Brett Anderson
by Graeme Thomson © The Herald
Midway through a conversation that encompasses everything from the Crow poems of Ted Hughes to John Constable's art, Brett Anderson says a strange thing. "My pop instincts are still there," he sighs. "I just wish I could get rid of them." Huh? The former Suede singer is clearly a very different man from the one who burst onto the indie scene in 1992, singing of chemicallyfuelled sex in council houses and admitting that he wanted to "make his mark on pop history". Ask him now what he hopes to achieve with his new solo record, Slow Attack, and he replies, "Absolutely nothing. I don't have the same sets of goals I once had."
This much is clear from his music. Where Suede peddled a heightened version of frayed suburban glamour, all glitter and guitars, Anderson's solo career has been positively autumnal, defined by a shadowy melancholia. His eponymous debut and its follow-up, last year's Wilderness, suggested he was playing rather stubbornly against his strengths, but Slow Attack is more successful. Burnished by woodwind and piano and recalling the later work of Talk Talk and even Van Morrison, it's a finely crafted and occasionally very beautiful record. Once the prince of urban alienation - to the point of self-parody, perhaps - lately he's been moving his music out to the country, scraping away at the bucolic veneer to unearth something "bleak and brutal and hostile" underneath. It works well. Slow Attack suggests that Anderson is finding his feet as a solo artist.
"The first album was me being a bit confused about what I wanted to do, still in a band mindset, " he admits. "Wilderness was an important step to starting again, but it was a very minimal record with limited appeal. This is the first one of a series that's going in a different direction. I feel like that they're getting better all the time. I'm hopefully starting to make records that don't sound like anyone else."
Most pop stars fight the ageing process tooth and nail. Not Anderson. Physically he looks much the same as he ever did, if not better. Lithe, tanned and well groomed, his healthy glow is testament to the fact that, after a decade of dedicated drug abuse which ended in heroin and crack addiction, he cleaned up his act around the turn of the millennium. The more stable and well adjusted his life, however, the more drifting and haunted his music has become. It's not attributable to sobriety, he insists, so much as simply getting older.
"I'm 42, I'm not going to hide from that, and I don't want to pretend to be 21, " he says. "There's something a little bit cynical about that. Pop music should be naive and joyous and celebratory, and I don't really want to make music like that. I see life in a different way. For me, melancholy is elegant and beautiful, it's something you see in the world whether you're happy or not. I don't see a contradiction in that at all."
Suede were a strange old band. Defined as new glam, positioned somewhere between those two grand dames, David Bowie and Morrissey, they were lumped into the Britpop soap opera and became embroiled in bitchy feuds with Blur long before Oasis appeared to the scene. There was something brittle and remote about their music, however, and Anderson rather resented being seen as a part of a pack. "It was an accident that Suede fell into the Britpop category, because we were making the kinds of records we were making long before that term was ever coined," he says. "It became a big cultural phenomenon, but I always felt very removed. I think the most interesting artists have always been on the fringes, talking with their own voice rather than as others are telling them to see it."
Lyrically, Anderson was characterised as the JG Ballard of pop, a dedicated dystopian singing of concrete and asphalt, fetishistic sex, tawdry desire and cheap thrills. He was unquestionably a fine pop star. Deliberately controversial and combative, he had an instinct for drumming up headlines. In particular, he will be followed to the grave by his declaration, made to Melody Maker in 1992, that he saw himself as "a bisexual man who has never had a homosexual experience".
He has been haunted by the quote, admitting "the kind of mischief it caused wasn't really worth it. It was forced into this ugly little thing of, is he gay or is he straight? Whereas I was trying to express something of myself in between those two polar opposites. Rave and ecstasy culture broke down socio-sexual stereotypes, people just felt like emotional beings rather than sexual beings."
He recognises, however, that the "reason that quote has lived for such a long time is because there's something about it that resonates with me as a character. I've always been much more comfortable being vague and not laying my cards on the table".
Suede split up in 2003 after almost 15 years and five albums, feeling that "creatively it had run out of steam". All parties remain on decent terms, but while a reunion is not entirely out of the question it's not imminent. Between disbanding Suede and launching his solo career, however, Anderson did reconcile with former Suede guitarist Bernard Butler, his original songwriting partner who left the band in 1994.
In 2005 the pair formed The Tears and released an album which, though solid, hardly reignited old glories. Hooking up with Butler seemed an incongruous move for someone intent on ditching the baggage of the past and "evolving away from a band format". Does he regret it?
"No, I don't," he says. "I needed a few answers for myself about our relationship and what we could do and couldn't do, and I answered them. More than anything I was looking for a way to stimulate my creativity. I felt really confused towards the end of Suede, which was why I had split the band up. I needed some answers, and doing The Tears was a step back on that path."
Since then Anderson has released an album a year. The material effect of sobriety has been an increase in productivity. Slow Attack was started in January and finished in May, during which time Anderson wrote over 30 songs. "Being clean changes the way in which you're able to devote energy to your work, " he says. "I've made three albums in three years, there's no way I could have done that in the nineties.
There's a big rock'n'roll myth that everyone wants their artists to be f***** up and on the edge, but that's bulls*** from people who don't know how music is created."
He might finally have shaken off the ghost of his former band. When he tours in the new year, he won't be performing songs from the Suede era. "This is my third solo album and I think it's time to move away from that, " he says. "I still love those songs, they mean a lot to me, but I need some space from them. I'm proud of the past and what I've done, but you can't dwell on it."