Suede (2011)
Interview Background
Taking this interview from home one evening, I wrote 'calm' in my notes while speaking with Suede’s Brett Anderson. Having basically inaugurated the concept of Britpop in the early ‘90s - long before Blur or Oasis were making their plays for tabloid covers - I found it fascinating how serene the former pop provocateur sounded. The album he was promoting at the time of the 2011 interview was Black Rainbows, which was his final solo release before returning to the Suede fold for the expertly delivered exotic and louche sounds of Night Sounds and The Blue Hour (check out the Pripyat-filmed video for Life Is Golden, released a year before the Chernobyl TV series made the site a hotspot for vain and foolhardy Instagrammers). While he had learnt to avoid the tabloid-baiting soundbites of 20 years previous, Brett’s elegant and considered responses to my questions proved he was still a master of engagement, whether capturing listeners with clever lyrical vignettes or winning over journalists who had always sat more in the Blur camp. Listening back to Black Rainbows nine years later, it stands up as a poignant and beautifully bleak album richly deserving of acclaim from Anderson’s army of black duffle-coated fans.
The following is an edited version of an interview first published in Rip It Up, October 2011.
Brett Anderson - In Rainbows
by Scott McLennan
As a pivotal figure in Britpop he was a provocative, sexual and androgynous creature, a gifted lyricist who delved into a grubbier type of love and captured a ‘90s youth lifestyle that was suburban yet aspirational. Almost two decades since his band Suede’s first single, Brett Anderson has released the dynamic new solo album Black Rainbows.
An astute and erudite musician, the Londoner proves an engaging conversationalist, variously referencing Johannes Vermeer, Jean Cocteau, Friedrich Nietzsche and Miles Davis in his answers to Rip It Up’s queries. Growing up in West Sussex, Anderson’s creativity was encouraged from a young age.
“Despite being poor, I was brought up in a house of culture,” Anderson recalls. “There was a lot of classical music and painting and all those values were quite important to my parents. My mum had an aesthetic eye and trained as an artist, so it was quite a creative house as well. Mum used to make all of our clothes and Dad used to make our furniture – he even made speakers, which is a bizarre idea now. That was the sort of house we belonged to, where you just made things: if you wanted a picture on the wall, you painted it. It was as simple as that – you didn’t go down to Habitat and buy it. I like that I learnt to make things and I apply that to my music.”
Showing an early eye for art, Anderson’s interest in visuals heavily influenced Suede’s celebrated album designs. With its incongruous cover photo of a rusting jet in a Northumberland field, the 1997 B-sides release Sci-Fi Lullabies remains one of the decade’s most striking record sleeves.
“I’m glad you chose that one, since Sci-Fi Lullabies is probably my favourite sleeve of ours actually. The visual side is still an important part of the package to me, but you have to get balance with it and it should never override the music. The way things look can enhance the way something sounds and a lot of my favourite records over the years have had amazing sleeves. I don’t think Pink Floyd’s Animals would sound like it did unless it was for the sleeve.”
Despite featuring blooming flowers in the foreground, Black Rainbow’s cover art is haunted by an ominous sense of death.
“I was thinking about the fact it almost looks like a memento mori in a way and I wanted that classical element to it, like it was some sort of Vermeer or something. It was inspired by a painting technique called chiaroscuro, where you have a black background and the only things lit up are the features of the subject, and I wanted to have that suggestion of death.”
Black Rainbows finds Anderson re-energised, with the arrangements strong and the lyrical quirks – such as lead single Brittle Heart’s sexually skewed mention of carpet burns – proving Anderson still has an eye for deliciously debauched detail.
“Yeah, there are details like that which I find quite amusing,” Anderson chuckles. “It would be very boring to write straight love songs - there’s something a bit dull about flowers and chocolates. They can be amazing, but I don’t think there’s been an amazing straight love song written for the last 30 or 40 years. I was thinking about this the other day and probably the straightest love song I’ve ever written is the Suede song The Wild Ones. That, funnily enough, is probably my favourite song, so maybe I should try writing them more often! It manages to be just enough bitter and just enough sweet to work.”
Anderson’s sense of fulfilment is justified - fans often tell the singer his songs have soundtracked major moments in their lives.
“They’re the moments I love the most, since it’s fulfilling to have played an important part in a person’s life. Someone told me the other day they had their first kiss to So Young, so to be part of the fabric of their youth is very special.”
With Suede’s reunion tour wrapping up in Berlin this month, the quality of Black Rainbows might be disappointingly overshadowed by talk of a new Suede album. Brett Anderson is pragmatic.
