Monday, October 1, 2007

Brett Anderson Interview/Shoot









Brett Anderson sits in the light-drenched front room of his west London home and ponders the pros and cons of photographic props. It’s tough to find a posing partner equal to a smouldering cigarette, but he’s defiantly off the Benson & Hedges these days - surprising, perhaps, when you consider that fags were once so intertwined in his psyche he’d confuse them for women. Bananas (“too healthy”), cars (“too Jeremy Clarkson”) and cats (“I’ve posed with Fluffington before”) are eschewed before a simple painting backdrop is finally settled on.

Mr Anderson is in particularly high spirits considering the tedious European promo schedule he’s just suffered. He runs upstairs to grab a copy of his new record with the vigour of an enthusiastic teenager. Happily, there is much to relish about his eponymous debut solo testament. ‘One Lazy Morning’ is blissful string-drenched pop, while ‘Song For My Father’ is gorgeous and tragic in equal doses. This is undoubtedly Brett’s long-awaited return to artistic form.

“It’s my most personal album,” he says. “It’s about what I think and how I feel about life. It’s also quite bleak. The big realisation I’ve had is there’s never really an end point. The beauty of being an artist is you never quite arrive. You’re always on a journey where the more you know, the less you know. I’ve accepted that, which is a personal victory.”

The record is certainly a vast move on from the Bernard Butler co-written Tears album. Where that was overblown, this is melodic and subtle, and more so than anything Anderson has recorded before. There’s hardly a Suedeish “awwww oohhhh” in earshot. But what’s Brett’s own humble evaluation?

“There’s nothing that will make you hate your own music more than releasing it,” he says. “After analysing it and talking about it and reading reviews, it gets distorted horribly. I’ll have to wait till the dust settles. There will be people that like my album and people that don’t like it. Some people will think it sounds not enough like Suede and others will think it sounds too much like Suede. It’s kind of impossible, really.”
One criticism levelled at Brett is that he often tries to second guess what his critics want to hear, sometimes even changing his persona and output at the expense of his unquestionable songwriting talent. In this case, though, he’s done nothing more subversive than record a stirring album. For the first time since Suede’s trashy glam pop opus Coming Up, Brett sounds comfortable in his own pale skin. Posing for photos in his back garden he looks it too. How things change. When questioned about his somewhat ill-fated 2005 reformation with ex-Suede partner Butler, he is muted. “I think our album was good: it had a real depth and I was disappointed that people beyond my fan-base didn’t get it... or even like it, maybe. I think it had a beauty that wasn’t picked up upon and it didn’t get the acclaim it should have done. Ultimately, mine and Bernard’s reunion was too good a story.”

Was there a bitter sense of déjà vu? “People cared about the theoretical concept of us getting back together more than the actual reality of the music. There was no way any album would have lived up to it. Unfortunately, our work always gets overshadowed by stories. The first Suede album was overshadowed by hype, the second by him leaving the band, and the Tears record was overshadowed by us getting back together again. Maybe in the future we’ll make an album that won’t be overshadowed by something.”

On the subject of history, how healthy does the future of Suede look? “I don’t know. I’m not the right person to ask. Suede doesn’t exist at the moment, but it was always left open ended. It’s really hard to reform bands without it coming across as sad. I finished Suede because it wasn’t stimulating me.”

Indeed, Suede’s final LP, A New Morning, saw the group at their lowest point creatively. Worst of all, Peter Saville-less, the sleeve was appalling. “A lot of that was me trying to piss off Suede fans,” says Brett. “We were choosing to do things because we’d never done them before, not because they were good things to do. I was very confused and didn’t know what I wanted Suede to be. I wanted to break away from the Brett-shaped mould I’d created.”

So what lies on the horizon for Mr Anderson? “The next record I make will be my second solo album. I enjoyed making this one so much and feel like it’s a springboard to the next. I think it will be more band orientated.”
Forever the romantic outsider, Brett remains happily distanced from any singular scene. “I’ve always had a healthy disrespect for the music industry and it’s always had a healthy disrespect for me. My pet hate about this industry is the fact that it’s populated by people who neither know nor care about music. It’s becoming more of an industry and more corporate, especially the so called ‘alternative’ branch.”

Unsurprisingly, his opinion of smug music industry joke The Brit Awards is unreformed. “I’d really rather not pollute my mind with shit like that,” he sniffs. “I’m really conscious of watching TV and being exposed to adverts. The older I am the more sensitive I get about it.”

When I question Brett on how things were different in the olden days he’s visibly taken aback. “The olden days? You mean when everyone wore armour? When I first started making music at least the alternative industry was actually there and the labels had ethics, which were removed from the corporate machine. I find so many so-called alternative bands these days are very conscious of their career path. It’s all very neat. The most exciting and dangerous bands have always been separate from that world.”

Do you think that adds to the blandness of the scene? “Yeah. Bands deal with the attention that’s thrown at them so much better than Suede did. There were so many fuck-ups with us, but that’s what made the story interesting. And the media machine was less sophisticated in the early nineties when we started out. These days it’s very developed at selling packaged rebellion, which is people doing ‘outrageous’ things because that’s what they’ve been told to do. I don’t find that mentality engaging or interesting, just kind of dull.”

So what does Brett see as the solution? “I’m slightly disappointed that there hasn’t been a new type of music that has replaced guitar based rock as the hip thing. We’re in 2007 and there isn’t a new dance music that has come along and taken over the music scene. Whatever you think of dance music, at least it was challenging in the late eighties and early nineties. It challenged the status quo of the music industry. There isn’t that now, which you have to be slightly worried about.”

I wonder if Brett cares that his downbeat interview responses may render him unfairly pessimistic. “Nah,” he shrugs. “Everybody thinks I’m a manic depressive anyway.”

- Published in The Stool Pigeon music paper

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