I devoured this book on one sitting. Beautifully wrote, very honest, too honest in places. Brett Anderson looks wryfully looks back to the period of his life before he signs a record deal for Suede. When it comes the death his mother, I found tears rolling down my face. ( )

Well written and captivating auto-biography from Suede frontman Brett Anderson. (Suede is one of my favorite British bands so I was curious to read Brett’s story.) The book focusses mainly on Brett’s early years... childhood, school, starting the band, and takes place in the 70’s, 80’s, and the 90’s. The book ends when Suede are ready to reach some well-deserved success. Brett wrote a follow-up bio “Afternoons With the Blinds Drawn” which I will have to read soon. An interesting read from a very talented man. ( )

I was a nervous, twitchy, anxious child, prone to bouts of insomnia and lonely, terrified hours awake staring at the grotesque faces that the folds at the top of the curtains seemed to make. Once the sun rose, I would wait for everyone else to wake up, staring for ages from my window at a pair of trees growing near the abandoned mushroom factory at the bottom of our road. One I called The Mouse and the other I called The Clown, and I would gaze transfixed as they swayed and billowed, seemingly locked in their immutable dispute, buoyed and buffeted by the eddies and currents of the high wind.

This book is a far cry from the gossipy fan-y book named "Suede: The Authorised Biography" by David Barnett; the latter is a book that dances feyly through drugs, bitchiness, Suede's fall-through and rebirth, where this book begins with Anderson's beginnings, and ends at the cusp of Suede breaking through.

This book is actually very well written. Anderson's curtness with language is instantly on display, as is his self-proclaimed two-pronged love for honesty and hatred for irony, where both his song lyrics and this book is concerned. As he writes, there is no absolute truth where memoirs are concerned, but, as he puts it, perspective.

Anderson, currently over 50 years old, is still a kind of rock star, as far as one can be these days, but seems far more interested in ordering his family around with handling the garden at home than doing drugs. However, he still has a knack of combining poetry and the mundane, often taking the language of the common person, twisting it until you have a decent song at the end.

If one listens to Suede's debut, eponymously named album today, one is quickly left with insight as to how good the album still is, and how even the band's b-sides were extraordinary.

Anderson has an acute and precise way of delivering his childhood onto pages:

I was a nervous, twitchy, anxious child, prone to bouts of insomnia and lonely, terrified hours awake staring at the grotesque faces that the folds at the top of the curtains seemed to make. Once the sun rose, I would wait for everyone else to wake up, staring for ages from my window at a pair of trees growing near the abandoned mushroom factory at the bottom of our road. One I called The Mouse and the other I called The Clown, and I would gaze transfixed as they swayed and billowed, seemingly locked in their immutable dispute, buoyed and buffeted by the eddies and currents of the high wind.

I'm utterly glad for having read this book on an electronic reader that allowed me to check its built-in dictionary constantly, mainly because some words were far too tricky for me. Still, they were really worthy of checking the meaning of. How often can one really say that?

One such word is "penury", which means "severe poverty". Anderson's family grew up under completely desolate straits, monetarily speaking. Also, Brett's relationship with his father is delved into, and a lot of analysis and therapy has seemingly gone into handling him:

Living under my father’s roof involved picking your way through a complex wilderness of seemingly pointless rules. He once wryly described his only indulgences in life as being ‘an ounce of tobacco and a copy of the Radio Times’, which he would jealously guard with a Gollum-like grip. Woe betide anyone who removed it from its special tartan holder, or got to it before he could schedule his listening pleasure with a series of Biroed circles, or even more transgressively took it from its home under the small wickerwork stool where he liked to place his feet while puffing and wheezing endlessly on his ever-present briar pipe. There were other rules about the proper time to eat plums and the ‘correct’ way to tie a tie, which on reflection don’t quite translate, but at the time seemed narrow and petty, always betraying a sense that he was desperately trying to wrest control over the moving pieces of his world.

[...]

