Afternoons With the Blinds Drawn Page 13

  During my snatched hours away from the labyrinth of the studio I had started to pay visits to the designer Peter Saville with whom I was developing sleeve ideas. Like countless other young men in countless other bedrooms I had sat there as a teenager gazing into the abstract, unreadable enigma that was the cover to Unknown Pleasures so when Saul had cleverly suggested him and had arranged for us to meet at the Nude offices it felt that somehow a part of the fabric of my childhood was about to come to life. Peter is without doubt one of my favourite people in the music business. He is a rare flower of wit and sophistication in a barren desert of desperate ill-mannered bullies. At the time he was living in Mayfair rather like a character from an Evelyn Waugh novel in a hilarious parody of a wealthy playboy’s pad. After ascending in one of those ancient, caged Edwardian lifts you would be greeted at the door by his assistant and led into the flat and offered a seat on a Mies Van Der Rohe Barcelona chair or a similarly designed piece of elegant modern furniture formed of leather and brushed steel. The apartment was rich with thick, seventies shag-pile rugs and pop-art paintings and expensive-looking textiles and everywhere were scattered fine art and photography books. After half an hour or so of flicking through images of scantily clad women a real scantily clad woman would sometimes waft through the spacious lounge with bed-hair, smoking and muttering something into the phone in a German accent and eventually Peter would descend like some bleary-eyed aristocrat in his customary silk dressing gown yawning his apologies and asking for coffee. We would then spend shifting, merging hours just talking. Peter is one of those people with whom the conversation spools and fragments, drifting off ever more into tangents as, fascinated and fascinating, he navigates the channels of his meandering thought. Eventually the subject would settle on the matter in hand and we would finally focus on our ideas for the sleeve artwork. In amongst his huge stockpile of books we had found one by a German artist called Paul Wunderlich and loved the charged, surreal depictions of warped sexuality. They hinted at a kind of pop-art sensibility but with their own distinctive mien: stylised and taut with suggestion and beautifully strange. We decided to use them as our guide for the look of the sleeve. Peter was convinced that we could manipulate a photograph to imbue it with the same feel and so we went about staging something using models to create a kind of human tableau that paralleled some of the dissolute themes of the record. Peter’s friend Nick Knight took some beautiful photographs and the resulting sleeve opened a new visual lexicon for us and was the birth of a friendship between Peter and myself that has spanned decades.

  Back in the real-world grey of the studio Ed’s enthusiasm to make everything sound upbeat had even extended to the ballads and I wandered in one day to lay down my vocal to ‘Saturday Night’ to find that the backing track had been recorded much too fast so when faced with the task of singing I was simply unable to fit in the words. Unfortunately when I listened back it felt hurried and crammed and mechanical and bereft of charm, lacking any of the poetry that good phrasing can lend a lyric. We eventually ended up slowing it down and getting the speed of the track more or less right but I always feel that a song has a natural tempo that it’s the band’s job to find. As a singer my instinct probably veers towards a slower pace, feeling that somehow it unlocks a heft and a size to the music, that it gives the space that allows me to deliver the narrative properly and to lend the song lilt and ebb. Ed on the other hand was convinced that everything had to be faster, that the true pop heart of the album could only be unlocked with punch and haste and brevity. It was a struggle between us that inevitably led to an imbalance as we pulled in different directions and started to mistrust each other, him wanting one thing and me childishly contradicting him and demanding the opposite. It was responsible for one of my biggest regrets concerning that album – the vari-speed vocals. In the days before the digital wonders of Logic and Pro-Tools when everything was recorded on to two-inch tape the only way you could change the speed of a track was to slow the tape down or speed it up but this of course resulted in a subtle change in pitch. We had used vari-speeding before on things like ‘Metal Mickey’; it was a well-known technique that, if used subtly, could somehow nicely glue the sonic components of the track together, and if you listen carefully you can hear it on a whole galaxy of well-known pop songs from the pre-digital age, from The Beatles to Abba, but without a careful, stayed hand it can make the singer sound like Mickey Mouse. When we got to the mixing stage it was deemed by those in charge of the more technical aspects of the record that some of the songs were too slow and would benefit from radical vari-speeding. Looking back I think it’s a shame that I didn’t stand firm and trust my instincts but by that point I was caught up in a scrabbling, undignified chase for success, seeing the prize dangling before me and believing that the only way to grasp it would be to ignore the nagging voices inside. Many songs that shouldn’t have underwent this pitch-control technique which I feel gives parts of the album a lightly mechanised, slightly artificial sheen. Perhaps that suits some of the deliberately blithe, disposable themes like those in ‘Beautiful Ones’ and ‘Filmstar’, but I also like to flatter myself that in many of the tracks there’s a soul and a grace that it betrays. Our single biggest mistake in this respect though was how one song in particular ended up sounding. It was towards the end of the sessions when Saul started muttering about how he didn’t think we yet had the first single. An A&R man’s role is a strange, unenviable one. It’s his job to be dissenting and questioning at times, to push and demand, to be unpopular and to force the band to stretch themselves. Often though, as they are kept to a certain extent at arms’ length from the creative hub, theirs is a frustrating task; knowing what they want but lacking the expertise to be able to explain it or sometimes the access to be able to influence anyone. Again, like Ed, it always felt that Saul had a very personal relationship with Suede, that he cared about us beyond a point that was professional and that his life was deeply meshed with ours. It was I suppose something that we had fostered and encouraged and which lent our whole setup a strong sense of family, a feeling that our fortunes were locked together ‘for better or for worse’ and that as with any family there were inevitable quarrels and spats and sulks but you walked away and forgot them and moved on, your bonds somehow strengthened through the trials of your vicissitudes and mutual experience. Saul knew as well as any of us that the album had to be a bullet-proof comeback or we would suffer fatal wounds from the circling predators of the press who had smelled blood and begun to move in for the kill and he felt that we should summon our strength and push ourselves to write one defining song which would act as a figure-head for the campaign.

