‘I always think they’re not lusting after me,’ Brett Anderson says of the middle-aged fans who still turn up to see his band Suede and leave the shows a little flushed and excited. ‘They’re lusting after something that doesn’t really exist. They’re remembering their wild youth. It’s faintly comical to me when I think about myself in the 1990s and the sexuality of it. That got a bit out of control, I suppose. And it’s odd, because I’m quite a reserved person in lots of ways, so I don’t really know what was going on there.’
Oh, Brett, you do yourself a disservice. Look at yourself! Not an ounce of flab, dressed like a clothes-horse, face all sharp lines and clean planes. You’re a well-preserved man.
‘Well, thank you.’
I tell him that a couple of years ago, my price for interviewing him on stage at the Barbican in London had been that my wife got to meet him, at which he cackles. ‘I don’t know if people would still feel the same way if they really knew me. So much sexual attraction is about how people really are, rather than what they look like.’ Which is easy to say when you look like him.
Anderson turned 51 this week and he has managed a remarkably dignified third act in his pop life. Suede recorded five albums in nine years from 1993, topping the charts and, for a while, being absolutely ubiquitous (‘There was an odd period in 1993 when everything I picked up, not just music papers, had some reference to Suede. It was incredibly exciting’). The last two albums, though, were pretty crappy: Anderson was smoking crack and the band’s moment had passed.
A solo career followed, with polite reviews to match.
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