The Art of Longevity Season 12, Episode 6: Suede (Revisited)

“I don't know where I'm going from here, but I promise it won't be boring.” Those words were spoken at one time by David Bowie, and thus are gospel to us here on The Art of Longevity podcast. Fortunately, some bands still live by that same philosophy. For evidence, we revisit the world of Suede. 

Suede has refused to become boring. Somehow, this band of 40 years have gone the other way - more exciting and visceral than ever. Suede are not hanging about to become their own echo! Albums like Autofiction and now, its immediate follow-up Antidepressants are not just the proverbial ‘return to form’ type records. They are nothing short of a reinvention. Mat Osman, co-founder member with Brett Anderson and bass player, shares his views on the new Suede record:

“It feels like Autofiction on steroids. If Autofication was a TV show, Antidepressants is the film version. We took everything more widescreen with this record”. 

However, for Osman - you can forget about that old cliche of a band making music for themselves and hoping the world will agree (that’s what Rick Rubin has been telling us with The Creative Act: A Way of Being and to be fair, more than a few artists have told me it works for them. It's not for Suede. Instead, the band’s creative mission has been guided by their fans - their reactions at live shows, to the band directly, but also the band’s own interpretation of what a Suede audience really wants. 

“A band without an audience isn’t a band. It’s a hobby,” Osman declares. That emotional connection is Mat’s affirmation - fan tattoos of favourite songs, tears at gigs, and stories about Suede songs at weddings. This fan connection is Suede’s compass in the band’s 4th career phase. And so we return to a key central theme of longevity; usefulness to people. 

“As I get older, those moments where someone says, ‘That song helped me,’ mean everything,” he reflects. “That’s what I’m proud of. There’s a community feel [between the band and the fans] that becomes more and more important. 

It’s evident from this ‘Revisited’ episode, that Mat Osman and Brett Anderson have a fair degree of telepathy on many things - a shared vision that no doubt has added focus to Suede’s current run of creative form. They even agree on the most ironic thing about where Suede has arrived; that they were the least likely band to survive in the first place. 

“Longevity is not something we strived for, it just happened as a side effect of our bloody mindedness and passion for making music”.

They still have it. 

Season 12 of The Art of Longevity is Powered by Bang & Olufsen. Long copy can be found on www.songsommelier.com.

Transcript

SPEAKER_01: 0:01

Welcome to Season 12 of The Art of Longevity. I'm your host, Keith Joplin. Each episode features an in-depth conversation with an accomplished, famous, or cult musician or band. And over the course of 11 seasons so far, we've established many themes and secrets to a long, thriving career in music. Each and every guest has shared the most incredible, honest insights about their successes and failures. It's a really great way for fans and creators to discover more about these amazing artists. We make each episode a tribute to the artist, and so you'll find on my website the full write-up and a unique artist portrait by the wonderful Mick Clark. The Art of Longevity is brought to you with Bang& Olufsen, celebrating 100 years of crafting products with beautiful sound and stunning design. Matt Osman of Suede, welcome to The Art of Longevity. Thank you for having me, Keith. How are you? I'm very

SPEAKER_00: 1:08

well. How are you, Matt, and where are you? I'm in northwest London, where I live, on the laptop. talking

SPEAKER_01: 1:16

to you. And this is The Art of Longevity Revisited. It's the second time we've had a chat with Suede. Brett was surprised, I think, at the time to find that he'd inspired the whole thing.

SPEAKER_00: 1:30

Yeah, I mean, completely. It's one of those weird things. Longevity seems such a strange thing because when we started as a band, I think you would have had us down as the most likely to collapse and burst into flames after three years of any band that had ever lived. And it's not something I think we ever really aimed for. It's almost a kind of side effect of being, I think, A, bloody-minded, and B, just being incredibly passionate about music. Those two things have combined into a kind of... I hate the word career. because, you know, a career, you know, it sounds like you've planned it out, and it really hasn't been. But into, you know, kind of like 40 years making music, which is the thing that I love doing.

SPEAKER_01: 2:23

Yeah, I'm the same about that word.

SPEAKER_00: 2:25

Yeah, it's really strange, isn't it? Whenever I hear it, it's like, you know, my friends have careers. I don't know what I have, a calling.