  In the early summer Richard had given me a demo that he had jokingly called ‘Pisspot’. To be honest I can’t even remember what it sounded like now because the song ended up undergoing so many changes as to be unrecognisable from the one on the original cassette that had littered the MDF shelves of my scruffy little orange studio back in Chesterton Road. I must have liked something about it but asked Richard to change the chorus and so he delivered a beautiful sweeping chord sequence, lyrical and flowing and suggestive of something romantic and yearning over which for some reason I decided to write a tawdry fiction about being confronted by pictures of an ex-girlfriend in a pornographic magazine. It was a jarring mismatch so I tore up that idea and raided my notebooks and came up with a new one, this time singing, ‘Oh, oh, oh, you and me, we’re the litter on the breeze, we’re the lovers on the streets’ over the chords. It was an incredibly thrilling moment; there was a grace and a poetry to the melody and the words which I loved but I felt now that the verse was wrong. Sensing that something special was almost in our grasp for many weeks we threw ideas at it until one day in the studio I was strumming and humming away in that slightly irritating, distracting way that people in control rooms do when I hit upon a simple C/Em/F/D/G sequence which Ed, brimming with the kind of wild-eyed enthusiasm that makes him so great to work with, absolutely adored and the chords an
d melody were nailed. I went home and worked on the lyrics, writing a kind of romantic, generic street anthem, something that borrowed the ‘us against the world’ sentiment of ‘Hand In Glove’ or ‘Heroes’ and I called it ‘Trash’: a song which both accepted and celebrated the drab, limiting world of my humble beginnings, a song about love and poverty and class and one which ended up introducing the album to the world. ‘Trash’ was always so important for me and I think in a wider sense for the band itself. Apart from it being a very successful comeback single that silenced many doubters and muted many naysayers it was written as a kind of ‘band anthem’. It was a song which attempted to detail, I admit somewhat romantically, the characteristics of the members of the band – our collective identity – and in a broader sense I think that of our fans. It must have been inspired by the very tribalistic, playground pop culture of warring gangs that I grew up with whereby you defined yourself as a person by the music you listened to and wore your passion like a badge of honour, something for which you would often be willing to suffer. In many ways I think ‘Trash’ was my attempt to describe and in some ways manufacture a ‘tribe’ for myself; to plot points on a cultural graph that I and people like me could inhabit. My strange upbringing with a Liszt-obsessed taxi driver in a council house full of Aubrey Beardsley prints had marinaded me wonderfully within a curious soup of dissonant ingredients but it had ultimately left me with a sense of never quite belonging; too poor to be accepted by the middle class to which my parents’ values covertly aspired but too different to fit in to the working-class community in which we lived which viewed us somewhat suspiciously as distant and aloof. I had always slightly envied those Manchester bands for whom their ‘people’ were already waiting, lying dormant, ready to be activated should the moment come, but for Suede I think ours were much less regional but still out there somewhere and ‘Trash’ was my attempt to find them. I had been searching for a while and all of those early songs that had tried to establish a collective identity were hinting at it – ‘We Are The Pigs’, ‘The Wild Ones’ and even things like ‘So Young’ were all attempts at locating an army, a herd, a gang of people who felt the same as me – but ‘Trash’ was much more explicit, providing a kind of manifesto of what it meant to be a ‘Suede person’. For Richard particularly the song was an especially important moment which marked his transition from a talented copyist into a fine writer, finally emerging from Bernard’s smothering shadow and being accepted and loved by the fans as an artist in his own right.

