Despite looking and sounding nothing like them, Britpop/alternative rock heroes Suede have previously been mistaken for 70s hitmakers Slade, of Merry Xmas Everybody and Cum on Feel the Noize fame.
Both great bands, of course, but musically very different.
I took a friend to see Suede at the Cambridge Corn Exchange last year and she was expecting to see Slade, while the band’s bass player, Mat Osman, speaking to the Cambridge Independent via a Zoom video call from his home, recounts another time the quintet were mistaken for Noddy Holder and co.
“I can remember once we were crossing the border into Serbia. We’d been playing in Hungary and went into Serbia, and there were these massive, massive queues,” he recalls.
“Something had happened, some terrorist thing, so it was all getting a bit fraught. And then this guy turned up, knocked on the window and said ‘You’re a band? You’re a band?’
“We’re like ‘Yeah, we’re called Suede’. He’s like ‘Ah!’, disappears off and then comes back with a couple of Slade CDs. Everyone was like ‘Don’t say anything’.
“So we all signed our own names, apart from Brett, who signed ‘Noddy’, and then they waved us through.
“Yeah, it’s been the bane of my life, the Slade thing, apart from trying to get to Serbia, so thank you, Noddy, for that.”
Hopefully, those heading to Suede’s gig at Audley End, near Saffron Walden, in early August, as part of the Heritage Live series of concerts, will be aware of exactly who they’re going to see – and that’s the band comprising Mat, singer Brett Anderson, drummer Simon Gilbert, guitarist Richard Oakes and keyboard player/rhythm guitarist Neil Codling.
Suede were dubbed ‘The Best New Band in Britain’ by Melody Maker in 1992, before they’d even released their first single, and their chart-topping, self-titled debut album was the second recipient of the Mercury Music Prize, in 1993.
My favourite album by the band, however, is 1996’s Coming Up, an absolutely outstanding record from start to finish.
The group’s best-known hits include Animal Nitrate, Beautiful Ones, Trash, Saturday Night and Filmstar.
Their last album, 2022’s Autofiction, was another resounding success, debuting at number two in the UK Albums Chart. That made it Suede’s highest-charting LP since 1999’s Head Music.
Autofiction made many publications’ ‘best albums of 2022’ lists and was hailed by The Guardian as a “back-to-basics triumph”.
“We’re writing for a new album and we’re just getting ready for a summer of gigs,” reveals Mat, 56, whose younger brother is TV presenter Richard Osman.
“Lots of gigs here in Britain and lots of gigs in China and Indonesia and places like that, so we’re girding our artistic loins at the moment.”
Did the hugely positive reception to Autofiction spur Mat and the boys on to write a follow-up?
“Yeah, totally,” he replies. “It’s really important to us that we’re still making music that moves people, interests people and kind of becomes part of their lives, and it was a lovely surprise with Autofiction.
“It was just one of those things that seemed to connect with people – and you can never really tell what it’s going to be.
“I think with Autofiction what happened was we’d made a couple of quite bombastic orchestral records and we wanted to do something much simpler.
“And then, weirdly, it took place during lockdown. We did lots of the rehearsing for it and writing for it in lockdown, and I think it just caught the tide of the times a little bit.
“When we came back, I think people were looking for something that was quite ‘human’, ‘live’… They’d spent so long staring at screens doing Zooms and stuff that I think it just connected.
“But it’s always lovely when it happens. It’s always a privilege when it happens because it gets harder and harder, I think, as you get older.”
Forming in 1989, Suede continued until 2003 before disbanding and subsequently getting back together for a triumphant gig at London’s Royal Albert Hall, as part of the Teenage Cancer Trust shows, in 2010.
Their ongoing and very active existence has been one of the most satisfying band reunions in recent years – both for fans and, it seems, the band themselves.
Also, while some of their contemporaries have gone through various line-up changes over the years, Suede’s has remained constant since 1995.
Mat says there is a unity within the group. “We’re in a nice position that pretty much everyone writes and does part of the thing, it’s never become a side project, I think,” he observes.
“I think the thing that’s important is the five of us kind of live for Suede, and we enjoy it as much – or more – than we ever have done.
“We’re pretty unified, and the weird thing with Suede is it’s almost like it’s bigger than the five of us.
“Quite often when we’re making records, we’ll be listening to something we’ve just written, or trying to write something, and you’re kind of like ‘Yeah, it’s really good but it’s not Suede’. Suede has its own logic and its own tides.”
Seeing Suede in concert last year, I was amazed at the energy level.
“I love it. It’s not a complicated thing why we’re like that,” notes Mat, who, like his brother, is also a published novelist (his most recent book is 2023’s The Ghost Theatre).
“We love playing live and I think the sense of connection and of community – especially because we were split up for nearly a decade – that sense of the magic of the live performance and what you give out, you get back 20-fold... it’s really important to us and it becomes more and more important as we go on.
“I love the kind of scrappy magic of a live gig. We have no click tracks or things on tape or anything like that. I like it to be just quite raw and natural and as connected as possible.”
Going back to the new album the band are working on at the moment (it has no release date yet), Mat reveals that when it comes to making records “it takes us forever, it really does”.
“We write kind of 50, 60 songs before we’ve got enough and it goes through a myriad of different variations,” he explains.
“I don’t think we really know even what it’s about yet. There’s usually a moment about halfway through where you go ‘Oh right, that’s what it is’ and then the rest of it gets easier. But at the moment we’re still at the ‘scrabbling around for scraps’ stage.”
Mat, who was born in Welwyn Garden City, grew up in Haywards Heath, West Sussex, and now lives in London. He and Brett met at college when they were 16.
He admits that when Suede reformed in 2010 – for what was initially meant to be a one-off concert – he did not know what to expect.
“I think the Royal Albert Hall, when we came back, was an incredible moment,” says Mat, “because it’s one of those things that it almost seems pre-ordained now that we were going to come back and it was going to go really well and we were going to sell a load of records and be able to play live for another decade.
“But I had no idea if anyone was still interested, I really didn’t.
“Music’s very cyclical and fashionable so no-one really talked about Suede while we were away. You certainly didn’t hear us on the radio or anything like that.
“So there were a couple of moments of playing that first gig and just seeing the love and the passion of the people there, and just the vitality of it and the way it didn’t feel like a souvenir, it didn’t feel like a victory lap – it felt like the start of something.
“That was a really special night. We stepped off stage and the first thing I can remember saying is ‘We’ve got to do that again’.”
On still being in a band at this stage of his life – and being seemingly happier than ever with life as a member of Suede – Mat adds: “Me and Brett have been plotting Suede since we were 16.
“It was our life and we haven’t really done anything else. We had s****y jobs and stuff but they were just there to pay for the rehearsals.
“And you can kind of get used to anything – it’s the human condition. So when we split up, I don’t think I really realised how lucky and privileged I’d been.
“We worked really hard at it, but at the same time this is just what happened. And since we’ve come back, it feels completely different.
“I’m just aware of the fragility of it; I know it could end at any point – bands end every day – and it just makes everything feel so much more special.
“Especially since lockdown actually, coming back after that, the sense of the magic of playing live has been kind of multiplied for me and I look forward to it with more hunger than I ever did.”
Suede will play at Audley End House and Gardens, as part of the Heritage Live concert series, on Thursday, August 1, with special guests Johnny Marr (a “massive hero” of Mat’s) and Nadine Shah (“a generational talent, she’s just extraordinary and the new record’s brilliant”).
Tickets, priced £75.38, are available from heritagelive.net. For more on Suede, go to suede.co.uk.
