Brett Anderson - Afternoons with the Blinds Drawn

Coal Black Mornings

Published by Little, Brown

ISBN: 978-1-4087-1185-9

Copyright Brett Anderson 2019

The moral right of the author has been asserted.

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the prior permission in writing of the publisher.

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For my family

The peeling walls of the tiny bathroom were crumbling and flaking from the damp eating into the plasterwork and a small patch of mildew was spreading its delicate filigree of greying fungus across the coving like a little hand-painted forest. A mean-looking slatted window peered out on to the black sealant roof of the side return, and beyond that it was possible to glimpse the rows of brick houses that backed on to the scruffy weed-strewn gardens; dumping grounds for rusted old bicycles and rotary dryers and abandoned bits of furniture. Between the patches of mould dampened badly scissored random images were stuck to the crumbling paintwork with little discs of Blu-Tack and inside the cracked shallow bath a terrapin skittered and scurried around the parabolic enamel walls of his prison in a sorry circling dance. The bathroom door opened on to a tiny lightless corridor which in turn led into a high-ceilinged corniced room, its walls merging and shimmering as the flickering shadows made by the candles twirled and the flames guttered. The rattling loosely fitted floor-to-ceiling windows gazed out over a wrought-iron balcony and on to the stucco facades of Moorhouse Road in Notting Hill, the occasional twinkling glimmer of a kitchen light betraying the presence of the odd night owl adrift in their own private nocturnal rituals. Strange-looking glass beads hung from the door lintels and drying, browning artichokes sat forgotten in a cracked china bowl on a small side table next to the scruffy slate-grey sofa, and scattered all around us were half-empty bottles and torn Rizla packets and ash-trays heaving with butts. The night had been a long one. My old friend Alan and I had spent most of it smoking and chattering excitedly and listening to a cassette demo of To The Birds, rewinding and rewinding until the ceremony became a frenzy of looping indulgence as we sat lost in our own private meandering thoughts and the neighbours groaned and thumped and covered their ears with their pillows. The world was slowly shifting, our lives were realigning and beyond the dreary mundanity we could glimpse a different future, something that sparkled with promise and possibility, and sensing this we would sit for hours, listening and nattering and plotting and planning and hoping, feeling the knot of anticipation coil tightly within us.

So here I sit writing the book I said I wouldnt write, talking about the things I said I didnt want to talk about. I suppose it was inevitable. I wonder what dragged me to this place beyond a childish need to be heard, a somewhat garish impulse to tell the world my story. On the countless early mornings I spent lying staring at the ceiling thinking about this the one thing I promised myself was that I would again try not to write the same book that weve all read so many times before. Most rock bands tend to follow the same predictable trudge along the same predictable roads through the same predictable check-points, as preordained as the life cycle of a frog or something and so the tale is always going to have an air of inevitability, especially when everyone knows what happens in the last chapter. So instead what Im going to try to do in these pages is to use elements of my own story as a way to reach out and reveal the broader picture, to look at my journey from struggle to success and to self-destruction and back again and use that narrative to talk about some of the forces that acted on me and to maybe uncover some sort of truth about the machinery that whirrs away, often unseen, especially by those on whom it is working, to create the bands that people hear on the radio. This might seem a little ambitious but its my way of trying to claim some sort of ownership over the second part of my story, a story that was so assiduously documented by the media and which certainly doesnt need another retelling in that conventional form. Its remarkable how hindsight can lend a clarity that at the time was beyond you. Now I am able to look at what happened to me during the crazed rollercoaster of those salad days and almost see it all happening to someone else, whereas back then it felt so incredibly personal, so utterly immersive, my face pressed up against the glass as it were, far too close to it to be able to see any truth. This, then, is not so much an extension of the scruffy, dog-eared Bildungsroman of the first part of my story but instead a different kind of tale, something that pokes and prods at the cogs and gears that have ground around me over the years and hopefully answers a few questions, as much for myself as anyone, as to what exactly happened and why.

And so as the nineties lurched and spluttered into their fledgling years Suede emerged, blinking, from the debris of our rented rooms, dusting ourselves off from the threadbare chaos of our lives and from the scenes of quiet ruin that inspired those early songs. Ours however was to be the longest ever overnight success. I once described our career arc as being like a pram thats been pushed down a hill and it still seems like a fitting metaphor. It has always felt somehow precarious and out of control and ever-so-slightly terrifying. I suppose the child in the pram was the four of us, screaming against the bitter slap of the wind as we tumbled into the traffic.

Of course before we picked up speed there were still many awkward evenings standing on stages trying to convince muttering crowds in back rooms of pubs and places like the Camden Underworld and the Islington Powerhaus confrontations with seas of folded arms and grim, resolute black-jeaned armies wearing impress me faces but once the tipping point had been reached there was a sense that we could almost at last surrender to the thrilling inevitability of the ride that was pulling us along and that it had started to become something that was bigger than us. I dont mean to say that there was anything approaching a scene yet because there wasnt our momentum was still our own and it felt that if we were in any vanguard then we were in a vanguard of one. Music history has slightly rewritten itself over the years in that heedless way that it sometimes does in order to make the pieces of the past fit the truths of the present. On we staggered from stage to stage with holes in our shoes and a tangle of badly dyed hair smelling of Batiste dry shampoo and the musky, cloying bouquet of dead peoples clothes and slowly we began to piece together the brittle foundations on which all bands must build the edifice of their work the fan base. This was years before social media when word of mouth meant literally just that, when the only way to make it was to get out there and play, pressing your sweating flesh against that of the front row, feeling the oily squirm of clammy palms and the report of the stage against the seat of your worn-out needlecords. Gingerly we started to cast our net outside London, for the first time chugging along the motorways in rented off-white Ford Transits to places like the Tunbridge Wells Rumble Club and the Brighton Zap. In those days travel, no matter how humble or prosaic, was still novel and so the journeys rattling around smoking Silk Cut and eating service-station sandwiches as our friend Charlie Charlton barrelled us along the M23 felt like some sort of wonderful adventure. We used to have a fusty old mattress in the back of the van on which we would sit and jabber excitedly on the way there and drink cheap red wine and collapse on the way back while Mat sat up the front with Charlie lighting cigarettes and trying to keep him awake. For young men in their twenties theres something thrillingly virile and tribal about being in a band and in that winsome period before the joylessness of repetition set in there was a powerful sense of belonging; it felt by very definition