SPEAKER_01: 2:34

Yeah, you definitely have a calling. Often with musicians that I talk to on this podcast, There is definitely an art to longevity, and there's a million ways you can do it. But often the feeling that they have is, well, I don't know nothing else. I didn't have any other calling. So that's partly why I'm still here. I

SPEAKER_00: 2:53

mean, that's partly it. When the band split up, I realized that I had no transferable skills. Really? Yeah, no, totally. And it was such a strange time because I was... I didn't want to do music anymore. That's a lot. I didn't want to be involved in the music business anymore. I found it really... I found the whole thing kind of quite depressing. And I thought that the music industry was kind of... It was very venal and it was very... it was always setting people against each other and it didn't really care about art and all those things. And of course, after 10 years doing other things, I realized that's all jobs. That's all industries. You know what I mean? It's probably the same in the NHS. You know, everyone's kind of going, yeah, it's all politics and it doesn't have the magic it had in the 1970s or whatever. But it was, you know, it was an incredible experience lesson to learn i think one of the things about being away from it for a decade is you learn what's great about it and what you just have to put up with

SPEAKER_01: 4:07

you're so right i mean half the story really of these conversations is about how artists cope with the business you know and the fact that culture and commerce clash and sometimes it's beautiful and it works but mostly it's a really awkward juxtaposed. It's ugly. But you're right. In so many ways, it's not that different from what we all have to cope with in our chosen way, whatever we choose to do in terms of a career. I

SPEAKER_00: 4:41

often end up having conversations with fans and things like that. They'll say, why aren't you playing in Australia? Or why don't you do a tour with kind of an orchestra on every gig. And at the end of the day, I say it's always money. You know what I mean? The fact is that if you want to do what Suede have done, which is make a record every couple of years that costs six figures to make, then you have to make some money. You know what I mean? It's the nature of the beast. And you can kind of pretend that you don't, But as I get older, I'm more and more aware of the fact of just trying to be honest about what we're doing here. You know what I mean? We're trying to entertain you and to move you and to make you feel certain things. And unfortunately, you have to pay us to do that. It'd be lovely if we could just give it all away and reach people that way. But we're subject to the same... late-stage capitalism that everyone else is.

SPEAKER_01: 5:58

Well, you know, as you become an independent band as well, the buck stops with the band. So you are paying for your album. You're paying for the tour. You've got to be aware of the economics of the business even more than you were when you were in the label system or whatever.

SPEAKER_00: 6:14

But I kind of love that. I mean, one of the things I really like about Since We Came Back is that we decide what we do. You know what I mean? We have great people working for us. We have great managers and everything like that. But we decide what we do, where we go, who we work with, who does the sleeves, all these kind of things in a way that we never really did because back in the day, they were kind of like economic decisions. And now they're the decisions that we have to make. But we have so much more control now, I think, over what we do. And I love that. I love the fact that we never turn up somewhere and go, why the hell are we doing this? Why? You know, because the answer is always because you agreed to, you know, sometimes we don't look into, we don't look into the fine print enough, but you know, there's something quite romantic about, about once you get past that kind of like huge major label thing where you have these tons of people working with you in the, It is just about the five of us. You know what I mean? The five of us, we go into a room, and we play instruments, and when we've written songs that we like, we record them, and then we go and play them, the places where people want to hear them. There's something quite romantic about it, that it doesn't feel like it's part of a huge industry, that it feels like just... us doing what we've always done. All that's happened is that the huge amounts of hangers-on who were in the music industry are not involved anymore. When I look back on the 90s and how much we spent on videos and promo trips and taxis, you know what I mean? Never once considering the fact that someone was paying for them And, you know, it's kind of years later, you're kind of like, oh, right. Yeah, it was us. I'm glad to be kind of shot of that.

SPEAKER_01: 8:28

You know, what's really impressive about what you've done as a band, and I really mean this as someone who wasn't necessarily a Suede fan, actually, maybe a casual fan until, until autofiction. Well, no, until the Blue Hour. Okay. But that's not the point. It's, Having done this and having worked in the business and got into this topic of longevity, it's so impressive to see how the band has reinvented itself and made everything fresh and exciting again through autofiction, we'll talk about antidepressants in a moment, and then the touring. It feels like a true invigoration and that is not easy to do. There's a whole bunch of bands that are still doing great music, but it comes with a mellowing out. And actually, Suede have not done that. You've kind of really gone back to this sort of punky energy. I

SPEAKER_00: 9:29

mean, I think it's partly because we split up for a decade. You know what I mean? Having done that taught us, I think, very much what was important about the band, what was great about the band, you know, what was special. Since then, we've focused, you know, really hard on those elements getting older in a band in a relationship in life is a battle against cynicism and mediocrity it's it's so so easy to slip into routine and to slip into doing what you've done before and it's the death of it's the death of everything you know it's not just a band thing and it's hard work you know it's it's It's easy to kind of just do what you've always done before. You know, it's a constant slight seduction. Because that happened to us once, you know, because, you know, with like the last album, it was such a shadow of what we could do and what we had done. And we know now what that feels like. You know what I mean? To kind of let other people down, to let yourself down. And to have spent a chunk of your life on something that didn't really matter to anyone, I think that's always there in the back of our minds. It's kind of like, it has to be special. It has to be important. You know, when we first started doing gigs after the Royal Albert Hall show, there was a thing that it had been so magical. And compared with how touring had been before, which, you know, we would tour for 18 months and I defy anyone not to have bad nights and not to kind of sleepwalk through things when you're doing that. And we've been really careful. We don't do huge tours anymore. We don't repeat the set for six months. You know what I mean? There's new songs every night. It's a constant battle with that kind of the lazy devil on your shoulder. You know what I mean? There's a kind of creative, hardworking angel on one side And then a devil in slippers going, come on, you know, just give it a rest for a bit. And, you know, it is hard work, you know. And I don't think we ever would have said that back in the 90s because you had to pretend that everything came easy and everything was, you know, you were a born star and these things just flowed from you. It's hard work, you know. We work hard and we throw away a lot of songs and, If a gig doesn't work, then the set list gets ripped up. We work hard at making everything fresh and everything special. But the rewards are extraordinary.

