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blast from the past
reprinted here in its entirety for your pleasure is an oldie but a goodie. it is a transcript of an audio interview done by david barnett with brett and mat in 1998. bits and pieces of the interview were originally included on the head musing promotional CD.

hello everyone it's brett here

and mat

from suede

can you tell us a bit about the song on this CD, "implement yeah," particularly as it's quite an old song?

it was just a thing we did years ago in rehearsal. kind of messing about . .

we first played it in your bedroom

did we?

the lyrics definitely (sings) so it's probably the oldest suede thing ever

that's right, on highlever road . . . we did it ages ago, before bernard joined i think. when me, mat and justine were just farting around doing nothing - but she's not getting a writing credit if that's what she thinks!

don't send her a copy!

how did justine's guest appearance at reading come about?

she came to reading with us and i just said d'you fancy coming on stage and she knew the song and we just did it. you go through so many years of being sort of precious about everything you do so you get to a time when you just want to have a good time and enjoy yourself. we just did it for a laugh. you can't take everything too seriously all the time. it's not supposed to be too big a deal or anything.

the other new song you played at reading, "john pong," is the only thing people will have heard of the new album. do you think it's quite representative of the record?

it's actually gonna be called "he's gone." the way people heard it at reading isn't very representative of the kind of textures that we're using on this album. when we did it at reading it was quite trad, we hadn't arranged it properly it was just a song we just played it as a band in quite a traditional way. but the way it is on the album, it's quite a successful one. it's a ballad but we managed to update it.

there's been reports that you've got about 20 new songs. how many of these are actually finished and how many are . . . ?

any good?

we're working on a core of about 15, 16 while we're here. 5 will be b-list material. most of those 20 we've got an idea about. the whole angle of approach for this album is sort of slightly different from the ones before. what we're trying to do is let things grow in the studio a bit more. before we've always gone into the studio with preconceived ideas about what's gonna go on the album and what's gonna be b-sides and i think that's been to our detriment sometimes, we've thrown away really good stuff and i kind of want to let things grow a bit more and be a bit freer and a bit more experimental. people use the word experimental as in a style with lots of weird noises. i don't mean experimental like that but actually truly experimental as in doing something that your mind doesn't naturally arrange itself around. mat?

brett's right.

people are talking about a new dancey direction, or something heavily groove based. how true do you think that is?

that's rubbish. every single album we do the press always has some story that manages to get the complete polar opposite of what the album's about. dog man star was supposed to be a rap album and coming up was going to be a double experimental album and you couldn't get much further from the truth. it's not dancey at all. it's not so rocky i suppose, but there are some
stompers on it

just cos steve's worked with a lot of dance records people assume we're going to turn into sabres of paradise. he knows his stuff.

it's too one dimensional to say groovy or whatever. it's just a re-interpretation, an attempt to jog yourself out of . . . you know, you get into ruts when you work the same way all the time and we didn't really want to do that.

why did you decide on steve osborne?

he's cheap.

he's very cheap! he was really into it and he's made some really good records and he was just easy to get on with. we did a couple of tracks with him, a couple of demos and they sounded really good.

that's what made my mind up. we did a couple of songs before we decided to take him on and he did one, "savoir faire" that's gonna be on the album which is one of my favourite things we've ever done, i was very excited about what he managed to do with it. it's one of those songs that's in the wilderness, you're not really sure how it's gonna turn out and he just managed to get something really interesting out of it. it's good to work with new people cos you just tend to get different things out of them. you know, we've done 3 albums with ed and we had a good relationship and that, it's just good to try new things out.

"feel" was the first 5-way co-write. is that jamming way of writing something you'll be doing again?

we've done a couple of tracks we're working on for the album that have been jams. the whole writing process has completely changed. it's much less formulised. we'll grab hold of an idea and it doesn't really matter where it's come from. it might be simon humming a tune in the toilet, so the possibility of writing combinations are completely open.

"europe is our playground" was a great success . . .

it was a smash hit.

will you be following that up?

i think i've taken electric music as far as it can go. i'm going to take skiffle into strange new places . . .

coming up was very commercial, was there any sense of deliberately trying to regain lost ground?

we fancied doing it more than anything. we didn't check our bank balances or anything. you always want to make a different record from the last one we fancied making that kind of record.

it's difficult to say how much is your subconscious, you know what i mean? that's the sort of record we wanted to make. we were excited about being a band again more than anything and it just came out like that.

would you agree, though, that coming up achieved that, got you back on top and that now you're freer to maybe do something a bit more interesting?

yeah, i suppose so. i saw it as a spring board. i do listen to it a lot though, i really enjoy it. it's probably my favourite out of the three albums. i do get a kick from listening to it. there's lots of things on the first two that i can't really listen to. i just sound like a different person really.

is there a lyrical theme to the new album, what kind of things are you writing about?

i'm not singing anything particularly emotional. i'm deliberately writing stuff that is kind of quite uninvolved. i don't want to be histrionic. people talk about passion and i always think that's a such misinterpretation of what passion's about. passion can be about something completely soulless and i've tried to write from quite a cold point of view. there's a couple of things on the last album which i thought lyrically were really successful. things like "she", which i thought was a really good piece of writing. it's really simple and it's really quite cold but there's something interesting about it so i'm trying to go in that direction. stuff like "europe" and "grafitti women" i like the way they're quite emotionally uninvolved. but having said that there's a couple of tear-jerkers on the album. i can never resist it.

how much do you consider the influence your lyrics might have? are you trying to get across any kind of political or social commentary or is it more a case of what sounds good?

it has to be a bit of both really. when you're writing if you're a musician which i am, the first thing i am, i'm a musician before i'm a lyricist. i always find it really dodgy when you can really tell that people's lyrics have been written separate to the music. i always try and just let everything flow together. the sound of the words is just as important as the meaning of the words and they're intrinsically interlinked and you can't really say one's more important than the other and that's not to say that some things, people could say oh that means that half the words you write must be flippant in a way but no, not at all. but who's to say which is more important, something to sound right or something to mean something, they've both got equal weight. it's like saying which is more important your sense of vision or your sense of hearing. it's one of those impossible questions it's really important to not concentrate on one side of things. for the song to be about what it feels like. i don't like music that's too theoretical.

so what have people got to look forward to in the near future?

mat?

they can look forward to mat in the near future. no it's going really well. it's taking a long time like they always do. the thing is the tracks sound more different from each other than on any record we've done before. there's actually a bigger variety between the type of songs we're doing. it's all recognisably suede but there's a bigger range of songs on it. there's stuff that's like two chords and is almost just like a rhythm track and there's really complicated songs. it's quite varied.

it's an unfocused lot of garbage basically.

it's just a whole lot of stuff we had lying around.

bits and bobs.

when do we get to hear something?

when the first single comes out? i hope it comes out january, february.

any ideas what the first single might be?

there's a song called "can't get enough" which i think is an obvious opening single which is one of my faves but you never know. like last time "trash" ended up being the first single and we never wrote that till a month before we finished recording the album. so you never know. you can't predict too far ahead . . .