In the early 1990s Suede frontman Brett Anderson was one of the best known and most distinctive faces in the charts. But as his newly published memoirs reveal, his foppish image gave little clue to his impoverished and eccentric beginnings in Mid Sussex – a world far removed from rock-star success
Fans of Haywards Heath should look away now. Brett Anderson, 50, the lead singer of the Britpop band Suede, grew up on its fringes and documents his intense dislike for this “drab, dreary little train stop” in his newly minted memoirs, Coal Black Mornings.
Anderson spent his childhood and adolescence in a “poky, claustrophobic, low-rise council house” on the outskirts of Lindfield, breathing in the aroma of paraffin heaters and his mother’s cheap hairspray, poor enough to be eligible for free meals.
“Officially, we lived in a quaint Sussex village,” he writes, “but our house was somewhere the tourists never visited; hidden well away from the chocolate box fantasy of the high street. It was a place where, beyond the torrid kitchen-sink dramas of everyday lower middle-class life, nothing ever really happened and probably nothing ever really will.”
Ironically, it was this very ordinariness which appears to have been the making of him because it gave him something to kick against and instilled an almost physical urge to get away.
In the early 1990s Suede’s angular, anxiety-wracked indie songs – which included such hits as Animal Nitrate, Beautiful Ones and Trash – reigned supreme. In 1993 the band’s eponymous debut album – described as “a dark, druggy, carnal beast fuelled by Bernard Butler’s snarling guitar lines and Anderson’s falsetto yowl” – went straight to the top of the charts and scooped the Mercury Prize that same year.
As one music critic observed, Suede’s swaggering, self-consciously arty intensity was especially seductive to a generation of misfits and dreamers turned off by lager and laddism. Theirs was an innately English aesthetic and they sounded quite unlike anything around at the time.
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Denne historien er fra June 2018-utgaven av Sussex Life.
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