SPEAKER_01: 12:25

Yeah, that comes across. There's a sense of excellence to what you're doing, which takes work.

SPEAKER_00: 12:31

Yeah, it also takes throwing a lot of stuff away. It gets harder as you get older as a band to find... things that embody the band, that feel like Suede, but also are fresh and new. You know what I mean? It's a real tightrope thing. We could do a reggae album and it would be fresh and new, but other people do that better. You know what I mean? So we have to find the things that we do best without repeating ourselves. To be honest, when we throw away songs, and we do throw away hundreds, it's almost always not that they're not any good, but that we've done it better before. You know what I mean? There's always that moment where you kind of go, is there something in the 200 songs that we've written that feels like this, that has this emotion, and is better than this? And I mean, there often is. You know what I mean? You go into writing every song thinking this is going to be the best song of all time. But it's rare that they are.

SPEAKER_01: 13:35

Yeah, I mean, I think that's why I've identified so much with the band. You know, we're the same age, but I live in the normal world, you know, the real world, so to speak. So you get your energy from elsewhere. and you get your energy from music. I was reading this article, actually, by Will Hodgkinson in The Times on Friday. It was a fun article. It was based on an academic piece of work that I then discovered had been done at Durham University by this Professor Nick Collins. And I've actually been in touch with Nick since. But it's a study of bands musically over time, which, yeah, that's why it kind of caught my eye. It is based on a musical analysis of the harmonics and the rhythmics of the band. And most bands become less daring over time. I mean, you know, some bands don't come out well, mentioning No Name's Coldplay. And REM didn't come out very well, but Radiohead did. What was interesting about it was just that it's sort of a tendency to, I guess, get safer or try and stay popular. I mean, I'm not saying those bands don't did do that. But the thing with Suede is you haven't tried to please anybody but yourselves, it feels. But it's worked so well for the fans.

SPEAKER_00: 14:50

I don't know whether that's true, to be honest. I think we're always trying to please people. I know it's not... I mean, I know the cliche is, you know, we make records for ourselves and if anyone else likes them, that's a bonus. I don't think we were ever really like that. We were always out... to provoke a response. And I think when you're younger, those responses are probably spikier than they are now. I mean, a band doesn't exist without an audience for me. You know what I mean? That's something kind of toothless. That's something dead. And it was always about kind of how we moved people and how the shows made them feel and how the records made them feel, which was why kind of like A New Morning was such a kick in the teeth because it wasn't just that the critics didn't like it. It was that the fans didn't like it particularly. And the gigs that we did around then, there was no kind of connection. You know what I mean? It was... It was that thing that I see more and more and more with rock shows. They were watching us like they were watching a film. And one of the reasons why Antidepressants, the new record, shares a kind of DNA with autofiction is that the gigs that we did for that record were just extraordinary. They were so celebratory and... the mood in the audience almost before we came on, almost. The sense of community with them and the people who turned up at 9 in the morning for a gig at 9 at night, and the anticipation around them, and the way people reacted to the songs, it kind of changed what we did for this record. I can't pretend that it was just about we wanted to make a record this way, but I think we wanted to make a record that had that effect, especially post-COVID and in very straightened economic times, seeing how people felt about the band and how they felt about the songs. The first time we played She Steals Leads Me On and seeing people in the audience crying. As a musician, or for us especially, That's why we're here. That's literally to see people move, you know, to see them, you know, what happens to them. And, you know, when we came to make Antidepressants, we thought we were going to make like a real art record. We planned to do this ballet score that was not going to really be songs and was going to, you know, be lots of it kind of like wordless. But then immediately after touring, it was like, okay, there's a mood there. There's a feeling. There's a kind of abandon and release that we want to capture. And if you listen to antidepressants after kind of autofiction, it's like a widescreen version of it. It's almost like a film versus a TV show. We kind of learned how to do that very live, very spiky kind of thing. And then we're just trying to open it out on this record.

SPEAKER_01: 18:26

That's interesting because I haven't got a sense of that yet because it's not out yet. When you kind of preview a record, you can't get the feel of how it compares with the last one when you put it on the turntable and crank up the volume.

SPEAKER_00: 18:39

It just, it has a bit more breadth, I think. I mean, it still has the kind of, it has the live feel and it has lots of very anthemic sounding things and anthemic lyrics, but it just has a bit more breadth. There's kind of long grinding songs and there's a song called June Rain, which is among the prettiest, poppiest things we've ever done. And there's kind of despairing things, but there's joyful things. It just feels like autofiction on kind of steroids, really.