  Inspired by spending drifting, bleary mornings-after staring at Sky News trailers I called the album Coming Up, liking the way it suggested a sense of anticipation and an unembellished simplicity but also very aware of the colloquial meaning of the phrase – the sly, idiomatic implication of chemical rush and elation – thrilling again, as with my mischievous lyrics for ‘Animal Nitrate’, at the thought that I might be able to smuggle something vaguely poisonous into the fortress of the mainstream.

  GO TO HIS HOUSE

  AND KILL HIS CAT

  As I picked my way along Chesterton Road my eyes flitted casually over the usual scatter of empty cans and heaving binbags and dog shit that littered the kerb. In the road there was a new bit of graffiti which I hadn’t previously noticed but I was late and the words were facing the wrong way so I didn’t bother reading it. As I got closer to my flat though I saw that the same person had scrawled something in the same white paint on the pavement just by the house. The words formed slowly with every step I took until at last I saw the whole thing stark and plain against the grey concrete: BRETT ANDERSON LIVES AT NUMBER 106 CHESTERTON ROAD. GO TO HIS HOUSE AND KILL HIS CAT.

  Long studio sessions can make you feel like you are losing yourself in some dark windowless maze. Endless drifting hours are spent in closed, hermetically sealed air-conditioned rooms where the lack of natural light confuses your circadian rhythms and the emotional intensity and the physical challenge can push you to the thresholds of your endurance. A strange kind of bunker mentality can develop whereby you begin to experience mild Stockholm syndrome: an unhealthy surrender to the conditions of your willing imprisonment and the team of people that you are with become as familiar as close family. It’s a charged crucible, an arena that can sometimes break bands and sometimes strengthen their bonds as they all push in their own personal way towards the same goal – that of making a great record. The problem is that each of you has a slightly different definition of what a great record is and that differential can merge into disagreement. The minor conflicts and clashes that we had while making Coming Up were nothing unusual, just a necessary part of that process, the push and the pull and the struggle that should always accompany any creative endeavour – it’s a sign that everyone involved cares and therefore its absence would actually be somewhat worrying. When cabs were called late into the night and we blearily made our way back home we were always able to leave our niggles at the door, never again allowing the issues to fester and decay and become wounding and personal. Possibly we had learned something from the fractious clashes while making Dog Man Star … although probably not. Despite my reservations about some aspects of the record I have to say I’m incredibly proud of Coming Up: it redefined what the band were and introduced us to a whole new audience and in many ways, given the challenge, it was a remarkable feat. I think it’s important to not gloss over the frictions that strew the path though as somehow they make it more real and in the end it is often the story of these conflicts that is the interesting, most revealing part.