“I know what you mean, since everything I read is sort of like, ‘While we’re waiting for a new Suede album, here’s the new Brett Anderson album’, which can kind of get on your wick a bit sometimes. Suede will do some writing together and if it turns out well then we’ll release a record. It fulfils a completely different part of my creativity and you need to explore working with different people as well. You’ve got to go back with the right energy, I think.”
Black Rainbows (EMI)
Unpublished Interview Material
Black Rainbows is a great title, but what does it mean to you?
“It’s a contradiction, which I quite like. It’s an oxymoron and I quite liked it. I don’t really like explaining things too much – he says, doing an interview – but sometimes I think it’s nice to keep it obscured. It suggests the various contradictions of life to me – the bittersweet elements of life.”
Your mother died young. How often do you consider your own mortality?
“I think every day you look in the mirror you look at death, don’t you? That’s what Jean Cocteau said and I find that quite an intriguing concept – you just see your slow decline every day when you look in the mirror and you can’t really escape from it. (chuckles) You’re always reminded of it, since you start dying the day you’re born and it’s the journey of life. As you get older you find your body doesn’t work as well as it used to.”
You’ve got a few aches and pains you didn’t have 20 years ago then, Brett?
“(laughs) I’m not going to get onto that!”
You mention paper planes in two separate lyrics on the album – were you more inclined to spend school classes making planes and doodling pictures in exercise books than getting on with work?
“I like the image of a paper plane, since it’s somewhat childish and naïve. I can’t put my finger on what appeals to me about it, but I like the fact that I reference it throughout the album and it gives it a consistency. I’ve done that a few times in the past where I’ve consciously re-used lyrics to give a sense of style. It’s almost like what Miles Davis said: ‘If you make a mistake once it’s a mistake, if you make a mistake twice it’s deliberate’. There’s a beauty in repetition sometimes.”
Jarvis Cocker said in 1996 - “I’d think I’d have to retire from writing songs if I married. Otherwise I’d be putting my marriage in my lyrics.” Has married life affected your lyrical slant?
“No, not at all. Sometimes stability in your life can be an important creative force. There’s a cliché which people seem to need to believe in where they have to have their artists damaged, however it’s something perpetuated by those who don’t understand how creativity works. Sometimes you need stability in life in order to have clarity. I think that’s quite important, so different things work for different people and I find myself very creative now that I’m married.”
Would a 25-year-old Brett Anderson would take that on board if you walked up to him in the street?
“Probably not, but people change and that’s fine. The sort of person I was when I was 25 was completely different. Did you know that every cell in the human body is completely replaced every seven years, so every seven years you are physically a completely different person. When I was 25 is almost two life changes away, so I think it’s fine to turn around to your 25-year-old self and admit you’ve changed. I’m not a better person and I’m not a worse person, I’m just a different person. There are things about me that I loved at 25 and things that I hated, but you have to accept that you’ve changed and that you’re still learning.”
Your latest album bio mentions seeing a Horrors gig inspiring you, but are there any acts you feel have followed in your footsteps by creating songs that are at turns romantic and gritty, suburban yet aspirational?
“I don’t think there’s anyone doing it like Suede did it or like I do it, there’s no one taking on that baton. I hear parallels – with The Horrors, I hear the occasional thing that reminds me of Suede – but for me a band like Interpol is the closest in a lot of ways in terms of the spirit. There’s something about the spirit in which the singer Paul [Banks] writes that has that gritty romantic drama of Suede. I’m a big fan of the band and we’ve shared the bill at festivals quite a lot of times. I’ve hung out with them and respect them. They’re nice people.”
Tackling Black Rainbows without having all the lyrics and music completely calculated in advance, it sounds like it was inspiring but is it too much of a stress for you to do it again?
“It’s an interesting question and I really like the way Black Rainbows turned out, but I’m not sure if it’s the way to work that suits me best. I almost needed to do this to find my feet with this method and challenge myself, but I’m not sure if I’d do it again in the same way. I don’t think this was about finding a new working method for me. It was hard work and it sounds like it was easy because ‘oh, we just went into the studio and did some jams and then came out with an album’, but it really wasn’t that simple. There were three days of jamming and laid down initial tracks for the album, took them away to edit them and then I sat there for six months trying to turn them into songs. So it was six months working on these tracks for me, which is the key point. It might be relatively easy jamming on a guitar and coming up with grooves, but turning things into songs is the alchemy for me. That’s where the magic really happens, you know? I’m a songwriter, so that’s always the point where you challenge yourself the most."