SPEAKER_01: 19:11

Yeah, I mean, in my head, I've paired them together, kind of twinned them as records.

SPEAKER_00: 19:17

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01: 19:18

There's a great tradition in that. You know, going back to Night at the Opera Day at the Races, maybe Kid A, Amnesiac, you know, that kind of thing. And it feels like that is... part of this whole what you've called a fourth phase i don't know yeah it's definitely part of this phase of of suede

SPEAKER_00: 19:38

yeah we're always learning from the record before you know what i mean you know and the blue hour very much came out of the record before it because we we've done this record that that you know was supposed to be listened as as an entire thing and had these big long almost like proggy passages and it was something we really wanted to do but I think we were all surprised at how much it struck a chord with people. We thought we'd made something that might be quite difficult, you know what I mean? Because you're constantly being told people only listen to singles, people only listen to playlists, blah, blah, blah, blah. So there was a bloody-mindedness in doing something that was supposed to be listened to and run and go. But the reaction to it and the way people kind of fell into it and fell in love with it definitely made us think with the Blue Hour, okay, well, let's push at these boundaries. You know what I mean? And you can see it with Dog Man Star and the debut album. You know what I mean? We saw that people loved what we were doing, but also the artier side of it and the more difficult side of it didn't scare any of these people off. And there was just a sense of, okay, everything we did on the first record, how can we magnify it? And if you listen to something like Introducing the Band, you could never put that on your debut record, I don't think, because it's not a song. It's not a live thing. It was something created in the studio to expand the myth of the band. So I think we've done this quite often. You know what I mean? We've taken the record before and said, everything you love about this, we're going to twist and amplify.

SPEAKER_01: 21:27

The art of longevity is powered by Bang& Olufsen, the luxury audio brand founded in 1925. For 100 years, Bang& Olufsen has been pushing the boundaries of audio technology and acoustic innovation. Bang& Olufsen's products combine beautiful sound, timeless design, and unrivaled craftsmanship. This is the other strand to the way suede is sort of taken over my life in a sense. Cause there's the art of longevity, which came from Brett's quote. And then I love the blue hour so much. And then also fiction. I was, I was thinking about what is it that makes a classic album these days? Cause you guys have made undisputed classics. So if you go back to dogman star, people will be listening to that album and talking about it forever. And you can revisit it, you know, um, after 30 years, 40 years, 50 years probably. But in a way, the Blue Hour and Autofiction are just as good to me. They're just as good in terms of what they've achieved creatively. And I like them even more. But then how does a record last? How do you make it last? How do you make it as important as a band? That got me writing articles. I ended up writing a bloody book, which will be out in February. So I'll definitely get it over to you guys. That's the inspirations behind it. And it's about... The album's surviving first and foremost, as you say, in the whole world of songs and clips and social scrolling. But then beyond the album still surviving and even getting better, it's again about how do you know as a band when you've made a classic? And it felt, we'll come on to antidepressants definitely in a minute, but with autofiction, it felt like you know you'd made a good record, you toured it for three years, and you tress it with the respect you thought it deserved. And that's what made it take a hold. But I mean, these days it's a real challenge for bands of five years in or 50 years in because you release an album, it takes you two, three, maybe four years. I think Brett told me that autofiction took four years to make. And then it seems to evaporate into thin air on streaming. Yes

SPEAKER_00: 23:42

and no. I mean, the measure is how deep does it go into people's lives, I think. And there are great, great pop singles that don't do that at all. The soundtrack things and the sound of the summer or whatever. There's nothing wrong with those. But with albums and with the kind of music that we're making as kind of older people, it's about how much it gets its claws into people and their everyday lives. You know, as I get older, those moments where someone says, you know, I got married to the Wild Ones, or, you know what I mean, we had Life is Golden playing at my mum's funeral or whatever. Those moments are increasingly important to me, just for the sense that I haven't wasted these last 30 years. Because for me, that's what music is for. You know what I mean? It's to get tied up and tangled up in people's lives and to spice it and to soundtrack it and all those kind of things. So, you know, with autofiction, I mean, we love the record and we love the way it sounded and everything, but it was how much people took it to their hearts that, for me, made it a classic. You know what I mean? It's... it's a weird, weird, um, kind of measure, but the blue hour and also fiction, we suddenly started seeing people with life is golden tattoos and she still leads me on tattoos. I'm not saying you should get a tattoo of your favorite, but as a measure of you writing something that really means something to people. It's a really good one. And it just happens every now and then. You know what I mean? Especially in the Far East, both of those songs, there's a kind of, I guess, simplicity to them and a mood to them that has really caught on. And again, I find that insanely moving to go to Malaysia and to hear 16-year-old kids singing She Still Leads Me On and seeing... in their eyes that they get it. You know what I mean? They understand the mood of it. Nowadays, that's what I do this for.