Although he never physically harmed me, my dad’s brooding rages were terrifying and have probably left me with my own legacy of neurosis. He could be very controlling – always demanding to know where you were going if you left the room. To this day it’s impossible for me to even go for a piss without telling my wife. It’s like that scene in The Shawshank Redemption when Morgan Freeman’s character gets the job as a bag-packer in the supermarket. At other times he could be hugely confrontational and would make outrageous or quixotic statements about politics and music. When I eventually drifted towards adolescence and began to challenge him, we would continually clash in increasingly bitter, cyclical debates over the relative merits of pop and classical. Christmas after Christmas would end in fraught, charged arguments as we sat glumly at the table in paper hats while he passionately but pointlessly tried to prove to me that the Pathétique was ‘better’ than ‘Satisfaction’. The experience made me highly opinionated about music and probably prepared me wonderfully for a lifetime of over-explaining my own.

I won't go into detail on that more, but it's safe to say that Anderson's relationship with his father was complicated, which is the word Anderson feels best can describe it, both when the father was alive and today. He also describes his loving relationship with his mother, detailing how she not only constantly mended but also created clothes for the family, due to their poverty. He also writes frightfully and horribly sad passages on learning that his mother was diagnosed with terminal cancer and had a mere six months left to live.

There's fun in the book, too. Anderson's sentences reveal a wry and dry humor, which left me chuckling a couple of times. Otherwise, though, I got the sense that his hunt for The Truth often left the text leaning that way, and never into...Chas and Dave territory.

I don’t think our dad’s growing reputation as Haywards Heath’s answer to Edith Sitwell or my mother’s habit of sunbathing nude in the garden really helped, but slowly we were accepted and absorbed within the community, although we were always seen as outsiders – ‘that lot with the piano in their kitchen’.

[...]

Crisps were one of the few foods I really craved as a child, and I clearly remember a fantasy I would occasionally allow to spool in my head whereby when I was grown up and had enough money I would buy myself a small mountain of them. It’s something I really should do one day just to commune with my ten-year-old self.

Anderson goes to lengths to explain that really, he does not wish to shed any bad light upon his parents or other persons because of malice, and I believe he does not; he further explains that he himself now is a father, and as such, truth must out, in order for himself to become and/or stay the person he is.

My dad’s sister, my auntie Jean, was a spirited, rambunctious woman who was obsessed with cats and Elvis Presley, and would totter and clop in her high heels and miniskirt around Haywards Heath under a huge, swaying, dyed-blonde beehive hair-do. She was the manageress of the local branch of Dorothy Perkins and lived with her husband, a sweet, meek man called Vic, in a flat above the shop on South Road with their burgeoning brood of children, a white long-haired cat called Kinky and a large illuminated tank full of tropical angel fish. I remember she used to drink Babycham out of those small painted seventies’ glasses, and my mum once made her a purple draught excluder in the shape of a snake. She is only a misty, washy memory for me, though, as her life ended in 1980 in a tragedy of almost iconic scale. She was found dead in a car with a man, who was presumed to be her lover, after they both succumbed to carbon monoxide fumes. As a child, overhearing the babble and conjecture at the time, it was unclear to me whether it was an accident or a suicide pact or even murder, as the gossip-mongers and the tittle-tattlers speculated and raked over the scant facts.

I think the coroners returned an inconclusive verdict of ‘misadventure’, which only added fuel to the fires of rumour that burned fiercely in our sleepy town. It was naturally a drama of giant proportions within the family and a crushing tragedy to her surviving children and husband. It formed the inspiration for a song I wrote well over a decade later called ‘She’s Not Dead’, where I tried to borrow some of the detail to paint a probably highly stylised sketch of the heartbreaking episode. One of the original lines was ‘carbon monoxide sang as the engine ran’, and to be honest I don’t know why I didn’t keep it. It seems strange to me now, and not a little callous, that I can sit here and talk about how I have turned personal events that have crushed and redirected people’s lives into songs. Part of me feels that it’s a somewhat shaming and trivial thing to do, and I hope I’ve never cheapened anyone’s memory, but I think it’s important to realise that art generally is just a process of documenting and interpreting and channelling one’s experiences and turning them into something that lives in a place beyond reality. In my defence, at least the song is a good song, if that doesn’t sound too glib, and the characters in it hopefully have a certain grace and dignity. Well, that was honestly the intention.

