Death and the Suede man
Brett Anderson teams up with Charles Hazlewood and Paraorchestra to breathe new life into songs about dying
“IHATE jolly music,” says Brett Anderson, an avid plunderer of the pale rider’s record collection. “I find happy music depressing. All the best songs are about the murkier sides of life.” He makes a natural frontman, then, for Death Songbook, an orchestral covers project focusing on the “morbidly beautiful and poignantly sombre”, instigated by renowned conductor Charles Hazlewood.
Around the start of lockdown 2020, inspired by his former wife’s Festival Of Death And Dying in Somerset – an arts weekend intended to “up the debate on the last great taboo” – Hazlewood began looking for answers in the great beyond. “For such a universal theme, it’s something we’re so loath to talk about,” he says of death and all its dark tributaries. “We find it deeply uncomfortable, and yet the great irony is that, especially in music, melancholy and themes of loss and heartbreak and anxiety are the octane that fuels most of the greatest art that’s ever been created.”
Imagining an album of “delicate reclothings” of rock’s darkest materials, Hazlewood’s first thought for collaborators were Paraorchestra, a pioneering ensemble of up to 50 players both disabled and non-disabled, who push the boundaries of the traditional orchestra using a combination of traditional, electric and electronic instrumentation.
“We’re talking about vulnerability,” he says, “and if there’s one community in our society that deals on a daily, hourly, minute-byminute basis with vulnerability, it’s the disabled community.”
Hazlewood’s next call was to neighbour and friend Anderson, “a dark melancholic just like me”. He didn’t take much persuading. “I thought it was a fantastic premise,” Anderson confirms. “Bleakness and disintegration is in the DNA of all the music I have ever loved, so when Charles suggested it to me, I was immediately sold. I loved the idea of curating a suite of songs, culling some of my favourite music from my youth and giving it a new twist.”
The songs they chose to rework, says Hazlewood, “landed like freefalling angels out of the mist” – mainstays of their melancholy youths by the likes of Echo & The Bunnymen, Depeche Mode and Japan. Recording much of the album in one afternoon at the Wales Millennium Centre in Cardiff, the Paraorchestra were augmented by Portishead’s Adrian Utley, Polar Bear’s Seb Rochford and guest vocalist Nadine Shah, bringing a tensile menace and unsentimental grace to the likes of “The Killing Moon”, Skeeter Davis’s sublime “The End Of The World” and – somewhat surprisingly – Black’s “Wonderful Life”. “That was an interesting choice,” Anderson says, “because on the surface you would assume the song was simple and positive, but I’ve always found it brilliantly and bleakly ironic.”
Anderson and Hazlewood worked up a new song for the record too – a chilling portrait of domestic violence called “Brutal Lover” – while Anderson reinterprets four of his own compositions, including Suede’s “The Next Life” and 2022 single “She Still Leads Me On”, written for his late mother. “Death is the ultimate fear,” he says. “The thought of it is sometimes too overwhelming to properly entertain, so I think as artists we try to find ways of making beauty from it as a way to stare it in the face.”
Completed with three tracks recorded at the project’s live premiere at the Millennium Centre in October 2022 – where Gwenno provided guest vocals on a febrile, jazzy “Enjoy The Silence” – Death Songbook is intended as an entreaty to not fear the reaper. “It’s about reacquainting oneself with the fundamental truth that melancholy or darkness, these are the main pillars of great art,” says Hazlewood. “And far from that being depressing and making you feel even more desperate, it has the opposite effect.”
“Bleakness is in the DNA of all the music I have ever loved” BRETT ANDERSON
Death Songbook is released by World Circuit/bmg on April 15; the album will be performed live at The Roundhouse, London (April 24) and Manchester’s Aviva Studios (April 26)