http://s3.amazonaws.com/data.tumblr.com/tu...zfO%2Fj%2BBo%3DCommento di Brett su ogni album:
Suede: It’s got that restless, burning energy that debut albums should have. It was a relatively uncomplicated time, before all the cracks that get expanded by fame and money began to split the band apart, and Bernard [Butler] left. This was before Britpop happened, too, so for about 18 months, even two years, it felt like Suede was on its own, that we were doing something so individual and powerful that it became the basis for what became Britpop in the public consciousness. As a body of work, I still think it’s great and I love a lot of the songs, like So Young, The Next Life and Sleeping Pills. But it could have been even better, if we’d put [B-sides] My Insatiable One and To The Birds on there in place of Moving and Animal Lover [all are present on the new reissue]. But hindsight is easy. I feel the same about some of my vocal deliveries. I could have toned them down, but we were very much in the moment when making it, drunk on the arrogance of youth. I feel very privileged to have been part of that period of accelerated hysteria for Suede because not every successful band gets that.
Dog Man Star: I was conscious that the word ‘Britpop’ had started to be used, and of wanting to travel as far away as possible from the parochial, jingoistic cartoon that was forming in British music at the time. Rather than write about life on the dole in London, I wanted a broader, more international context, which touring with Suede had exposed me to. Dog Man Star was about that ambition. The Hindu deity flying out the window of the back cover image summed up my move from Britishness. I was listening to Kate Bush’s Hounds Of Love, Lou Reed’s Berlin and Scott Walker, albums with a musical journey and stories of sadness and darkness. Black Or Blue was more or less ripped off from Prince’s Condition Of The Heart – a lot of that album’s sexuality came from Prince, which I’m sure was a million miles from what Bernard was listening to. It’s a murky, difficult and emotionally complicated record, and just as much about my own disintegration and breakdown as about mine and Bernard’s relationship. I don’t think anyone could have gone through the accelerated maelstrom of success that Suede did without repercussions. Drugs had always offered me an escape route, but focusing on them is missing the core issue.
Coming Up:This was the most enjoyable Suede album to make, though blood, sweat and tears went into it. I was obsessed with the fact people had counted us out, that Bernard had left and Suede was effectively over, and I had the playground desire to prove people wrong. A hell of an effort went into making sure the songs were amazing. I really enjoyed the freedom of writing them because the first two albums were so structured; Bernard would come up with music and I’d write the vocal and lyrics. Coming Up was more of a meritocracy - if something was good enough, it didn’t matter what the source was. Like, Richard [Oakes] wrote the chorus for Trash but it needed a new verse, which I wrote, and I think you can hear that spirit of playfulness in the record. It’s our pop album; Dog Man Star was so dank and extreme and tortured, it was the last thing we wanted to repeat, especially with what was effectively a new band, with Richard and Neil [Codling, keyboards]. But I never wanted to something one-dimensional, so having three slow songs at the end reinforced the desire to take you through a range of emotions.
Head Music:I was a lot more relaxed about Suede after Coming Up sold a million, but I was exhausted too. We did an 18-month world tour and then started Head Music straight away. It took a long while to make, which I take responsibility for. There were lots of drugs around and I regret I wasn’t fully engaged. But in a funny way, it suited the mood of what I was trying to make, something less emotional, which was implicit in the album title. It wasn’t some guy sitting at home with his acoustic guitar, singing about how his girlfriend has left him. It was blanker and more oblique. Also Neil was ill [with ME] and was absent from a lot of the sessions, plus we were establishing a relationship with a new producer, Steve Osbourne, who was holding it together as we tried to reinvent the band. We wanted something more groove-based, influenced by electronica. That’s embodied in She’s In Fashion, which was quite an un-Suede song but it made your ears prick up when it was on the radio. I wish we’d left off four songs but Everything Must Flow and Indian Strings are great and I absolutely love Can’t Get Enough, a punky, violent little number. It’s a flawed record and I think Suede’s most underrated, but I’m proud we didn’t just sleepwalk into the next album.
A New Morning: I wanted to get out of London, away from drugs and the urban alienation subjects I’d been writing about for most of my career, and get into a different headspace. I spent six months in a rented cottage in the Surrey countryside, writing songs like Morning and Oceans, with this dappled bucolic vision. Originally, we chose Tony Hoffer to produce, because we liked what he did on Beck’s Midnite Vultures. But there was talk about something folk-tronic, Granddaddy-ish, so obviously we were confused about what we wanted. Perhaps unsurprisingly, then, it didn’t work out with Tony’s modern West Coast vibe, so we re-recorded everything with Stephen Street. But in retrospect we should have gone back to the demos, which you can tell [from the new deluxe version’s bonus tracks] we had a real enthusiasm for. There was also an element of Suede coming to an end, and going through the motions, like it had become a bit of a job. It’s why we tried to do things differently, to deconstruct Suede. We’d say, Would Suede do this? If the answer was yes, we wouldn’t do it. Which maybe wasn’t a good idea. Like releasing Positivity as a single. But I’ve always had little respect for bands that just trudge up this slow slope of success, and respected bands for trying new things and fucking up a few times.
