Ep 53: Brett Anderson

that's in it, but we're very pleased with it. We've got an incredible cover feature with an incredible artist this month, so that's what we've been doing. I managed to also get the worst haircut of my life today, which is mainly down to the fact that the hairdresser cut my sideburns almost above the year. So now I just look like I just look absolutely. I don't trust myself. I look at a reflection myself. I don't trust that man I see in the mirror, and so I can't expect

anyone else to. But you know, I mean, it'll grow out. So a day of ups and downs for me. I hope yours has been good. It's I guess it's Friday by the time you're listening to this and the weekends ahead blah blah blah. But let me introduce who this week's guest is here on Midnight Chat. Brett Anderson, I'm sure you know is the frontman of Swede, and I'm sure you know who's Swede are And you don't need me to go through all of this. But for those who might not, and I suppose a lot of our

younger listeners probably might not necessarily know who's Swedar. Someone of my age. We all know Swede, but had formed in nineteen nineteen eighty nine and split up in two thousand and three originally, and they reformed in twenty ten. They're about to release their third record since reforming, which isn't bad going considering it's there. What is it two four six, it's that eighth in total, but that are

three since twenty ten. It's called The Blue Hour, and it is as you're here Brett and I talking about it. It is essentially the third part of a trio. Is the way that they see it. It sounds very much like Swede, and Brett is very clear about that. But it is a little bit different. It's quite as I say to him, it's quite operatic, and there's some good visuals that have come with the early singles of it that is out today as well, So it's a busy day Friday. The Blue Hour by Suede is out today.

So yeah, I preciated the time that Brett afforded me. I actually went to his house in or to his flat should I say, in notting Hill, and we speak a little bit about that at the beginning. So it's always nice to kind of have a snoop around, you know, a pop star's house. It was very nice and I appreciated the fact that you let me do that because you know, if I'd had these sideburns then I don't think you would have let me in. But fortunately I didn't.

I had a sensible haircut. We got this recorded and that's all I've got to say on it, So please sit back and enjoy this episode of Midnight Chats with Brett Anderson from Swede. How long have you lived in this area of town? Have you always been over West Side?

bit of notting Hill a rocal Moorhouse Road. God, so many nearly thirty years ago now, and I'm just sort of yeah, I lived in the same in the same area for about twenty five years actually, but now my family we all kind of like my family, we sort of moved to the country, but we have a flat here as well, which is kind of quite useful.

a bit annoying. There were a couple of times I remember we went away and then came back and then literally there's the whole street smelled of piss and it was pretty disgusting. But yeah, I don't know. It's one of those things, isn't it. You know, it's kind of like the good things about the bad things about pro Oranti. It's kind of like there something quite exciting about it.

to me. It's one of those sorts of places I don't it's not like it doesn't have any kind of identity like a city has or you know, it doesn't really have that sort of thing. It's a it's a it's a kind of commuter town. You know.

you know. And you know, it made me fall in love with music in a lot of in a lot of ways, because music was the only escape that you had from the kind of like the grayness and the mundaneity of everyday life. You know, the kind of the glamour of music, I suppose was the escape, and you kind of like, you know, the music very very early on to me became became an incredibly sort of like

important force. My father was a huge classical music fan, and he kind of like force fed me all of these kind of like people like List and Mala and Vargin and stuff. And obviously, as was my duty as a son, I hated it and gravitated towards what was was what was the exact polar opposite, which was punk rock and you know the power of punk rock music,

which which has been very overdocumented over the years. But it was kind of like, you know, discovering the sex Pistols when I was you know whatever, twelve or whatever was a really key moment for me, as I think, you know, defining yourself, finding something that you love and finding it yourself is a really exciting thing. There's that sense that music kind of like is a sort of like badge of identity.

very he'd a belittle the music I liked. But that was kind of quite good fun that I quite liked that that sense of sort of challenge, which I sometimes wonder, you know, when when I hear about kind of kids that like exactly the same music as their parents, so they always feel a little bit sorry for for them. I always thought they pop music was one of the point of it was that it was supposed to kind of instigate the generational conflict. Yeah, yeah, of course, Yeah,

that's very much what it did in my household. You know, I'd be upstairs playing the sex Pistols and my little crappy sort of boots stereo and must would be blasting out kind of marlor downstairs, and you know, be the almost this battle of the volume of the volume pedals, you know.

