Brett Anderson
Singer
Kindly pitching his book.
From Fantastic Man n° 27 – 2018
Text by ELIOT HAWORTH
Portraits by BRUNO STAUB
Styled by MAX CLARK
“As I see it, the classic ‘bloke-in-a-band’ biography format is as follows: band forms after love affair with music, band becomes successful, band becomes jaded, band spirals into addiction and arguments, and band splits up – and then there’s the closing chapter on how they reform and everyone gets their life back together. That’s just a string of clichés and I wasn’t interested in regurgitating a string of clichés in my book. So instead, ‘Coal Black Mornings’ is about my unusual childhood growing up in a tiny, single-storey council house in Haywards Heath with my artist mother and classical-music-obsessed father. It’s about failure and struggle and the chain of emotional inheritance from father to son. It’s also about the moment I first meet the other members of Suede and when we first start struggling and failing as a new band, spending three years doing gigs in London, playing for two people in a pub, that kind of thing. Then we get signed. Then it stops! It was so important to stop the book at the point when we got signed. That’s a very symbolic moment for me. It’s a very symbolic thing for all musicians. They’re always striving to get signed. So that was the moment I wanted to stop. From then on you become successful, to lesser or greater degrees, and for me there’s nothing interesting about success. It’s like that thing in drama and in film: the most interesting parts are where it’s still unresolved and you don’t quite know what’s happening. I wanted that to be reflected in the voice of the book. Rather than saying, ‘This is me and aren’t I brilliant?’, I wanted a sense of it still finding its way in the world, for it to feel a bit unsure of itself.
Are there any music biographies that I like? I think the Patti Smith book ‘Just Kids’ was really nice because she didn’t give her readership what they wanted. I’m a huge fan of hers and I wanted to read about her album ‘Horses’, but she only mentions it very fleetingly in the book. Instead, it’s very much about her life with…what’s his name? Mapplethorpe. I thought that was lovely. Other than that, I like reading literature where nothing really happens. I don’t read blockbusters. I read books about families that sort of just sit around. Writers like Tessa Hadley. Have you read ‘London and the South East’ by David Szalay? Now that’s a book about failure! If you want to read a book that’s utterly, utterly engaging but isn’t really about anything other than a bloke’s dull life, then that’s the book to read.
I genuinely loved writing, I couldn’t stop writing. I’m like that with music too: I just have to get it all out of my system. I must have been quite unpleasant to live with for a while, probably not a great husband, but it’s the only way I can do it. I didn’t anticipate how much it would be like stepping into a time machine. That threw me. I was completely transported, emotionally, back to these moments, feeling things I hadn’t felt for 25 years. Some were really painful and I was crying the whole time I wrote them, and others were lovely. I loved reliving the early days of Suede. You know, as you move into adulthood, it’s so easy to lose sight of the person you used to be. That person was quite a special little person. Like everyone in their adolescence. I’m not saying I was a particularly special adolescent, but it’s nice to remember that shy, diffident person that’s hiding in there somewhere. Because that person is responsible for everything you are, in a funny sort of way.
I’d like to do another book, I suppose. I don’t know exactly what it would be about. A follow-up on the ‘fame years’ might be too predictable. I had always suspected that if anyone wanted a book from Brett Anderson it would be a book about my singing ‘Animal Nitrate’ at the Brit Awards or something like that, which I wasn’t prepared to do. So when I went to certain publishers and they said, ‘Well, this is great, but where’s the second half?’ I told them outright I wasn’t writing it.
What’s it like writing a book, compared to writing music? With music and writing songs it’s always veiled, to a certain extent, and you’re making the music with other people. Whereas this book is just me and it feels a bit like I’m being judged on my life. So if anyone decides to slag it off, which I have to be prepared for, I guess it’s going to be harsher. From my experience releasing records, there’s always this amazing period just before the record comes out where you’re living in a total fantasy bubble and you think it’s going to be THE record that’s going to go to number one in America. And then you’re always confronted with reality. So I don’t really know what to think about it yet. I mean, I’m very proud of the book. But my opinion is meaningless really. Right now, this is the first interview I’ve given for it and reviews haven’t come in yet. People have read it and have said kind things but there’s a huge difference between a few friends and colleagues being kind compared to when it’s ushered out into the harsh playground of public criticism. Let’s see how it comes back after its first day of school! Poor little thing, I already feel slightly protective of it.”