Biog man star

So young… Suede’s Brett anderson reflects on his pre-fame early years

WHEn Brett Anderson was searching for a model for his memoir, Coal Black Mornings, he turned not to the usual heap of predictable rock biographies but to Laurie Lee’s Cider With Rosie. “The biggest lesson I learnt from that book is how anything, no matter how mundane, if well described, can be interesting,” says Anderson. “My life had interesting elements, but there was also drudgery. I didn’t want to write the usual rock biography, which is why it finishes when it does. It was a bloody-minded determination not to do what people expected.”

The book ends with Suede signing to nude, full of hope and expectation but yet to be acclaimed the best new band in Britain. Instead, Anderson produces the origin story, focusing on his childhood in Haywards Heath and his student years in an almost unrecognisable London, with Suede slowly taking shape amid the flatshares and pub venues of Kentish Town and Ladbroke Grove. “I’d decided the point it was going to finish, and it was very consciously when we got signed,” says Anderson. “That is the symbolic moment in any band’s career. The whole of my life led up to that. on the dole, trudging around London with holes in my shoes, and six months later on the cover of magazines. It’s a huge shift in status that you can never get again. It’s a magical moment to focus on without needing to exaggerate.”

Anderson’s father, a dominating, curious and rather tragic figure, features as prominently as Justine Frischmann, Bernard Butler or Mat osman; there is a wonderfully toecurling moment when he mortifies his son by shouting out during a classical concert at the royal Albert Hall. Anderson writes unflinchingly about his “dirt poor” childhood, where his meals were foraged and his clothes stitched together by his enterprising mother. He is equally candid about the some of the pretensions that made up his early Suede persona, and how he now interprets his “overt femininity” as a crude attempt to compensate for the loss of his mother and his break-up with Frischmann.

There are amusing cameos for ricky Gervais, future Pointless host richard osman and The Smiths’ Mike Joyce, who amazes a nascent Suede by answering their “drummer wanted” ad. Yet arguably the book’s main character is the shabby London of the early 1990s, where “nothing seemed to work properly and everywhere was painted in the same landlord magnolia”, and how that fed into Suede’s music. “I spent a lot of time reflecting on things, including my relationship with London, and it’s partly reliving those days as a way of assimilating those memories. A lot of the book is set in a specific part of notting Hill. It wasn’t moneyed and plush and safe, it had an edge, it was artistic. That thing of social classes living cheek-by-jowl on the Portobello road isn’t there any more.”

Anderson also wanted to avoid any grudge-bearing and score-settling. His memories of Frischmann and Butler are complex but warm and full of gratitude. “Trying to write about my relationship with Justine was very tough, treading the right line and not cheapening our relationship,” he says. “You need to protect that privacy. It’s an explicit memoir, but there are also things I don’t want to talk about because they are private and I’m telling the book on my own terms. I wanted to make sure the people I was writing about – Bernard and Justine – who aren’t so much in my life… I didn’t want to sully those relationships.”

of course, if there are future volumes, Anderson might have to tackle more difficult terrain – the monumentally fraught recording of

Dog Man Star, for example. “I’ll have to wait and see how I feel about it,” he says. “one thing I’ve learnt is that I can write about whatever I want to write about, and that was very freeing.” Peter Watts

“Writing about Justine

[Frischmann] was very tough, not cheapening our relationship”