She was always making something or mending something. And my dad used to sort of make things as well. He was quite creative in a different way, not in a less artistic way, in a more kind of practical way. So he's sort of like he used to make all of our furniture, and you know, sort of so everything we kind of owned was sort of homemade or second hand or something like that. So it's kind of quite a sort of an old upbringing, quite sort of left

field and creative. And I think when I came to wanting to hear a certain sort of thing musically, when I couldn't quite hear it, I thought, well, I'll try and make it myself. And it was that kind of attitude. It's sort of like if you don't if you haven't got it, you make it, you know. And it's that sort of like, well I can do that, you know, because my mother used to make all our clothes and my dad used to make our furniture, So why can't

I make songs? So I sort of sit there and bash out and try and you know, make write these rubbish songs. And you know, those rubbish songs were rubbish for many years and then some critical point got quite okay and people have started to like them.

It's just guys sitting around. I mean, to call them bands is sort of like slightly kind of giving them a little bit too much kind of you know, it's given too much credit, just us sitting around with guitars on our laps, you know what I mean talking about being Yeah, because it's like, because I've sort of answered questions like this, it's like, you know, they become all the pigs. Well you know what were they like people assumed that we were kind of gigging around, you know,

playing or something. You know, it's kind of some people sitting around kind of like writing some crappy songs. You know, it's you know, retrospectively, it's sort of like they've they've they've achieved more kind of you know than actually at the time. But it's a rite of passage, isn't it. For for for for lots of young men, you know, bitch forming a band and you know it's exciting.

you sing? Like, Okay, then I suppose I'll give it a go. I wasn't sort of like, oh, I want to be a singer. I had to learn to be a singer. I had to sort of learned to, you know, to express myself. You know, when I first started as a singer, I was kind of thought it was all just about sort of singing in tune and singing nice

words and singing nice songs and stuff like that. I didn't understand the kind of how you've got to sort of emote and have you got to give yourself to the music, all of these sorts of things.

to me, that's the hell. The idea of getting in front of people and having to sing is just I could I.

But that's why there is so much ego in amongst musicians and specially singers, because it's a sort of strange role to find yourself in and and but when you sort of get good at it, you know, which you have to sort of get fairly competent to sort of reach a certain standard. There's this there's an incredible thrill, and it goes from being this terrifying thing, and in

the early days it is it was terrifying. I don't really know how the hell I kind of pushed through those early days because some of those early gigs were just so depressing. You know, we regularly there were more people on stage than in the audience. We once played to one person, you know, things like that, how can you kind of and you just have this blind self belief And I don't really know what it was based on, because I wasn't particularly musically adapt and we certainly hadn't

really learned to riot and stuff at that point. And for some reason, I just pushed through it, and you just you just sort of I don't know, it's yeah, that sort of self belief which can mutate into into hubris.

the press sort of thing. But we're playing those things like Drowners and to the Birds and you know, Pantomime Holes, all these songs that end up on the first album meltal Mickey as well, and we were sort of still playing those to two people perhaps sort of thing, and everyone's like and we were kind of out. It was interesting.

Thing was swayed because I think we were really out of step with what was going on at that point when we were on the Cusp, just before we made it, the whole sort of baggy shoegazing thing had just sort of like, you know, it was just kind of coming to his you know, dreary end and Swayed certainly weren't baggy and certainly weren't a shoegazing band. We're sort of doing something different. And first of all that was a weakness because people kind of like just ignored us and thought, well,

they don't fit into this. But it allowed us to sort of go away and become good at what we were doing, which was being Swayed kind of thing. And then when we did sort of appear, we were kind of like we suddenly we felt like we were fully formed. You know, we didn't grow up in public. Sure, we had a lot of time in rehearsal rooms and playing to one person in pubs to kind of like you know, learn our crafts.

any kinship with it. It felt as though we'd started it and then it kind of like dissiplate appeared off and an old tangent. You know. When I was writing those songs in Whenever nineteen ninety nineteen ninety one, I was documenting Britain and the bands that came later. I think we was celebrating Britain, sure, And that's the huge

difference there, you know. I was just singing from the point of view of a kind of like a poor why it's twenty something guy in London singing about my life, and my life was sort of like standing in dold cu'es looking at the dandruff on the color of the man in front of me and sort of like you know, rented flats and the throb of last Night's Hangover. You know, it certainly wasn't a celebration of this gingoistic flag waving celebration that it became the cool Britannia thing. And I

did distance myself from that. I thought it was ugly. I thought it was I thought it was simplistic. I thought it was misogynistic. I thought it was horrible. And as soon as I saw what was happening with britpop, I kind of distanced myself and we wrote dog Man's Star, which is as Unbritpop an album as you can possibly get. It's about isolation, it's about disintegration, all of these things that's certainly not supposed to be a sort of like

a beery sing along of an album. And yeah, I've always been very proud that we've tried our own path. You know, sometimes it's hard, but I think that history looks back on that tread drunk their own paths with you know, kindly hopefully sure, who knows, maybe not?