Taking this interview from home one evening, I wrote 'calm' in my notes while speaking with Suede’s Brett Anderson. Having basically inaugurated the concept of Britpop in the early ‘90s - long before Blur or Oasis were making their plays for tabloid covers - I found it fascinating how serene the former pop provocateur sounded. The album he was promoting at the time of the 2011 interview was Black Rainbows, which was his final solo release before returning to the Suede fold for the expertly delivered exotic and louche sounds of Night Sounds and The Blue Hour (check out the Pripyat-filmed video for Life Is Golden, released a year before the Chernobyl TV series made the site a hotspot for vain and foolhardy Instagrammers). While he had learnt to avoid the tabloid-baiting soundbites of 20 years previous, Brett’s elegant and considered responses to my questions proved he was still a master of engagement, whether capturing listeners with clever lyrical vignettes or winning over journalists who had always sat more in the Blur camp. Listening back to Black Rainbows nine years later, it stands up as a poignant and beautifully bleak album richly deserving of acclaim from Anderson’s army of black duffle-coated fans.
The following is an edited version of an interview first published in Rip It Up, October 2011.
Brett Anderson - In Rainbows
by Scott McLennan
As a pivotal figure in Britpop he was a provocative, sexual and androgynous creature, a gifted lyricist who delved into a grubbier type of love and captured a ‘90s youth lifestyle that was suburban yet aspirational. Almost two decades since his band Suede’s first single, Brett Anderson has released the dynamic new solo album Black Rainbows.
An astute and erudite musician, the Londoner proves an engaging conversationalist, variously referencing Johannes Vermeer, Jean Cocteau, Friedrich Nietzsche and Miles Davis in his answers to Rip It Up’s queries. Growing up in West Sussex, Anderson’s creativity was encouraged from a young age.
“Despite being poor, I was brought up in a house of culture,” Anderson recalls. “There was a lot of classical music and painting and all those values were quite important to my parents. My mum had an aesthetic eye and trained as an artist, so it was quite a creative house as well. Mum used to make all of our clothes and Dad used to make our furniture – he even made speakers, which is a bizarre idea now. That was the sort of house we belonged to, where you just made things: if you wanted a picture on the wall, you painted it. It was as simple as that – you didn’t go down to Habitat and buy it. I like that I learnt to make things and I apply that to my music.”
Showing an early eye for art, Anderson’s interest in visuals heavily influenced Suede’s celebrated album designs. With its incongruous cover photo of a rusting jet in a Northumberland field, the 1997 B-sides release Sci-Fi Lullabies remains one of the decade’s most striking record sleeves.
“I’m glad you chose that one, since Sci-Fi Lullabies is probably my favourite sleeve of ours actually. The visual side is still an important part of the package to me, but you have to get balance with it and it should never override the music. The way things look can enhance the way something sounds and a lot of my favourite records over the years have had amazing sleeves. I don’t think Pink Floyd’s Animals would sound like it did unless it was for the sleeve.”
Despite featuring blooming flowers in the foreground, Black Rainbow’s cover art is haunted by an ominous sense of death.
“I was thinking about the fact it almost looks like a memento mori in a way and I wanted that classical element to it, like it was some sort of Vermeer or something. It was inspired by a painting technique called chiaroscuro, where you have a black background and the only things lit up are the features of the subject, and I wanted to have that suggestion of death.”
Black Rainbows finds Anderson re-energised, with the arrangements strong and the lyrical quirks – such as lead single Brittle Heart’s sexually skewed mention of carpet burns – proving Anderson still has an eye for deliciously debauched detail.
“Yeah, there are details like that which I find quite amusing,” Anderson chuckles. “It would be very boring to write straight love songs - there’s something a bit dull about flowers and chocolates. They can be amazing, but I don’t think there’s been an amazing straight love song written for the last 30 or 40 years. I was thinking about this the other day and probably the straightest love song I’ve ever written is the Suede song The Wild Ones. That, funnily enough, is probably my favourite song, so maybe I should try writing them more often! It manages to be just enough bitter and just enough sweet to work.”
Anderson’s sense of fulfilment is justified - fans often tell the singer his songs have soundtracked major moments in their lives.
“They’re the moments I love the most, since it’s fulfilling to have played an important part in a person’s life. Someone told me the other day they had their first kiss to So Young, so to be part of the fabric of their youth is very special.”
With Suede’s reunion tour wrapping up in Berlin this month, the quality of Black Rainbows might be disappointingly overshadowed by talk of a new Suede album. Brett Anderson is pragmatic.
