The Art of Longevity Season 5, Episode 7: Suede, with Brett Anderson

The Art of Longevity

Suede (or, The London Suede for our friends in the USA) has reached 30 years in the business (well, minus the seven years the band was officially split in 2003). As singer Brett Anderson hits mid-50s, you cannot accuse him, or the band, of being boring. The energy and vitality of Suede’s 9th studio album Autofiction is striking, as are the band's recent live performances. More than that however, the album is Suede’s strongest batch of rock songs since, well, perhaps since ever.

This is all the more remarkable in a sense, coming off the back of The Blue Hour (2018), which was also a superb record, albeit very different to Autofiction, with lush production, strings and field recordings. It suggests Suede is a band reborn, on top of their game.

I spoke to Brett on the eve of the release of Autofiction and found him in fine fettle, excited at the prospect of promoting the record (how refreshing is that!) and discovering how it would land with both critics and fans. Not least because in a sense, it is a full-circle record that harks back to Suede’s beginnings 30 years ago (that first EP The Drowners in 1992) but at the same time comes across fresh, confident and modern.

This isn’t just another episode of The Art of Longevity but one in which Brett and I discuss the whole concept of the show (which he inspired) - the career arc of rock & pop bands - a process that has "all the inevitability of the lifecycle of a frog”.

The way Brett put it himself in the second part of his autobiography, Afternoons With The Blinds Drawn, is thus:

“Every band follows the same sort of career arc with the same points plotted grimly along the way like the Stations of the Cross: struggle, success, success, excess, disintegration and if you’re lucky - enlightenment”.

Having assessed the careers of many other artists that have guested on the show using ‘Brett’s Curve’ (sic) as a benchmark, how would Brett reflect on Suede’s career with hindsight and the objectivity of wisdom along with freedom from the attachments of the bands earlier career?
The answer might surprise you...
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