SPEAKER_01: 26:16

Yeah, I think that is remarkable that you've had this renewed international success and you've been playing to really big audiences as well. I think, you know, bigger than you've played to before. Last year, we played

SPEAKER_00: 26:30

our biggest headlining festival that we've ever played, like 175,000 people. We played our biggest one-off headline gig in a place in China that was like 12,000 people. Yeah, we played our biggest London gig with the Mannix. I think that the hunger for live music is only growing. Again, one of the themes of antidepressants is that in an increasingly disconnected world, the community feel of live music and that sense of coming together and of having a common emotions. It becomes more and more important. You know what I mean? And some of that is not us. You know what I mean? Some of the reason why those shows post-COVID were so great wasn't just that the band are good. It's that the audience wanted them to be good. This is one of the things that I love about again, about the later stage of our career, is that when we started off, it was very combative. You know what I mean? And every gig we did, there were lots of people who wanted you to fail and lots of people who didn't really care. You know, just wanted to see, okay, this band that have been forced down our throats, let's see if they're any good. And we kind of relished it. But when we do gigs now, there's that incredible sense. Everyone wants this to be good. Everyone wants this to be special. And it makes it so easy. You know what I mean? All you have to do is play well and communicate and show that this music means the same to us as it does to them. That's great. I love that.

SPEAKER_01: 28:28

Yeah, and I read as well with Antidepressants that you've recorded a lot of the tracks. I think most of it live as a band. And I hear that more and more as well. I mean, Tom O'Dell, I spoke to last week, has done the same thing with his new album. Wanted to make an album that closed the gap between the studio and the stage. I think that's the way he phrased it. And I think it's for the reason you mentioned. It's because live has just become more important than ever.

SPEAKER_00: 28:55

Yeah, you know, it's those moments of, I guess, of abandon, but also of just living in the moment. Knowing that this will happen once and never again, it's really important to people. In an era where everything is recorded and everything is kind of like perfect and the audio is perfect and the video is perfect, those moments that are kind of just fresh and you don't quite know what's going to happen are always the best ones. I can't... More and more, we love it when things go wrong on stage. And it used to be back in the 90s, if something went wrong, you were heartbroken because it meant you had feet of clay. But nowadays, I relish those moments when everything falls apart and you have to start again or someone comes in at the wrong place because... It means it's there and it's real and it's live.

SPEAKER_01: 30:05

And this is one of the benefits that comes with getting older and more experienced as well, right, is that you know that it's not a life and death situation. It's just that we can recover from it and enjoy it.

SPEAKER_00: 30:16

I mean, that's absolutely true. Just knowing that you are going to fail and then you are going to succeed is a very strange thing. You know, when I came to writing novels, I knew so many people who tried to write novels and had given up kind of 50,000 words in or 30,000 words in. And the weird thing is the thing that being in a band taught me was there's always those moments. Every time we make a record, halfway through we go, well, this isn't working. We don't have enough songs. It doesn't hang together. What the hell are we going to do? And because we've been doing it for 30 years, what we do is keep going. You know, you just keep going and you chip away and you start again and you take what's good and throw away what's bad. And to be honest, that was the biggest thing for me when I was writing my first novel was just getting to those moments where you're like, well, this is no good. You know, no human being will ever want to read this. What the hell are you doing? And feeling it, you know, like feeling that dread and But just having this little voice at the back of your head going, we've been here before. You know what I mean? You just, okay, keep going and see what happens. And then you find it, you find the magical, you find the formula, or you find the chapter, or you find the one song in an album where you suddenly go, oh, okay, right, okay, this is the song that the record revolves around. And now, now I know what we need to do.

SPEAKER_01: 31:55

Yeah, I mean, it's such a good point. In a way, it's getting harder because there's more distractions out there in the world. So if you want to create something and you want to create something special, you're going to have to put the work in and it's hard graft and you've got to push through those hard moments.

SPEAKER_00: 32:13

I think this is one of the real challenges of AI. Not that I think it's going to replace what we do, but that Anyone who's starting out making something, starting out writing a book, starting out writing a song, anything, will always have this, oh, I could have a pristine, professional sounding version of this at the click of a button. You know what I mean? The good thing about starting music and writing things pre-AI is you never had that. You know what I mean? There was never an alternative. It was either get better or stop. Whereas now, unfortunately, it's get better, stop, or do something mediocre with AI.

SPEAKER_01: 33:07

Yeah, I think that's my fear as the consumer, the listener, is you can tell. It's my fear, but it's also, I think it's, ultimately, it will be the solution. Because, you know, as an industry, And as an artist, you feel it as well, and you brought it up. But as an industry, there's a complete obsession with AI at the moment. And there's the scandal of AI artists cropping up on streaming and getting attention. And for me, I'm just kind of waiting for it to pass. Because ultimately, we want to receive music and art that is made by people and bands. And it's the expression of the human condition. That's what we want to receive, ultimately. So we're just going to have to wait, I think, for this to whole moment to pass, but yet I know it's not that simple.