“I know what you mean, since everything I read is sort of like, ‘While we’re waiting for a new Suede album, here’s the new Brett Anderson album’, which can kind of get on your wick a bit sometimes. Suede will do some writing together and if it turns out well then we’ll release a record. It fulfils a completely different part of my creativity and you need to explore working with different people as well. You’ve got to go back with the right energy, I think.”
Black Rainbows (EMI)
Unpublished Interview Material
Black Rainbows is a great title, but what does it mean to you?
“It’s a contradiction, which I quite like. It’s an oxymoron and I quite liked it. I don’t really like explaining things too much – he says, doing an interview – but sometimes I think it’s nice to keep it obscured. It suggests the various contradictions of life to me – the bittersweet elements of life.”
Your mother died young. How often do you consider your own mortality?
“I think every day you look in the mirror you look at death, don’t you? That’s what Jean Cocteau said and I find that quite an intriguing concept – you just see your slow decline every day when you look in the mirror and you can’t really escape from it. (chuckles) You’re always reminded of it, since you start dying the day you’re born and it’s the journey of life. As you get older you find your body doesn’t work as well as it used to.”
You’ve got a few aches and pains you didn’t have 20 years ago then, Brett?
“(laughs) I’m not going to get onto that!”
You mention paper planes in two separate lyrics on the album – were you more inclined to spend school classes making planes and doodling pictures in exercise books than getting on with work?
“I like the image of a paper plane, since it’s somewhat childish and naïve. I can’t put my finger on what appeals to me about it, but I like the fact that I reference it throughout the album and it gives it a consistency. I’ve done that a few times in the past where I’ve consciously re-used lyrics to give a sense of style. It’s almost like what Miles Davis said: ‘If you make a mistake once it’s a mistake, if you make a mistake twice it’s deliberate’. There’s a beauty in repetition sometimes.”
Jarvis Cocker said in 1996 - “I’d think I’d have to retire from writing songs if I married. Otherwise I’d be putting my marriage in my lyrics.” Has married life affected your lyrical slant?
“No, not at all. Sometimes stability in your life can be an important creative force. There’s a cliché which people seem to need to believe in where they have to have their artists damaged, however it’s something perpetuated by those who don’t understand how creativity works. Sometimes you need stability in life in order to have clarity. I think that’s quite important, so different things work for different people and I find myself very creative now that I’m married.”
Would a 25-year-old Brett Anderson would take that on board if you walked up to him in the street?
“Probably not, but people change and that’s fine. The sort of person I was when I was 25 was completely different. Did you know that every cell in the human body is completely replaced every seven years, so every seven years you are physically a completely different person. When I was 25 is almost two life changes away, so I think it’s fine to turn around to your 25-year-old self and admit you’ve changed. I’m not a better person and I’m not a worse person, I’m just a different person. There are things about me that I loved at 25 and things that I hated, but you have to accept that you’ve changed and that you’re still learning.”
Your latest album bio mentions seeing a Horrors gig inspiring you, but are there any acts you feel have followed in your footsteps by creating songs that are at turns romantic and gritty, suburban yet aspirational?
“I don’t think there’s anyone doing it like Suede did it or like I do it, there’s no one taking on that baton. I hear parallels – with The Horrors, I hear the occasional thing that reminds me of Suede – but for me a band like Interpol is the closest in a lot of ways in terms of the spirit. There’s something about the spirit in which the singer Paul [Banks] writes that has that gritty romantic drama of Suede. I’m a big fan of the band and we’ve shared the bill at festivals quite a lot of times. I’ve hung out with them and respect them. They’re nice people.”
Tackling Black Rainbows without having all the lyrics and music completely calculated in advance, it sounds like it was inspiring but is it too much of a stress for you to do it again?
“It’s an interesting question and I really like the way Black Rainbows turned out, but I’m not sure if it’s the way to work that suits me best. I almost needed to do this to find my feet with this method and challenge myself, but I’m not sure if I’d do it again in the same way. I don’t think this was about finding a new working method for me. It was hard work and it sounds like it was easy because ‘oh, we just went into the studio and did some jams and then came out with an album’, but it really wasn’t that simple. There were three days of jamming and laid down initial tracks for the album, took them away to edit them and then I sat there for six months trying to turn them into songs. So it was six months working on these tracks for me, which is the key point. It might be relatively easy jamming on a guitar and coming up with grooves, but turning things into songs is the alchemy for me. That’s where the magic really happens, you know? I’m a songwriter, so that’s always the point where you challenge yourself the most."
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