{"id":194112,"date":"2025-09-02T12:39:15","date_gmt":"2025-09-02T12:39:15","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/194112\/"},"modified":"2025-09-02T12:39:15","modified_gmt":"2025-09-02T12:39:15","slug":"suede-started-britpop-before-oasis-but-the-band-refuses-to-stay-there-we-are-anti-nostalgia","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/194112\/","title":{"rendered":"Suede started Britpop before Oasis, but the band refuses to stay there. ‘We are anti-nostalgia.’"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

For most of its career, Suede assumed Britpop \u2014 the movement the band helped originate in the early \u201990s \u2014 wouldn\u2019t make a comeback. That assumption will be tested on Sept. 6, when Oasis plays the Rose Bowl<\/a>, one of its first U.S. shows in more than two decades and part of what\u2019s being billed as the biggest rock tour of 2025. Ninety thousand fans are expected to show up in Pasadena for the Gallagher brothers\u2019 brash, sentimental version of Britishness \u2014 the stadium-sized equivalent of a pub on Santa Monica Boulevard. The day before, five thousand miles away, Suede will release \u201cAntidepressants,\u201d its 10th studio album.<\/p>\n

In the U.S., the band goes by the London Suede, thanks to a decades-old legal dispute with an American folk singer. That name is more likely to elicit polite recognition than the ecstatic nostalgia Oasis still inspires. But in Britain, Suede was the spark. Its 1992 single, \u201cThe Drowners,\u201d ignited what would become Britpop, the most significant resurgence of British rock since Beatlemania, paving the way for a new generation of bands and projecting British soft power abroad. The group\u2019s self-titled debut album followed the next year, pairing stacked, anthemic guitar lines with intimate, distinctly British portraits of life.<\/p>\n

Emerging from a cult of nonpersonality, where ordinary figures with unassuming names like Ian Brown ascended to British music royalty, Brett Anderson, Suede\u2019s fey and foppish androgyne, reintroduced theatricality and glamour to the scene. For a brief spell, Ricky Gervais <\/a>co-managed the band. The group landed the cover of Melody Maker, then one of Britain\u2019s most popular music magazines, before it even released a song. Its debut album became one of the most anticipated releases of the early decade, with a volume of enthusiasm comparable to the Smiths\u2019 arrival just over a decade before. When it was released, \u201cSuede\u201d became the fastest-selling debut album in British history.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe released the first Britpop album,\u201d Anderson says, matter-of-factly. \u201cYou have to accept that.\u201d And yet the band\u2019s legacy remains strangely unclaimed, overshadowed by bands who made their Britishness easier to export. As Britpop began to cohere into a recognizable genre and vision, Suede was canonized as its originators, only to be largely eclipsed as bands like Blur and Oasis came to define the movement.<\/p>\n

Today, Anderson is joined by Suede\u2019s bassist Mat Osman, who wears a distressed black tee and statement necklace. Anderson, who describes himself as \u201canti-fashion,\u201d is wearing the same uniform he\u2019s worn for the better part of two decades: an impeccably cut shirt and a pair of tight cocktail trousers. He reclines into his couch, one arm flung lazily behind his head, while the greens of his English garden sway in the waning summer light. His band has been around so long that the zeitgeist it emerged in has circled back around again.<\/p>\n

\"Band <\/p>\n

\u201cWe released the first Britpop album,\u201d Suede\u2019s Brett Anderson says. \u201cYou have to accept that.\u201d And yet its legacy remains strangely unclaimed, overshadowed by bands who made their Britishness <\/b>easier to export.<\/p>\n

(Dean Chalkley)<\/p>\n

Soon after Suede released its debut album, David Bowie told Anderson candidly: \u201cYour playing and your songwriting\u2019s so good that I know you\u2019re going to be working in music for quite some time.\u201d He was right. Ten albums in, Suede remains creatively restless, refusing the comforts of a heritage band afterlife. \u201cWe are anti-nostalgia,\u201d says Anderson. The band\u2019s latest album carries the hard-earned knowledge of age and the strange doubleness of feeling both young and old, like \u201c18-year-old software on 50-year-old hardware,\u201d as Anderson puts it. He and Osman are nearing 60.<\/p>\n

\u201cAntidepressants\u201d is every bit an emblem of late-style. If Suede\u2019s early work captured the ecstasy and collapse of first love, \u201cAntidepressants\u201d is about the more precarious work of maintenance. \u201cPeople sing about falling in or out of love,\u201d Anderson says, \u201cbut no one really writes about keeping a relationship alive.\u201d Suede has become an experiment in longevity, driving teenage feelings through a wizened motor. Still, in the group\u2019s songs today lies a complex kind of Britishness \u2014 at once maddening and beautiful, destitute and soaring \u2014 the very kind the musicians always sought to capture in their portraits of British working-class life.<\/p>\n