  I sometimes reflect on the qualities that in my case have allowed me the luxury of living a life being paid for what I love doing the most. To be honest I’m not an especially naturally talented musician nor an artistic visionary nor even a particularly gifted storyteller. One characteristic that has helped me over the years though is the fact that I simply never give up. I’m aware that it’s a trait that doesn’t fit with the romantic notion of the enigmatic artist but this book isn’t about perpetuating those fictions and it’s an attribute that anyone who wants to get anywhere needs to acquire. In my case it has been something born from a mixture of incommensurate, hubristic self-belief and a desperate fear of poverty and has meant that after every seismic career crisis I have somehow found the energy to pick myself up and dust myself off and start again. And so, against all the odds, like in some hackneyed film about a plucky misunderstood underdog we had clawed our way back. Maligned, written-off and tarred and feathered by the press we had returned to the fray, scrapping and resilient: ‘the battle-scarred fighters who just won’t go down’. We released ‘Trash’ and then Coming Up in the late summer of 1996 to rapturous excitement and acclaim, the album hurtling to number one and going gold and platinum in many corners of Europe, and then embarked on an eighteen-month campaign of touring taking us in endless circling loops around Europe and Asia: rattling, swaying expeditions on countless tour buses and through numberless airports and an infinity of sound checks and blank backstage dressing rooms laden with mini-fridges and cheese platters until disorientated and unwashed we would be deposited like worn-out luggage back in London and make our unsteady way back to our homes to try to pick up some semblance of normality. I suppose this is probably the time for me to regale you with stories of on-tour japery and excess, the florid cartoon life of a band that those on the outside assume is being conducted by those on the road: the Dionysian sagas of glut and madness and bad behaviour, the misogynistic Loaded-style laddish cavalcade of ‘birds and booze’ and frenzied overindulgence. Strangely though I find it hard to remember touring in any detail, and what detail I can remember just fits in with the clichés that everyone would expect: the predictable dreary blur of alcohol and narcotics and dalliances with kitten-eyed foreign women. I tend to switch my mind to quite an animalistic setting while touring, my focus narrowing down to the simple requirements of sleep and food and intemperance. Of course there have been colourful incidents – waking up in a drunken stupor on the floor of a public toi
let in Stockholm to the flashing bulbs of the paparazzi, having coins thrown at me on stage by packs of angry thugs in Cologne, Jägermeister-fuelled evenings with random eighties popstars in Oslo – but recounting them in any detail beyond a brief mention leaves this book in danger of becoming just another wave in the sea of stories detailing the same predictable rat-run of jolly schoolboy-like shenanigans that allegedly all bands get up to and I promised myself that I would never write that kind of thing. In many ways such anecdotes seem somehow tangential to the tale that I am trying to tell. I want this to be less of a list of ‘stuff that’s happened to me’ and more of an investigation into other events and their consequences and so despite their graphic nature these kind of travel stories are in many ways peripheral. The only interesting thing that I can think of to mention about touring is how numbing it is. I’ve always found the whole experience so incredibly physically demanding that my intellect and creativity become secondary in order to indulge the tyrant of my body. Rather like when I’m on a long-haul flight and find that I am only able to watch the kind of ‘comfort viewing’ that I would never consider in my everyday life so I feel that my IQ levels drop dramatically when I’m on tour. Therefore we’ve never been one of those bands who have been able to write on the road, unable to indulge in that trope of the bearded, weary musicians gathered in a dishevelled hotel suite jamming away on their acoustic guitars while bleary-eyed waifs sit smoking and nodding along in the corner. Apart from the odd phrase or lyric smuggled into the ever-present bank of my notebooks the creative process gets put on hold. In many ways I quite like how this enforced abstinence dictates a kind of rhythm to the whole artistic cycle, allowing me to rest my mind for a while and let my subconscious do some work. I always imagine this process to be a little like how in agriculture a farmer will allow a field to become fallow for a while in order that it can be more productive in the future. The only song in our back catalogue that I think has been directly inspired by touring was called ‘Have You Ever Been This Low?’, a bleak, smeary sketch of the tedious drudgery of the experience that I penned hunched over my cream cheese bagel and my bottle of Snapple in a diner somewhere in Boston on the Dog Man Star tour. Slightly tangentially, the role of the subconscious is a fascinating thing when it comes to writing. Often when wrestling with the conundrum of a lyric or a melody I will take a break and go for a walk and forget about the problem for a while and let my mind settle only to return to my work and find that magically the mot juste has sprung into my head, my subconscious having been chipping away while I’ve been wandering around staring at some sparrows. It doesn’t always happen but when it does it feels like a wonderful gift and has resulted in so many crucial little snippets of our songs all the way from the ‘you’re taking me over’ hook of ‘The Drowners’ to the chorus of ‘Cold Hands’ and many, many things in between.