London Suede

BIOGRAPHY

That Autofiction is The London Suede’s punk album, a record that crackles with the sort of exuberant fire familiar to anyone who has seen the band live in recent years, should come as no surprise given the nature of its creation. As The London Suede started rehearsing some of the most punchy and direct songs of their career, they decided to go back to basics and become like a new band. In a move that sent them right back to their early days as an unknown London group, Brett Anderson, Mat Osman, Simon Gilbert, Richard Oakes and Neil Codling schlepped to a rehearsal studio in deserted Kings Cross to collect a key, hump their own gear, set up and start playing. After the trilogy of post-reformation albums that cemented The London Suede’s reputation not only as a band who changed the 90s musical landscape forever, but still a dynamic creative force, the desire was to enter the “fourth phase” of their existence with a record that was, according to Brett Anderson quoting the 17th Century philosopher Thomas Hobbes, “nasty, brutish and short”. 

Where 2018 album The Blue Hour saw them at their most experimental yet, with field recordings, spoken word and instrumental interstitials part of the palette, The London Suede felt that they had gone as far down that roadkill-strewn country lane as they could. “We didn't want to make increasingly cerebral music,” Brett Anderson says, “The Blue Hour is a little more willfully obscure, which is brilliant as it gives you somewhere to come back from.” As well wanting to write a reaction to The Blue Hour that was every bit as sharp as the jump from the grandiose Dog Man Star to Coming Up, The London Suede also felt that after two acclaimed documentaries (Mike Christie’s The Insatiable Ones for Sky Arts and BBC Four’s Rock Family Trees), along with ‘classic album’ and greatest hits tours and the approaching 30th anniversary of debut single ‘The Drowners’, it was time to look forward. 

The London Suede’s aim for their ninth studio album was to create something that replicated the power of the band live, something that they feel they hadn’t managed over the course of their 30-year career. “There's a weird inertia in the studio, so often it becomes about the microscopic, the technicality and the musicality, and I really wanted to push that out of the way” Anderson explains, “It was an attempt to get all of the shit and the noise and the naivety of being a live band and try and capture that.” The band speak enthusiastically of the “ritual” energies that exist between the band and audience at gigs, Mat Osman describing it as a “mass hallucination” and Anderson as “a license for insanity, this moment of primal connection”. To try and bottle some of this unholy magic, The London Suede initially planned to take the ‘back to basics’ idea to an extreme by playing gigs under a fake name – Osman even jokes that they’d intended to enter Battle of the Bands competitions – or by inviting a few fans to the studio and hammering through a set of brand-new songs in front of them with the tape running. In the end, circumstances led to a change of plans and the initial album was shelved as new material kept emerging. While on Night Thoughts and The Blue Hour sessions had been created by him and Anderson heading to Neil Codling’s house to write around the kitchen table, Autofiction saw a return to solitary working. Richard Oakes says that his aim was still, as ever, to try and find material that would ignite the singer’s creative fire. "By now Neil and I know instinctively what is going to inspire Brett, and what he's going to hate”, he says. From his solitary sessions came ‘She Still Leads Me On’, the track that reconfigured what Autofiction could be. A beautiful song written from Brett to his late mother, it's a bold opener to the album – Osman describes it as "exuberant" – and as Oakes says, "When The London Suede do exuberant it tends to be more towards the primal. The world had just stopped and yet we were able to write something joyous and hopeful".

With ‘Shadow Self’ and ‘Turn Off Your Brain And Yell’ also emerging from these solitary writing sessions, The London Suede entered The Kinks’ Konk studio in North London with long-time collaborator Ed Buller as producer. “We went back to Ed because we wanted to get close to that early sound of the band when we were less sophisticated with recording, and he's totally used to that,” says Osman. "He has this enthusiasm if he's really into something, and gets all these energetic ideas,” Oakes adds, “to have him get excited about songs like ‘15 Again’ and ‘She Still Leads Me On’ in the way that he was when he first heard ‘Beautiful Ones’ is fantastic". In the studio, The London Suede didn’t play to a click track, instead trying to make the sessions feel as ‘live’ as possible, imagining themselves in a gig setting where, as Oakes puts it, "if you made a mistake you wouldn't stop and say 'hang on, can we try this again?' you'd just plough on". The result is a vivacity that feels raw and full of a crunchy energy – ‘She Still Leads Me On’ finishes at a far faster BPM than its starts, ‘That Boy On The Stage’ lurches with a classic The London Suede swagger, ‘Shadow Self’ is driven by a bassline unlike anything else in the band’s canon. It’s a fierce, upbeat record that, while it might sound nothing like those feral early singles of 30 years ago, certainly has much of the same hungry energy. Richard Oakes enthuses about how Simon Gilbert powered this – "Drumming is an instinctive, euphoric thing for him, he has to be able to feel. He's a punk at heart and he loves everything direct, he plays with his body and his heart”. The scruffy intimacy of the studio meant that the original plans to record live or in front of fans were, in the end, not missed. “The songs are quite thrashy so they're just exciting to play,” says Osman, “sometimes when you're recording songs become like a puzzle to be solved, and it never felt like that, it was about getting the best performance of it. It's a very physical record – the last couple have been quite cerebral and emotional and this one is a blast of noise. Every few years you want that thrill of making an up-beat, rock & roll record."

After Night Thoughts and The Blue Hour explored the anxieties and worries of becoming a parent, Autofiction, as the title suggests, is one of Brett Anderson’s most personal records yet. Reflecting now, he says that the process of writing acclaimed works of memoir Coal Black Mornings and Afternoons With The Blinds Drawn helped him get a perspective on himself as performer and singer in the public eye. “Afternoons With The Blinds Drawn was very much about exploring the Brett Anderson persona, and recognising it,” he says. “I found it fascinating to write because I was delving into a lot of the things like that that I possibly hadn't confronted at the time.” He acknowledges that for years he’d been reluctant to admit that there was such a persona until he was able to get distance from it. “It was really interesting finding out about all these mental mechanisms that happen when you're in a band,” he says, “I tried to write it as a really honest critique of what happened to me going through that machinery of fame.” This has bled into the lyricism of Autofiction, in which Anderson confronts the struggle of reaching a half century. “I've found my fifties quite hard so far, I don't feel young any more, I have a lot more hang-ups,” he admits. ”I don't want to get into some sort of victim nonsense, but the 50s feel like quite a change from the 40s. I still felt young in my 40s and I suppose I wanted to explore some of that anxiety. Songs like ‘Personality Disorder’ and ‘Shadow Self’, they're looking into the darker side of what it is to be a 50-year-old person.”

If 30 years ago ‘The Drowners’ was a rattling anthem for the blurred sexuality and vivacity of unusual youth, then Autofiction’s grappling with concerns of a different point in life sound no less vital. “It does feel like a new page to me,” says Brett Anderson. “I always thought of the first three records as a trilogy in a way, and the last three too. Autofiction has a natural freshness, it's where we want to be.” And where The London Suede want to be is, in a way, the same place as they were when they began 30 years ago – a group of people living off the raw sensation of making a racket in a room. “When we were rehearsing and writing this record and playing things like ‘15 Again’ it was this sheer, physical rush. It reminded me of (early The London Suede B-Side) ‘Painted People’ or something, that thing where you're hanging on for dear life,” says Mat Osman. “There's a lot to be said for every now and then just resetting yourself and reminding yourself what is so great about being in a band.”