During most of his career, Suede assumed that Britpop, the movement that the band helped to originate in the early 90s, would not return. This assumption will be tested on September 6, when Oasis touches the Rose Bowl, one of its first US shows. Uu. In more than two decades and part of what is announced as the largest 2025 rock tour. It is expected that ninety thousand fans will appear in Pasadena for the British version of Gallagher British, the equivalent of a stage of a pub at Santa Monica Boulevard. The day before, five thousand miles away, Suede will launch “Antidepressants”, its tenth study album.
In the US, the band goes through the condemnation of London, thanks to a legal dispute of decades with an American popular singer. This name is more likely to obtain an educated recognition than the oasis of ecstatic nostalgia still inspires. But in Britain, suede was the spark. His 1992 single, “The Drowners,” lit what would become Britpop, the most significant resurgence of British Rock from Beatlemania, racing the way for a new generation of bands and projecting British soft power abroad. The homonymous debut album of the group continued next year, matched, the hymn guitar lines with intimate and clearly British portraits of life.
Leaving a cult of non -personality, where ordinary figures with unpretentious names such as Ian Brown amounted to the British royalty of music, Brett Anderson, Fey and Foppish Androgyne of Suede, reintroduced the theatricality and glamor in the scene. For a brief spell, Ricky Gervais managed the band. The group got the cover of Melody Maker, then one of the most popular music magazines in Great Britain, before he even launched a song. His debut album became one of the most anticipated releases of the first decade, with a volume of enthusiasm comparable to the arrival of the Smiths just over a decade earlier. When he launched, “Suede” became the best -selling debut album in British history.
“We released Britpop's first album,” says Anderson, with reality. “You have to accept that.” And yet, the band's legacy is still strangely not claimed, eclipsed by bands that made their British easier to export. As Britpop began to coast in a recognizable genre and vision, the suede was canonized as its creators, only to be largely eclipsed, since bands like Blur and Oasis came to define the movement.
Today, Anderson joins bassist Mat Osman, who wears a black shirt and a collar of distressed statements. Anderson, who describes himself as “anti-fet”, carries the same uniform he uses during most of two decades: an impeccably cut shirt and a pair of adjusted cocktail pants. He reclines on his sofa, an arm threw lazily behind his head, while the greens of his English garden balance in the decrease in summer light. His band has existed so much time that the spiritualist in which he emerged has turned back.
“We released the first Britpop album,” says Brett Anderson from Sueed. “You have to accept that.” And yet, its legacy remains strangely not claimed, eclipsed by bands that made its British easier to export.
(Dean Chalkley)
Shortly after Leede launched his debut album, David Bowie told Anderson candidly: “Your interpretation and your song composition is so good that I know you are going to work in music for quite some time.” He was right. Ten albums in, Suede remains creatively restless, rejecting the comforts of an afterlife heritage band. “We are anti-nostalgia,” says Anderson. The band's last album is aware of age and the strange bending of feeling young and old, such as “18 -year -old software about 50 -year -old hardware”, as Anderson expresses. He and Osman are close to 60.
“Antidepressants” is an emblem of the late style. If the early work of suede captured the ecstasy and collapse of the first love, “antidepressants” is the most precarious work of maintenance. “People sings about falling or leaving love,” says Anderson, “but nobody really writes about keeping a relationship alive.” Suede has become an experiment in longevity, promoting the feelings of adolescents through a withered engine. Even so, in the songs of today's group there is a complex type of British, at the same time crazy and beautiful, homeless and very high, of the same type as musicians always sought to capture in their portraits of the British life of the working class.
Anderson grew near Osman in the south of the English city of Haywards Heath, part of a working class family in a house subsidized by the government. His father was an obsessive classical music; His mother, an artist, trends that, at that time, were considered antithetical to the life of the working class. This assumed contradiction reflected Suede's own sensitivity, which resisted the ordered prescriptions of how the representative class should be. Music Press, an industry extracted from the upper middle class, fought to reconcile it. “There is a certain type of culture or working class with which the middle class feels very comfortable,” observes Osman. “It is that thing of oasis, football and beer.” Britpop, in his incarnation of the mass market, became precisely that: Laddish, Boozy and deliberately simple.
The suede quickly dissociated Britpop when he faced something that the band could not recognize; Something that, for the group, resembled a kind of Jingoism. The second album of the band, “Dog Man Star” of 1994, was the declaration “Anti-Britpop” by Sueed, More Art-Rock Fever Dream that Stadium Singgalong. It was around this era that the press came to define Britpop through caricaturized rivalries: Oasis (working class, football and stain stain) versus blur (middle class, art-star London). The suede, with its glamorous inflections and its high drama songs, did not place perfectly in any of the camps. The bandmates dressed in second -hand costumes that made them look elegant for some and, perhaps more condemnatically, refused to flatten their class identity in something easily readable.
Here he lay much of the problem. As Noel Gallagher said in 1994, the year in which Oasis launched his debut album: “You get a band like Suede and write quite decent music and all that, but Brett Anderson's lyrics are basically a cross between Bowie and Morrissey, and I don't think a 16 -year -old boy understands what it means.” In Britain, Osman observes: “The cartoon is more real than reality.”
In the United States, that cartoon is also beginning to gain traction, surprising development given the depth anti -American posture of Britpop. Unlike the previous musical movements in Britain, Britpop did not refer to American culture, it was often positioned against it. When Britpop jumped to fame in England, Grunge was taking over the United States. Sometimes Britpop acted as a cultural reflection against his Yankee counterpart. Unhooking even to the grunge satirized music with his megahit “Song 2”, a song of meaningless lyrics and Vim not won. However, the sense of suede witch was less a matter of manifest than instinct, driven by the desire to make small lives and intimate details in radical, romantic and even histrionic gestures. Britpop transmitted British through the toast; Grunge American articulated through sublimated passion. “You know,” says Anderson, “if I could choose between Grunge and Britpop today, I would probably choose grunge.”
Osman says he is making a conscious “not cynical” effort about Britpop's return. “It is basically a generation with spending power that consults nostalgia for its youth,” he says. “I am trying to think about that as something positive.” Rational it to see the concerts of Oasis less musical events than as exercises in monocultural communion, “both for being in a large multitude of people who feel the same as you like anything else.” Suede, meanwhile, inspires a similar massive fervor in remote territories: in Chile, where the group recently touched a crowd in tens of thousands, and in China, where it can comfortably fill sports stadiums. In the United States, a different story. Anderson says that the band has no plans to travel the states, since it probably does not win money with him, “and we are not doing charity work.”
While Oasis' Rose Bowl show can be remembered as the return of the American Britpop victory, Suede remains focused on the future, still finding ways to press. “Britpop is automatically some type of nostalgia, right?” Anderson says. “It is a faded version of a past that never existed.”
