They were the kings of Britpop — and then they fell foul of drugs and power struggles. Now Suede are back with a greatest-hits album and live gigs, says Mark Edwards

It is, as Mott the Hoople once noted, a mighty long way down rock’n’roll, and in the 11 years since they burst onto the scene, Suede have taken most of the detours available. Theirs is a story that takes in power struggles, drug abuse, Britpop and love triangles. And now — with a new greatest-hits collection and an authorised biography both imminent — seems a good time to look back on it.
The band think so too. They’re marking the hits collection — called, simply, Singles (out in October) — with what is very possibly a unique series of gigs at London’s ICA. Over five nights (starting on September 22), the band will play five gigs — on each night playing one of their five albums in its entirety. This extremely thorough career retrospective is typically Suede. The band have always acknowledged the obsessive nature of their fans. For example, most bands consider the B-sides collection as a late addition to the catalogue when new material is running dry. Suede acknowledged the completist nature of their fans by releasing a double album of B-sides in 1997, only five years into their recording career and at the peak of their commercial success.

“Suede fans tend not to treat buying our music like buying a pair of trousers,” says the band’s singer, Brett Anderson. “They’re very much immersed in the world of Suede. I’ve always wanted to mean something in people’s lives rather than being a nice little tune. There’s a Suede army out there: not belonging to any particular country, but united in their dysfunctionalness.”

Ah yes, dysfunction. Suede fans are the kids who lack social skills, the kids who get beaten up at school, the kids who aren’t sure how (or if) they fit in. And just to reassure them, the band they idolise are as dysfunctional as they are. When I first interviewed Anderson in the mid-1990s, he was a tricky mixture of arrogance and insecurity — as well he might have been. He had seen his band hailed as the best new band in the country, only to watch acclaimed guitarist Bernard Butler walk out; nobody was quite sure whether Elastica singer Justine Frischmann was living with Brett but seeing Blur’s Damon Albarn, or vice versa; and the scene Suede had helped create, Britpop, had thrown up a new band, Oasis, that now had all the plaudits Suede used to get.

Today, Anderson is a changed man — warm and friendly, as we chat in his house in one of the posher, prettier roads in west London. Anderson has been through years of drug addiction and come out the other side. One of the B-sides to the forthcoming single Attitude is called Heroin. The chorus runs simply: “Heroin — I’m out of it.” And indeed, Anderson looks healthy and happy as he discusses the ICA gigs.

“We knew that a few people had done concerts where they played whole albums — Brian Wilson did Pet Sounds — and we thought when the Singles album comes out, why not do the whole back catalogue? We’ll be playing lots of songs that we’ve never, ever played live.” More to the point, I suggest, there must be a few songs that the band don’t particularly want to play again.

“Oh, without a doubt,” Anderson agrees. “But the whole point is that you do it all — play it all, from start to finish, and take the rough with the smooth.” Both the fans and the band will be rewarded by encores comprising tracks from the Singles album — voted for by the fans. Some kind of online poll? “Er, no, I think we’ll just give them a bit of paper and a pencil when they arrive,” says Anderson. “And we are — honestly — going to play the songs that come top of the poll.”

Reinforcing the fans’ close connection with the band, the ICA shop will be selling a “Suede Collection” — not a fine assortment of designer Hush Puppies, but a selection of the band’s favourite books and films, so that fans can check out the works that inspired their heroes. If Suede fans need any more existentialist angst, they can get it from Albert Camus’s The Outsider, George Orwell’s 1984 or Michel Houellebecq’s Atomised.


The selection of films is not so predictable. Yes, we might have expected to see Performance there. Nicolas Roeg’s tale of a fading rock star is a film that, says Anderson, “I don’t ever need to see again in my life”, having watched it repeatedly during the grimmer times in his life. We might not be surprised to see Lars von Trier’s disturbing The Idiots. But Sleuth? “If I had to name my favourite film of all time, that would be it,” he says.

But what attraction could this stagey two-hander between Michael Caine and Laurence Olivier have for Anderson? And then you remember that the film concerns the increasingly aggressive mind games played out between Olivier and Caine, and that Caine is having an affair with Olivier’s wife. Is Anderson fantasising about how he would like to have treated Damon Albarn? Anderson won’t be drawn, limiting his remarks on Frischmann to discussing the musical effect that her departure had from the group. His comment that “Justine’s departure allowed us to become good” looks catty in print, but if you try and imagine Elastica’s ultra-cool Wire-isms merged with Suede’s emotional pop, you can see that he’s probably just being honest.

“That unit after Justine left was pretty good ... a very exciting band,” says Anderson. Indeed they were. Amazingly, they were hailed as “the best new band in Britain” by one music magazine before they’d even recorded their first single. Even more amazingly, they lived up to the hype, with a trio of singles — The Drowners, Metal Mickey, Animal Nitrate — that established them as a band who mattered.

“It’s a shame ...” Anderson corrects himself. “It’s a tragedy, to be honest, that he left when he did. We could have gone on to do a lot more.”

“He” is Bernard Butler, the guitarist whose contributions to Suede’s first album earned him comparisons with The Smiths’ Johnny Marr. In November, a new biography of Suede, Love and Poison, will be published. Those still waiting for Butler to explain his departure will be disappointed. He refused to be interviewed for the book.

“The truth of the matter is that ultimately, he wasn’t happy to be in the band,” says Anderson. “He was looking for a way out of the band, and that manifested itself in him creating lots of power struggles.” While Suede were recording their second album, Butler gave Anderson an ultimatum: fire the producer or I’m leaving. “I called his bluff,” says Anderson. “If I had thought there was anything I could have done that would have kept Bernard in Suede, I would have done that thing. But even if I’d sacked the producer, the next thing would have been either I go or you go, and so on. It wouldn’t have solved anything. The real shame is that I don’t really think he appreciated how good the stuff we were doing was.”

For anyone else who doesn’t appreciate how good Suede have been, Singles offers the perfect opportunity to be reminded.