SPEAKER_00: 33:56

I mean, I think it will force really creative people into being more idiosyncratic and delving into their own personalities more. I think the real shame is that there's a whole class of people, people making film music, people making advert music, lots of people who I knew kind of in bands growing up, who now make a living from making the kind of music that soundtracks daily life, those people are all going to lose their jobs. You know what I mean? And it's going to increase the division between superstars and nobodies. The jobbing musician, I think, is going to be a very, very difficult place to be. And what worries me about that is what happens is you end up with the people who want to be artists and want to say something interesting are the ones who can afford to do it. And that's never ever a good thing. We've seen time and time again that interesting music and revolutions in music are always made by by working people, people from ordinary backgrounds.

SPEAKER_01: 35:25

This is a huge concern, I agree. It's been the case with music anyway for a while, because with music, it doesn't cost zero to make. As you say, an album costs$100,000. If you want to make an album, you're going to have to ultimately pay for your own tour. And how are you going to do that If you can't get the advance from a label or a publisher, you're going to need family money, aren't you, to make a band? I'm stunned at

SPEAKER_00: 35:57

the bands that I meet who have day jobs. You know what I mean? I mean, bands who I just assume, you know, I was hearing on the radio all the time on the tour and stuff like that, just who a generation ago would, I mean, they wouldn't be making a great living. You know, none of us went into it to make a fortune, but they could just be musicians. You know what I mean? They could make that choice. Okay. Okay. You know, I'm going to live on 20 grand a year, but you know, I'm going to do the thing I love. And that's, it's kind of, it's kind of disappearing. And when I started in, in the, you know, when suede first started playing, it was a genuinely working class scene and, You know what I mean? There was a certain kind of person who cropped up all the time and lots of kind of like autodidacts and smart kids who were the first of their family to go to university and then just kind of interesting people. But I was kind of almost posh in that situation. If I was to be starting now, I would be a genuine oik. You know what I mean? It's a very, very strange thing. And it kind of encourages a kind of hobbyism, which I don't really like. I like the fact that bands, that we were trying to reach a lot of people. You know what I mean? I've always liked pop bands. And I was lucky enough to grow up in that age that the bands that I really liked, kind of the Jam and the Specials and Blondie and the Pretenders, they were cool. I wouldn't have been interested in other ones. You know what I mean? Because at that time, that was my measure of what was most important. But they also made number one records. And that sense, that kind of sense of British eccentricity and cool, not precluding reaching everyone, being played on the radio and everything, I think it's deep in Swade's DNA. I think it's really tied in when I say to you, we don't make records just for ourselves. We've always... wanted to entertain and to move people and to sell a lot of records. Yeah,

SPEAKER_01: 38:39

I think that's the thing I miss the most about when the industry worked differently, as a fan as well, because these days there is so much brilliant music out there. There are brilliant bands, there are some amazing solo artists. It's never been better. When you look at the breadth of talent, it's never been better. But There isn't that sense of, you know, with the 80s, it was art school meets pop with brilliant songs. And then the 90s came along and it was more about bands. But it also came from the inner cities or it came from the suburbs of Manchester or Sheffield and where it was working class. But yeah, it reached audiences here and international audiences. And there was this exchange of getting that from the U.S., to here and then back again that was amazing, that feels like that's more difficult now for bands. So yeah, we have great bands. We have Fontaines, we have Idols, we have nothing but Thieves, Wolf Alice. There are some amazing bands, but I feel it's going to be harder for them to get that international success and that broad success. It's almost like you've got to find your own niche right from the start.

SPEAKER_00: 39:52

Yeah, it's a very strange thing, the kind of slight flattening out of culture. One of the things that I find kind of quite strange and quite depressing is watching these kind of like quirky pop stars appear. You know, you look at, you know, kind of Lorde or Beyonce or Taylor Swift even, and them starting out in these interesting spaces. and then just flattening out as they reach kind of megastardom, where they all use the same writers and they all use the same stylists and everything. It's almost like anything, any eccentricity is kind of wiped away from them. It's one of the reasons that I kind of love Lana Del Rey in that... She's never turned into one of these people. She just mines these obsessions, which is quite a strange and unusual thing to happen. You know what I mean? You talked about Coldplay earlier. One of the things about Coldplay is just the way that dance pop music has infiltrated them rather than the other way around. You know what I mean? I don't feel like they've brought their eccentricities of the pop world. I think that, again, what I found interesting about them has kind of been wiped away. Yeah, I think it's just really, really hard because you do need to have big international hits to make any money. If you want to make money from streaming, then you have to... It's really hard to do it just in Britain.

