Tougher than leather

They've been through the bust-ups and personnel changes that mark most bands of their age, but Suede are made of stronger stuff than their peers. As they release their fifth album, Graeme Virtue finds founder members Brett Anderson and Mat Osman sunnier than ever HERE'S a good Rock Trivial Pursuit question: name the four territories where Suede have had No 1 hits. The highest they've managed here in their home country is number three - with the skyscraping ballad Stay Together, back in 1994 - so where else might they reasonably expect to strike a chord with their glum, glammy tales of urban alienation? Give up? Well, here's bassist Mat Osman. And he should know.

"Singapore Macedonia Peru and Iceland," he says, with the slow enunciation of an unsure contestant on Fifteen To One, before adding cheerfully: "The big four!"

We're sitting in a quiet corner of the Caledonian Hotel in Edinburgh, taking afternoon tea. Suede are in town to play an intimate warm-up date ahead of the promo push proper for their fifth album A New Morning. Osman - a lanky, amiable giant of a man - seems in good spirits, but the real revelation is bandleader Brett Anderson. Once a poster-boy for sunken-cheeked heroin chic with a ludicrous lopsided haircut and tight leather duds, today he seems fitter, happier, looser; his body language is relaxed, his handshake firm. But despite the mellow demeanour there's still a butterfly- mounting stare to his piercing blue/grey eyes, though he seems friendly enough.

Perhaps one of the reasons they're in such good fettle is because they've been cherry-picking sunny European festivals to play all summer.

"It's sort of been a lightweight version of being in a band," is how Osman describes it. "Fly in on Friday, do a couple of interviews, play in front of 40,000 people on Saturday " "Spot of dinner, and then home," finishes Anderson, dryly.

"We were playing places we've never played before," continues Osman. I ask how these crowds reacted to Suede's new material, their first since the successful but slightly plasticky soul of 1999's Head Music.

"We didn't play all that much," explains Anderson. "The set generally consisted of about three new songs."

"It seemed a bit unfair," adds Osman, "to go to Latvia where people have been waiting for 10 years for you to play Animal Nitrate and then turn up and say: 'Here's our new record! And by the way, we can't play it that well yet. You're our guinea pigs: tough shit!'"

As we chat, the chugging hits of Oasis are playing discreetly in the background, the snarling rock'n'roll bad boys now deemed suitable to soothe the ears of lobby-dwellers. There are more parallels to be drawn between London-centric Suede and the none-more-Manc Gallagher brothers than you might expect at first glance; apart from the fact they kick-started the giddy Britpop scene of the mid-1990s, they've both completed fifth albums this year and have undergone almost complete personnel changes since they started out.

Famously, original Suede guitarist Bernard Butler left the group acrimoniously during the recording of their second album Dog Man Star, and while his replacement Richard Oakes is still with the band, another comrade fell by the wayside last year; Neil Codling, drafted in on keyboards in 1996, had to leave due to chronic fatigue. He's been replaced by Alex Lee, who used to be in Britpop also-rans Strangelove.

"Everybody had been kind of expecting it and fearing it but it was like, OK, you've got to get on with it," says Anderson of Codling quitting. "He's a good friend of ours and we still see him. It wasn't anything like Bernard leaving - that was quite bitter and fraught. Neil leaving was more of a shame."

Written and recorded against this backdrop of revolving membership - and the collapse of their record label Nude - A New Morning sounds remarkably cool and collected, as optimistic as its title and a million miles away from the stomping, sexually-charged guitar abrasion that helped Suede's first LP become one of the fastest- selling debuts of all time.

Is it inevitable that bands calm down as they get older, that they settle in transit? It's certainly a sonic leap from the portentous operatics of Dog Man Star.

"It's just trying not to reproduce the same kind of feeling," says Anderson. "Dog Man Star was a very extreme album, but I think it was also a very flawed album. With this record, it's very much trying to write songs that aren't so hysterical, trying to write things with a different kind of energy to them."

"When you start in a band, you want to beat people around the head with your songs," adds Osman. "A lot of our early stuff is just like an assault, we were very combative and wanted to annoy people. It would be childish to still be like that we're not as cut-off from the world as when we started out. You have to make the kind of music that's true to your situation, not go chasing after a lost adolescence."

Anderson made his own radical departure this time round; after a career spent eulogising the grimy, dubious glamour of London, he upped sticks and headed out into the clear skies and cowpats of the country for inspiration. After four albums "ruminating on the fast life" he wanted to isolate himself.

"I enjoyed being on my own, actually," he says. "I discovered an important thing about myself which is that I can be on my own; I don't physically need other people's company. I don't know whether it's a good thing or a bad thing. It certainly means that you have a sense of your own independence. I've spent virtually 20 years of my life, from about 14, hopping from person to person, relationship to relationship, because you're scared of being on your own. So I thought f*** it, I'm going off on my own for a while and see what happens."

With an acoustic guitar, a typewriter and a few books, Anderson set about creating a "human, intimate-sounding record", one which - while undoubtedly bearing the sonic signature of Suede - heralds an expansive new era for a band commonly associated with claustrophobia, chemical psychosis and the smell of asphalt in the morning.

"It was a deliberate attempt to create an artificial environment for myself. It felt right, too. I felt that I needed the space away from London, away from the people I knew, away from the music business, away from drugs. Escaping all those things that were doing my f***ing head in."

The band recorded a version of A New Morning with notoriously technically-minded Beck producer Tony Hoffer, but elected to abandon it halfway through, at a reported cost of a couple of million. Starting afresh with Stephen Street - who's worked with everyone from The Smiths to Blur - they knocked off version 2.0 in just two months.

"It's taken us three years to make an eight-week record," muses Osman. "We've never done a record like it. Even our debut album took longer."

But what was it about Street that made things work?

"He wasn't too concerned with details," says Anderson. "He wasn't too concerned with the idea of it, he was just concerned about it sounding and feeling right. We just hadn't been like that for a while, it was a weird feeling."

Perhaps in a bid to stop the aborted sessions becoming the stuff of apocryphal legend, Suede fans will get the chance to compare and contrast both editions of the album; an embedded weblink on the CD will link to downloadable Hoffer versions of every single album track.

"It's really a fans-only thing, just out of interest. There's already been a lot of talk about it, so we thought: f*** it, we've got versions of every track on the album - although obviously they're inferior versions - but I think it's quite an interesting concept that you can see where a record could have gone to. But it's really just a point of interest for die-hard fans. We wouldn't recommend it to anyone else."

"Even the die-hard fans aren't going to be too chuffed," mutters Osman.

"They're not, are they?" replies Anderson, smiling at the prospect. "You can imagine them bitching about it."

The band seem to be having fun while they still can; with the new single and album out imminently and a full UK tour next month, Suede are going to be working hard for the foreseeable future. But one thing strikes you about that tour itinerary - why the blazes are they playing Aberdeen on Hallowe'en? "I didn't even realise," says Anderson.

Will they be dressing up? "I don't think we'll be dressing up," puts in Osman.

"But we've got a bit of a gothy contingent," concludes Anderson. "We get a lot of people dressing up anyway."

The single Positivity is out tomorrow on Epic. The album A New Morning is released on September 30. Suede play Glasgow Barrowlands on October 30 and Aberdeen Music Hall on October 31 www.suede.net

Copyright 2002
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