Wonderful, Sometimes

“Brett Anderson looks like a runaway from a detox clinic. He's wearing frayed Levi's, odd socks, a shapeless black T-shirt and dying shoes. He gazes blankly at the world through painfully red eyes, and speaks through a permanent sniff in a theatrical London drawl that trails off into an introspective slur. At other times he whines like a girl, toys nervously with his hair and regularly scratches and picks at some reddening scabs on his arms. He laughs when I ask him if he's wasting away on heavy drugs. "When you're sucked through this media machine and run under the wheels of the star machine, you can go to bed with a cup of cocoa and wake up looking like Bela Lugosi in the morning." Trashed on success, then. Brett could pass for one of the heroic victims that inhabit his songs; wasted from too much youth, bad drugs and violent sex. This is the mythology of Suede: eternal teenagers hooked on downers, sleeping pills and self-abuse, chasing a soundtrack of swooning guitars under the cold lights of some vicious city. In rock 'n' roll terms, it's X-Ray Spex's gritty urban alienation combined with The Smiths' heartfelt indie-passion and topped with the dispassionate slide into kinky junkie doom of Lou Reed's Berlin and Bowie's tarty Jean Genie. The core elements are familiar, but two years ago Suede injected the shock of simply being Suede into their plagiarisms and somersaulted into full-blown fame. On stage, Brett used his mic as if it was a cock, whip and bondage cord to encircle his thighs in a brazenly, transgressively sexual gesture. On Top Of The Pops, he jiggled kitten-like hips in low-slung trousers while a cropped top revealed a wiggling navel that both startled and simply turned people on. They released defiant singles like Animal Nitrate, a sleazy soap-opera that thrust unheard of amounts of rough trade and S&M imagery into the charts. Before they'd even finished their debut LP, Suede had appeared on 19 different magazine covers and, when it was released in March '93, the eponymous record sold over 100,000 copies in just two days. One year later and Brett sits on the floor of an East London photographic studio talking about his past, his future and what it's like to be a pop star - while I wonder if he's got enough energy and vision to be anything more than last year's model or this year's casualty.”

The Guardian’s booklet, published in April 12/2003