UNKNOWN: 41:43

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01: 41:43

The Art of Longevity is brought to you with Bang& Olufsen. Since 1925, Bang& Olufsen has created iconic audio and home entertainment products to the highest standards of sound, craft and design. You can find more about the partnership on our webpages and by signing up to the mailing list where you can then get episodes first plus invitations to events and offers. Finally, we want to get to 100 shows and beyond with the art of longevity and the only way we can do that is with your help and advocacy. So please rate, review and share the podcast wherever you can. Back to the conversation to wrap up this episode and we'll be back with another great guest very soon. One of the themes of this series has been, I think, reconciling the new stuff with the old. And you've got this takeover of the South Bank coming up, which is a really cool idea because it takes you all the way back to when you played at Bowie's Meltdown there. But yeah, I keep reading about surprises and how you're going to bring the catalogue back to life. But then you've got all this great new material. So how are you going to curate what's going on there? What are you thinking about?

SPEAKER_02: 42:58

I

SPEAKER_00: 42:58

mean, we're just trying to do something with real breadth. So, I mean, we're playing everything from a song that me and Brett wrote before the band, before Suede even existed, to things that we wrote this year in one go. There's almost, I think, in our minds, a kind of reaction to this summer of big Brit pop. gigs where you go and you see the same 15 songs played every night until their coffers are full. So we've rehearsed 70 odd songs. It's going to be completely different every night. The orchestral songs are two or three that we've done before, but the rest of them have never been done with an orchestra, especially this way. The acoustic songs are really acoustic. We're trying to break it down and do as much stuff off mic as possible. We're just trying to, I think, show the breadth of what we've done and what we can do. I mean, the thing about the last two records is I think they're quite tightly curated. And the gigs that we do that pretty much just feature them are incredible and really exciting. But it's just one side of the band. It's just an attempt, I think, to show what we can do. We're just showing off, to be honest.

SPEAKER_01: 44:31

Yeah, and you're still kicking against Britpop 30 years on. Well, yeah, I mean... This was a theme of Suede throughout the 90s. It's like, oh, you know, we're not part of this Britpop movement, and here we are, you're still having to fight it. It's never going to go away, is it?

SPEAKER_00: 44:48

You know, the story now seems to be that we started Britpop And we're trying as hard as we can to claim all of the credit, but none of the comedown. You know what I mean? So we're trying to say, yeah, we started it, and none of this would have existed without us. But do not blame us for anything that happened after 1994.

SPEAKER_01: 45:11

Well, it seems like people are having a lot of fun at the

SPEAKER_00: 45:14

Oasis shows. Yeah, look, one of the things about them is a couple of my friends have been to the shows. And I said, well, what were they like? And they both said they were absolutely great. But they also both said that what they loved was the audience. That it was such a... a vibrant audience, and everyone was singing, and people were dancing, and there was just a sense of people coming together who hadn't seen each other for years, and then new people, these kids who never thought they'd see the band.

SPEAKER_01: 45:50

This is amazing to me, absolutely amazing. And for me, it's one of the genuine miracles of the streaming era, is that you've got... Young teenagers going along to Oasis. And their favorite songs are not the ones from the first two albums that we all thought were the best ones.

SPEAKER_00: 46:09

They're not tied up with the excitement of it happening for the first time.

SPEAKER_01: 46:12

Yeah, they have no baggage as well. They've got none of that history. And they don't need it. They don't need it to enjoy the music. So I think that is really, really cool.

SPEAKER_00: 46:23

I love the way that there's a kind of omnivorousness, if that's a word, to the younger music fan that they don't really care about the context about so much stuff because it all lives online this is something I'd never really thought about but you know if you're a kind of a BTS fan you know everything about that band lives online it lives on you know online videos and on Spotify and all these kind of things but that's completely true of the Beatles as well. So if you come across the Beatles, you know, and the algorithm throws it up and it hooks you, it's exactly the same discovery as it would be with a new band. You know, apart from the live gigs and, you know, if it's a band from abroad, you're not going to see them anyway. You go through the same thing of kind of like, oh, I'll listen to the greatest hits. Oh, I love everything about this. I'll listen to the best record. I'll see the show that everyone talks about, the Madison Square Garden. And then, as you say, you start digging away and you find the things that speak most to you. And there's something great about that. We played in China last year, and we did a festival, and it was a really, really young crowd. And lots of kids kind of hanging out at the airport and at the hotel and everything. Very much like kind of going to Japan in 1994. And it was weird because, you know, they love the new stuff. They love the old stuff. And they were having stuff signed, you know, like drawings of us and photos and stuff. And lots of it was us from 1993. And I'm kind of talking to them going, Does this feel the same to you? You know, you can see what I look like now compared with, you know, back then. There's a drawing of me at kind of like 23 with cat ears and stuff. And it all exists in the same timeframe to them, which is very strange to me. You know, I can remember when I was growing up, you know, seeing like the stones or someone like that. And in my mind, there was the stones of the past. And there was the Stones now, and there was no connection. I saw when the Velvet Underground reformed, I went to see them in Paris. And this is a band who meant a hell of a lot to me when I was first getting into music, you know what I mean? Because they did stuff that I could play and they were cool and all these kind of things. And I remember going to see them in Paris and leaving halfway through. And it sounded okay, you know what I mean? But it was just like, I realized that what I loved was Andy Warhol's Velvet Underground, you know what I mean? New York's Velvet Underground. And this, them as part of the kind of like festival scene just was horrible to me. There doesn't seem to be that kind of context. It's, I like this, it moves me. I don't care that they're 50 now and they were 20 when they wrote this song because they're still playing it and everything like that. There's something hugely optimistic about that that I like.