You know, you've got to kind of like recognize your limitations and your and your I suppose you've got to recognize your You've got to kind of like recognize your your personality as a band. You know, I'm not, you know, sort of very foolish for for for the band to think that we could suddenly sort of become a reggae band or something like that. I'm being kind of silly,

but obviously not. But do you know what I mean, there's limitations in which Wade work And with the Blueout, I was trying we're trying to sort of like push it a little bit further out. You know, I'm writing a lot about about kind of there's a sort of like it's set in quite a kind of like almost

like certainly not set in an urban space. It's sort of set in a kind of like a slightly unpleasant kind of rural sort of hinter land, and I'm looking at looking at lots of the songs are written from the perspective of a child's point of view, And I suppose I was doing that because I was I wanted it wanted in lots of ways, lots of lots of the themes of the record is about kind of like

parenting and stuff like that. But I suppose that the child's point of view was was was a way to try and create a sense of vulnerability and a sense of kind of like hesitation and a sense of a

sense of unrest there, you know. And I didn't want to sing from a child's point of view in a kind of cliched sort of like you know, everything's great sort of sort of way, you know, I wanted to kind of look at it from a sort of slightly darker perspective and look at the kind of like slightly night create this almost like a slightly nightmareish sort of like vignettes, you know.

kind of what I wanted to talk about. I suppose this sort of sense of kind of like the sense of sort of threat that there is in nature, you know, the kind of like you know that there's the sort of thing when you're in the countryside and constantly seeing road kill the side of the road, and it's always it's always kind of like animals from children's stories, you know, it's always kind of foxes and badgers and these sorts of things that you know, you're kind of reading to

reading as you know, the children seeing there's these cuddly little characters and then you kind of like you kind of find them dead on the side of.

the road. There's nothing that special about it, but there's something quite there's something sort of tragic about it and sad about it and quite moving about it in lots of ways.

try it. And somehow, even though it obviously isn't there's no narrative link between the imagery of a deserted kind of town and the lyrics to the song, it somehow had a kind of grace and a kind of and a sort of poignancy that somehow reflected the lyrics to the song and kind of took took the lyrics somewhere else. I don't know, I can't. You know, it would be very easy to make a bit of a sickly video for Life is Gold, and I really didn't want to do that. And I like that. I like that it's

it's it is. There's something quite moving about about the video, and I don't really know why it's moving. It's I've always loved that imagery, you know, NaN's folly reclaim by nature, that whole theme, you know, the final scene in the Planet of the Apes of the Statue of Liberty on the beach, that sort of thing. It's like, it's fascinating.

I've always been fascinated with, you know, when you come across sort of like Second World War kind of concrete things in the countryside, overgrown, there's something really fascinating about it.

And of course with Prippy Out there's a whole level backstory of tragedy and all of these things that I don't mean to sort of belittle in any way, but there's something there's something kind of very in a very simplistic way, quite beautiful about looking at sort of like nature reclaiming concrete, and somehow it's sort of it resonated with the song.

as well. I mean, I think we're just trying to sort of like just take it a little bit further out and make it, you know, to do things that we've not done before, you know, things like the spoken word pieces of spoken word piece called Roadkill on there, and to use things like choral voices and stuff like that, just to try and push it, push the limits of what we do a little bit further out. But I don't think that, you know, there's nothing wrong with it

kind of trying to make a dark record. I think people sometimes when sometimes when you're kind of like in this sort of state when I'm kind of promoting a record record, companies are a little bit fearful of this, of the their band sort of saying it's a dark record. I was kind of like slightly regret When I was promoting dog Man Star, there was that sort of thing.

Bernard had left the band, and we were sort of trying to put on this brittle mask of optimism about the band's and I kind of like there was this sort of bullshit narrative about the record being about about ambition and all this stuff, and it's not an record about ambition. It's a record about disintegration and falling apart. But that doesn't make it any you know, that doesn't make it. You know, if I was a kind of like a fan of the band, i'd want to listen

to that. You know, I love things that are about failure and about falling apart and about darkness and stuff like that. You know, we're not kind of a boy band. You know, that's not the role of Swede to kind of like make nice sounding, sort of little love songs about kind of meeting a nice girl at the shop sort of thing. You know, we're trying that's not our role, and it shouldn't be. That shouldn't be what we're trying

to do. You know. One of the greatest things that happened that's happened to us over the last since we've reformed, is kind of realizing that we're not part of the mainstream anymore. And I think that's a really freeing thing, you know, when you realize, you know, we're not kind of going to get played on radio one anymore, and that sort of thing, and that's fine. What leave that

to people in their twenties, that's absolutely fine. But if you're still making music in your fifties, and if you're still if you still really care about it, I think it's important to sort of explore these kind of murky corners of life, you know, to take to try and take the format some sort of into a new place, you know. That's My favorite records are dark, you know, unknown pleasures. God, how dark is that? You know? It's you know, you know, it's it's about exploring these things.

