhere
we’d gone, people were all white teeth and healthy. Then we drove up to the
venue, there was this massive queue and suddenly everyone looks kind of
slightly ill, dark and [wearing] black. There’s loads of makeup going on. She
said, ‘Where did all these people come from? I’ve never seen anyone like this
in LA.’
That’s exactly what happened with Brett and me. We always felt
we were slightly odd and on the outskirts of things. Then suddenly, we started
going to the gigs and realizing there were millions of us. They were just all
dotted around. For a couple of years. It was like this huge band of outsiders. It’s
a wonderful, very moving thing.
Rock Cellar: Here in Los Angeles, legendary DJ Rodney on
the Roq at KROQ/106.7 FM was an early supporter of Suede, likely playing “The
Drowners” and “Metal Mickey” before anyone else. Did that exposure on such a trendsetting
station help draw more attention to the band elsewhere in America?
Matt Osman: Totally. Coming to California was like
coming home. It was such a strange thing. There’s something so all-encompassing
and huge about America. Everything gets talked about in terms of business and
which radio stations you got added. It was so lovely to come to a place that
was so Anglophile. People understood it and knew what you were talking about.
Although we were singing about very specifically London things and places. The
lives were about pretty much anyone who was young, interesting, and poor in a
big city.
Rock Cellar: When Richard first joined the band, he was thrown
into the fire…
Matt Osman: [laughter]
Rock Cellar: How do you feel his guitar playing has evolved
over the years?
Matt Osman: I think he’s a phenomenal musician. He
was asked to do an absolutely impossible job. He was appointed to replace [Bernard]
- someone who at the time was probably the best-known independent musician in
Britain. Someone who was winning all the plaudits. He had to nail everything
that Bernard did and write our biggest hit album while he was still technically
in school.
It’s incredible to me how blasé we were about it. I think
now [if it happened], I would worry for his mental health and I would think
it’s too much to put on someone’s shoulders. He’s incredibly modest and you’ll
never hear him shouting about what he can and can’t do. I think especially on
‘Autofiction,’ he’s basically taken the reigns of the band. This is his record,
and we just play on it.
Rock Cellar: Your first novel “The Ruins” came out in
2020 and your follow up “The Ghost Theatre” is due next June. Have you wanted
to try your hand at being a fiction writer for a long time?
Matt Osman: I always wanted to do it. It felt like
the [Mount] Everest of the creative process. The one thing that looks so
terrifying and daunting to do. I have to say, if I wasn’t the bass player in
Suede, I don’t know if I’d have ever had the time to do it. There’s nothing like
a bass player’s schedule to make writing a novel a little easier.
Remaining North American Tour Dates:
NOV 13: AUSTIN, TX @ ACL LIVE AT THE MOODY THEATER (Manic Street Preachers close)
NOV 16: CHICAGO, IL @ AUDITORIUM THEATER (The London Suede close)
NOV 18: SILVER SPRING, MD @ THE FILLMORE (Manic Street Preachers close)
NOV 19: PHILADELPHIA, PA @ THE MET (The London Suede close)
NOV 21: BROOKLYN, NY @ KINGS THEATRE (Manic Street Preachers close)
NOV 22: BOSTON, MA @ THE ORPHEUM (The London Suede close)
NOV 24: TORONTO, Canada @ MASSEY HALL (Manic Street Preachers close)
My interview originally appeared at www.rockcellarmagazine.com
Photo by Dean Chalkley, courtesy BMG
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