SPEAKER_01: 49:59

I agree. I think it's really phenomenal because it kind of removes this element of nostalgia in a way. It just removes the timeline from a catalogue. And I think... That is an opportunity. You know, as I said about Oasis with the kids just liking the songs they like, no attachment to those first two records. In a way, if you can still make new music that you care about enough, and obviously it's good enough, and you've certainly been doing that, there's an opportunity then, I think, to reconcile it with what's great about the catalogue. And the two are just the same

SPEAKER_00: 50:37

thing. One of the things that was always really clear to us was that We could only keep on doing this if we were making new music. You know what I mean? I mean, I love playing a kind of So Young up against something that we've just done because it kind of energizes So Young in a way that if we were just playing songs from kind of like pre-1996, they just die after a while. It's impossible to make them mean anything. If they're alongside things that are brand new and have that kind of youthful energy, then suddenly, I don't know, then they're reborn to me in a weird way.

SPEAKER_01: 51:23

Yeah. Well, look, Matt, it's been great to have you. I'm going to have to let you go in a minute. I just wanted to reflect for you on what you're most proud of with Suede at this point. I mean, I know

SPEAKER_00: 51:34

I've talked about it a lot in this interview. It's the moments when we've written something or performed something when it's kind of leapt from us to someone else. You know what I mean? And to be honest, when we started, it really wasn't a concern of mine at all. But, you know, there does come a point, you know, you do have to say to yourself after a while, is what I've done over the last 30 years, is it a worthwhile thing? You know what I mean? Everyone has to ask themselves that question. Yeah. And it's those moments. It's those moments where what you feel and what you make is kind of reborn in someone else. Something that we did in a studio in Belgium at kind of three in the afternoon, and we were arguing away about, is it too slow? Does it need a middle eight? These decisions that you make, and it's all an instinct and instinct Does it move me? Does it make me feel the right way? That you can transfer those to other people and that those songs live in their lives and they live in their minds and soundtrack things they've done. It's that. It's no different from the books or anything. You know, it's... Someone said to me a couple of days ago, and they were actually talking about a book rather than the suede thing, but I think it holds. They said to me, oh, you know... what you wrote, it made me cry. And it's one of the few jobs where my immediate reaction was, oh, fantastic. You know what I mean? Thank you very much, because that's what we're trying to do. And it's exactly the same. You know, when people say to you, you know, especially with something like She Still Leads Me On, when people say to you, this is how it made me feel, or, you know, I lost my mother, or I lost my boyfriend, or whatever, and that song helped me. That's it for me. That's what I'm proud of.

SPEAKER_01: 53:37

It is exciting because you're going to experience that all over again. You know, you really are with Antidepressants. I really feel that. I mean, to some extent, I sometimes feel myself judging a record, a good record, by the way it finishes. I mean, the last three tracks on Antidepressants really, really blow me away. Criminal Ways, then June Rain, which you mentioned, and then you've got Life is Endless.

SPEAKER_00: 54:01

Each one of them goes a place that we haven't been before. I mean, they're recognizably swayed, but they're all just slightly, you know what I mean, better versions of something we tried to do before, which I love.

SPEAKER_01: 54:16

When you play those, I'll be in the crowd watching the crowd for the crowd's reaction.

SPEAKER_00: 54:21

Yeah. Like I was saying with the Oasis thing, it's kind of like the crowd is everything. You know what I mean? A band without an audience isn't a band. It's a hobby. You know what I mean?

SPEAKER_01: 54:35

Okay, well, look, Matt, it's been great to have you. Thanks so much for the insights. As I said, Suede for me are just on a roll, an incredible role, and it's unusual to kind of get to your 50s and get to your fourth decade as a band. With that kind of energy, I think it's just really, really special. It'll never last. Well, I'm interested to see where you go next. Are you going to revisit that sort of more experimental project, do you think, that antidepressants turned

SPEAKER_00: 55:09

into? I don't know. I mean, it's been really fascinating doing the acoustic and the orchestral stuff for these gigs. Every time we do something like that, I can just see little kind of light bulbs appearing over everyone's heads. But to be honest, we always plan... what we're going to do next. And it never turns out that way. You know, this was supposed to be a ballet album. So I could tell you what we're planning to do next, but it won't be that, you know, kind of like the music will take over at some

SPEAKER_01: 55:42

point. All right. Well, to be continued. When you come on Revisited, well, we'll have to call it something else. We'll find out. All right. Cheers, Matt. We'll see you soon.