Anderson grew up near Osman in the southern English town of Haywards Heath, part of a working-class family in a government-subsidized home. His father was a classical-music obsessive; his mother, an artist \u2014 tendencies that, at the time, were considered antithetical to working-class life. That assumed contradiction mirrored Suede\u2019s own sensibility, which resisted tidy prescriptions of what working-class representation should look like. The music press, an industry overwhelmingly drawn from the upper middle class, struggled to reconcile it. \u201cThere\u2019s a certain kind of working-class culture or person that the middle class is very comfortable with,\u201d Osman observes. \u201cIt\u2019s that Oasis, football-and-beer thing.\u201d Britpop, in its mass-market incarnation, became precisely that: laddish, boozy and wilfully simple.<\/p>\n

Suede quickly dissociated from Britpop when it curdled into something the band couldn\u2019t recognize; something that, to the group, resembled a kind of jingoism. The band\u2019s second album, 1994\u2019s \u201cDog Man Star,\u201d was Suede\u2019s \u201canti-Britpop\u201d statement, more art-rock fever dream than stadium singalong. It was around this time that the press came to define Britpop through caricatured rivalries: Oasis (working-class, football-and-pints Manchester) versus Blur (middle-class, art-school London). Suede, with its glam inflections and high-drama songs, didn\u2019t slot neatly into either camp. The bandmates dressed in secondhand suits that made them look posh to some and, perhaps more damningly, refused to flatten their class identity into something easily legible. <\/p>\n

Here lay much of the problem. As Noel Gallagher said himself in 1994, the year Oasis released its debut album: \u201cYou get a band like Suede and they write pretty decent music and all that, but Brett Anderson\u2019s lyrics are basically a cross between Bowie and Morrissey, and I don\u2019t think that some 16-year-old on the dole is going to understand what he means.\u201d In Britain, Osman observes, \u201cThe cartoon is realer than the reality.\u201d<\/p>\n

\"\" <\/p>\n

In America, that cartoon is also beginning to gain traction, a surprising development given Britpop\u2019s deep-seated anti-Americana stance. Unlike previous musical movements in Britain, Britpop required no reference to American culture and often positioned itself against it. As Britpop rose to prominence in England, grunge was taking hold in America. At times, Britpop acted as a cultural reflex against its Yankee counterpart. Blur even satirized grunge music with its megahit \u201cSong 2,\u201d a song of nonsense lyrics and unearned vim. Suede\u2019s sense of Britishness, however, was less a matter of manifesto than of instinct, driven by the desire to render small lives and intimate details in sweeping, romantic, even histrionic gestures. Britpop conveyed Britishness through wryness; grunge articulated Americana through sublimated passion. \u201cYou know,\u201d Anderson says, \u201cif I could choose between grunge and Britpop today, I\u2019d probably choose grunge.\u201d<\/p>\n

Osman says he\u2019s making a conscious effort \u201cnot to be cynical\u201d about Britpop\u2019s return. \u201cIt\u2019s basically a generation with spending power indulging nostalgia for their youth,\u201d he says. \u201cI\u2019m trying to think of that as a positive thing.\u201d He rationalizes it by seeing the Oasis gigs less as musical events than as exercises in monocultural communion, \u201cas much about being in a huge crowd of people who feel the same as you as it is about anything else.\u201d Suede, for its part, inspires a similar mass fervor in far-flung territories: in Chile, where the group recently played to a crowd in the tens of thousands, and in China, where it can comfortably fill sports stadiums. In America, a different story. Anderson says the band has no plans to tour the States, since it probably won\u2019t make any money from it, \u201cand we\u2019re not doing charity work.\u201d<\/p>\n

While Oasis\u2019 Rose Bowl show may be remembered as Britpop\u2019s American victory lap, Suede remains focused on the future, still finding ways to push itself. \u201cBritpop\u2019s just automatically some kind of nostalgia thing, isn\u2019t it?\u201d Anderson says. \u201cIt\u2019s a faded version of a past that never really existed.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"For most of its career, Suede assumed Britpop \u2014 the movement the band helped originate in the early…\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":194113,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5123],"tags":[26949,108289,14498,108290,34155,1582,276,108293,5169,23649,2961,224,5337,31285,108292,5996,108291,19514,108288,6620],"class_list":{"0":"post-194112","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-los-angeles","8":"tag-band","9":"tag-brett-anderson","10":"tag-britain","11":"tag-britishness","12":"tag-britpop","13":"tag-ca","14":"tag-california","15":"tag-certain-kind","16":"tag-group","17":"tag-grunge","18":"tag-la","19":"tag-los-angeles","20":"tag-losangeles","21":"tag-oasis","22":"tag-osman","23":"tag-part","24":"tag-self-titled-debut-album","25":"tag-song","26":"tag-suede","27":"tag-time"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@us\/115134750432824566","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/194112","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=194112"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/194112\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/194113"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=194112"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=194112"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=194112"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}