of shit, because otherwise you just wouldn't finish it. In order to finish these things, you have to believe in them, and so there's a certain sense where you're kind of like you're sort of like manufacturing a kind of like a sort of fantasy about how the record's going to be going to be received, and then when you actually release it, you're confronted with the reality and even kind of like good reviews can sometimes be kind of disheartening. I can't really really describe it.

what I mean. Yeah, and it's you know, it's you do struggle with that, but it's kind of you have to if you're going to carry on doing this. I mean, what I've been thinking about a lot recently is how much a song or any kind of art lives with its audience. And you can create something and it's not until you kind of give it to the world and get feedback about it and get you know that sort of you know that you quite know what you think

of it yourself. You know, that's an interesting process. I think.

like it was happening to someone else almost. I think as you get older, you get more sensitive, you get kind of like, you know, it's never it's never easy to deal with these things. It's always it's always tricky. It's always it's always a journey.

And I don't mean that to sound kind of like, oh, we're going to kind of like be less sort of you know, we're still try and try and do things that challenge us and challenge our audience, but but I think we'll we'll we'll step back from that whole journey.

You can only really think of I didn't sort of have a you know, you learn so much about the record you're making while you're making it, and you can have a vague, very very very vague idea of the sort of shape it might occupy, but it always changes and it should change as well, because it's it's sort of like you're finding things out about it, and that's that's where it becomes kind of real and interesting, in the kind of mistakes you make and the sort of you know, all those sorts of things.

that's my opinion, which is completely meningless. It's not it's not for me to say, but people kind of people whose opinion I trust, who know the band really well, that's the kind of message I've been getting back from people that at first they were like oh okay, and then a few lessons in they're like whoa, okay, this is yeah, this is going somewhere interesting.

is very formulaic. It's struggle followed by success, followed by excess followed by disintegration, and very few bands managed to deviate from that path, and if you're lucky, you get kind of like end up with a point sort of

like a point of enlightenment somewhere after that. And so therefore rock biographies tend to follow a very formulaic sort of you know arc and I didn't want to do that, and that's why that's why I finished the book finishes in nineteen ninety two when we got When We Get, When we Got signed, which I thought was a kind of like a symbolic moment in a band's career, you know, it's the first moment where you kind of should publicly achieve any sort of success, and regardless of what happens

after that is another story. So I wanted it to be about a story about my early life, very much about my family. It started off specifically as a book about my father, and that's one of the main themes in the book. It's about kind of fatherhood. Really, it's about looking at myself as a son and looking at myself as a parent and kind of like you know,

those kind of things. But obviously it became sort of not just a book about parent who it's a book about struggle and failure and all of these sorts of things. But I loved writing it. I really like, I really did enjoy the process of writing it. I loved how writing prose kind of like there's a real freedom to it,

which you don't have when you're writing songs. When you're writing songs, you're kind of there's something incredibly sort of you've got to try and make it work within this very very narrow kind of kind of space, and it kind of it's quite constrictive, and when it does work, it resonates really really well. You know, the power of three words sung with the right melody and the right

back and can be kind of life changing. But you don't have that kind of like freedom just to sort of meander off and talk about your school dinners in nineteen eighty three or something like that within the context of a song, you know, yeah, certainly not in the context of a pop song. And I like that. I like, I like just sort of like exploring these little avenues of memory.

You know, it's about kind of trying to find a way into that that isn't kind of you know, just the kind of conventional path and look at trying to look at it from a different point of view, trying to look at sort of you know, maybe maybe more from the point of view of kind of like almost a sort of looking at myself as a as a as a as a case study almost and looking at looking at kind of how success and fame and all of these things affected me as a person, almost like

looking at looking that almost like as a sort of like a a sort of like a case study. I

don't quite have to explain it. There's a really good book by Alan de Barton called The Course of Love, which is about a relationship and at the end of it it's just you know, not just but it's a story of you know, kind of people falling in love and falling out of love, and every at the end of every chapter there's a sort of almost like there's a couple of paragraphs which is sort of like from a sort of psychology point of view, about what's happening

to the people. He's feeling this because of this, she's feeling this because of that, do you know what I mean? And it's really interesting to suddenly it's almost like this sort of like you know, sort of like this sort of an aside turning too the camera and by the way, this is going on here now, and it's kind of I love that's the duality to it, and maybe I could write something like that.

as you get older. But when you get it right and when you know there's a there's a sort of power to it that that is incredibly addictive. Actually, So just making more records or anything.