Speaking of how poor the Anderson family was:

When I was a young child I don’t think I was particularly conscious of us being poor. I was too locked within my selfish, narrow child’s world to really have any sense of perspective. It never occurred to me that other children didn’t help their mothers pluck dead birds or skin rabbits, or that most people didn’t just huddle around a single open fire in the winter evenings for warmth; not that Oathall was full of rich kids – it was a Haywards Heath comprehensive school – but I gradually became aware that our lives, if not unique, were certainly marginal. One particular grim ritual forced home the cold, hard truth. As my father earned so little I was entitled to free school meals. For some reason, rather than doing it privately and discreetly, the unfortunate kids that fell into this unenvied little band were forced by the school to queue up in public for their special tickets in the large echoing canteen in full view of all the other sniggering, jeering children. To say it was a humiliating experience is a crushing understatement. It was like a Dickensian workhouse scene; a punishment for being poor, like being pilloried or put in the stocks: brutal, completely unnecessary and pointlessly cruel.

The experience was truly scarring and made me utterly fearful of poverty. The memory of it often haunts me and makes me shudder with the fear that my own boys would ever have to go through anything nearly so horrible. A similarly crushing experience happened when on a Christmas day trip to London my father’s car broke down right outside Harrod’s department store in Knightsbridge. My mother, my sister and I had to get out and push while my father twisted frantically at the ignition key and pumped at the pedals to a dissonant chorus of angry car horns. The symbolism seems ridiculously appropriate and almost grotesque, our poverty spotlit against a backdrop of opulence and power; four insignificant figures lost in a desperate struggle while symbols of wealth gazed indifferently on.

On music:

Meanwhile, The Smiths’ colossal shadow of influence was ever growing; theirs was such a unique place in the world of pop – cultish and still distinctly marginal but with the reach to make thrilling little forays into the mainstream, so being a fan felt just as transgressive as being into the Pistols years earlier. They had hovered around my consciousness until one solitary evening when I was listening to Peel on late-night Radio 1 and heard Johnny Marr’s gnawing, insistent guitar hook coming through my tiny transistor speaker and Morrissey’s saturnine promise of leaping in front of a flying bullet, and that was it for me.

I'm sure Morrissey will reserve a new place in hell for Anderson, as he undoubtedly will learn that "Cemetry Gates" is misspelled in this book.

Then, there's this:

There was a student cafe on Gower Street called the Crypt or something, and one day I was sitting with my cup of tea and she came over to me and started talking. The first thing I noticed up close was that she had brown, discoloured teeth and what I thought at first was a speech impediment. Through her nervous, lisping drawl I managed to make out that her name was Justine. Justine Frischmann.

Described as one of his two great loves of his life, Anderson also fleshes out how she enters his life, as Bernard Butler does a bit later, and they form Suede.

Famously, Frischmann leaves Anderson for the singer of Blur, which causes calamity and severe heartache. Frischmann left the band, and didn't speak with Anderson for years. Still, this made Anderson and Butler gel more, and a hell of a lot of lyrics got written after that. Anderson is not one to shy away from detailing the meanings and inspirations for his songs, and a lot of that's in here.

Speaking of which, I can't help pointing this out, which must serve as a slight:

There was this bit of graffiti on a wall in Marble Arch which I noticed one day and that we both began to love saying simply Modern Life is Rubbish in stark white letters. We drove past it countless times and it never failed to fascinate us [...]

All in all, this book makes for a lovely read, not only for "musos" and Suede fans, but for anybody, really, who can identify with Philip Larkin's notes on what parents do to you, and for somebody who has ever wanted to escape a situation and did something about that. There's plenty of insightful, intelligent, and funny analyses here, enough to last. I'm glad Anderson didn't delve into gossip nor bad judgment. This is a good book, and it deserves 4/5 for being so well written, seemingly without bars or a real safety net, even though it's safe to say Anderson knows how to treat the media. ( )