England after dark
The cover of Select was ready for war before its hero was. Brett Anderson stood against a Union Jack while the enormous headline told the Americans to go home, as though a national uprising had begun against flannel shirts, guitar feedback and all the rain falling from Seattle onto the British charts. It was April 1993. Suede's debut album had just reached the shops, England was finding its own voice again, and the press required a face it could attach to a new era. The problem was that Suede did not fit inside that flag.
The flag was clean, geometric and unambiguous. Brett Anderson's world had the colour of nicotine, cheap wine, smudged lipstick and wet tarmac seen from the last night bus. There were no palaces, stadiums or proud nation marching towards a better future. There were flats with thin walls, suburban streets, casual sex, insomnia, pills, betrayal and people trying to look like stars despite having to return to their small rooms the next morning. Suede's Britain began where the postcards ended.
The first single, The Drowners, appeared in May 1992 and did not conquer the charts. It was enough to shift something in British music. Bernard Butler's guitar did not sound like another attempt to catch America. It unfolded broadly, nervously and theatrically, at times resembling a chandelier crashing onto the floor of a council flat. Anderson sang high, stretched syllables, bent his body and the language as though merely standing at a microphone was too unambiguous a form of existence. He did not look like a boy about to invite his mates for a pint. He looked capable of seducing the mate, his girlfriend and then stealing their cigarettes.
This was Suede's first revolution. The band did not answer American grunge with British strength. It answered with British artifice, theatricality and uncertainty. Instead of pretending to be natural, Suede displayed the costume. In place of authenticity measured by hair length and mud on boots, it offered a person choosing his own pose because reality had supplied only roles he refused to accept.
Glamour bought with the last loose change
Early Suede was often placed somewhere between David Bowie and The Smiths, but the comparison tidies the band too conveniently. Bowie fell from space. Morrissey declined earthly pleasures. Brett Anderson walked through South London at night and wanted everything at once: beauty, sex, fame, love, collapse, narcotic fog and someone who would see him as extraordinary before the city reduced him to the proper dimensions again.
Suede did not sing about luxury. It sang about performing luxury with your final coins. Glamour was not a limousine outside a hotel but a carefully chosen shirt put on in a damp-smelling room. It was no reward for success. It was a defence mechanism. A person fixed his hair, lit a cigarette and left the house because that was the only answer available to a life that had tried to place him in line from the beginning.
You can hear it in Metal Mickey, bursting into the room with all its guitar insolence while leaving a nervous tremor behind the chorus. You hear it in So Young, where youth is not a stage on the route to adulthood but a short period of immunity in which mistakes can still be made faster than their consequences arrive. You hear it in Pantomime Horse, where a large melody does not lift anyone above loneliness, but allows its size to be seen more clearly.
Bernard Butler built music larger than the rooms in which these stories took place. Within seconds his guitar could move from metallic incision to romantic sweep, as though Johnny Marr had suddenly decided to compose melodramas. Anderson answered with a voice perpetually balancing between masculinity and a performance of masculinity. It was provocative one moment and desperate the next, never allowing us to decide whether the character was seducing, pleading, mocking or preparing to flee.
Suede's debut arrived at the end of March 1993, entered the British chart at number one and won the Mercury Prize a few months later. The statistics confirm its success without explaining its meaning. More important was the way thousands recognised themselves inside a world that did not look like victory. Suede did not sing to confident conquerors. It sang to people who had to build a personality from the beginning every evening because none of the available versions fitted.
Britpop before the pub
The later Britpop story is loud, male and easy to photograph: a pint held overhead, a guitar painted with a flag, a cigarette stuck to the lower lip, a chorus sung by thousands of boys convinced the world finally belongs to them. In that version, history begins with Oasis, proceeds through the media battle with Blur and ends in the prime minister's residence, where musicians meet politicians and everyone briefly imagines popular culture might run the country.
Suede stood at the beginning of that story and did not belong at its ending. Years later, Anderson described Britpop as an increasingly masculine, nationalist and distasteful caricature in which he had no wish to take part. It is easy to understand why. The band helped open an era that later removed many of its most interesting qualities. Sexual ambiguity was replaced by lad culture. Class anxiety became decoration. Britishness ceased to be the setting for a private drama and became a brand printed on mugs, shirts and magazine covers.
Early Suede did not offer community based on resemblance. It offered shelter for people who could not fit any community. The debut cover showed two androgynous figures kissing, their genders impossible to determine at a glance. The image was not an accessory to the music. It summarised it. Bodies approached each other while identity remained outside the reach of another person's certainty.
The songs worked the same way. Anderson's characters desired without always knowing whom. They loved, but their love was rarely safe. They hurt others, allowed themselves to be hurt, entered strangers' flats and returned at dawn with knowledge that could not be explained later at work. Sexuality did not construct a stable identity in this world. It destabilised, another night street leading beyond the known city.
Animal Nitrate entered the British top ten and was performed at the Brit Awards. A television audience received a catchy guitar song filled with violence, desire, humiliation and despair. Suede smuggled a dangerous animal into the national sitting room and allowed it to cross the carpet under the camera lights. That was their pop: beautiful enough to be admitted, dirty enough to leave stains.
A new England
Suede did not invent British guitar music, glam rock, androgyny or songs about suburban life. It invented a new combination of them at a moment when Britain needed a language of its own but did not yet know how quickly it would turn that language into a slogan.
The Drowners did not sound like the anthem of a movement. It sounded like a secret overheard through a wall. Metal Mickey had the energy of a hit but moved too strangely to stand straight in line. Animal Nitrate opened a door onto a world mass culture preferred not to see. So Young turned youth into a hazardous condition, and Pantomime Horse showed that greatness can be imagined even when there is nowhere to go.
Blur later arrived with its gift for social observation, Pulp with Jarvis Cocker's class precision and Oasis with the promise that any boy from an estate could enter a stadium and demand immortality. Each widened Britpop's borders. Suede drew its night map first. Without the band, Britishness might have remained a list of musical references. Anderson and Butler made it somewhere people lived, full of smoke, low ceilings, wet pavements and people wanting more before they knew how to name it.
Britpop acquired its flag, heroes, battles, stadiums and official mythology a little later. By then Suede had already left the club at dawn, shirt open, lipstick smudged and rain soaking the sleeves. No national anthem played in the street. There was only the first bus and a new conviction that England need not be the thing flying overhead. It could be everything left on the skin.
The most British thing about Suede was not the accent, the influences or the knowledge of old records. It was the tension between the size of the dream and the narrowness of daily life. A person stood in a small room but sang as if the roof had just flown away. He owned nothing, yet for four minutes moved like the aristocrat of his own downfall. He knew he would probably lose, but made sure the defeat had the right haircut.
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