From The Times, June 30, 2007, written by James Collard.
Suited and booted
From Britpop chaos to modelling Aquascutum – Brett Anderson has smartened up his act
Brett Anderson is looking good – rested after a three-week tour singing songs from his solo album (out earlier this year), tanned from a holiday in Ibiza, and soigné. In short, it’s easy to see why Savile Row’s Nick Hart asked his mate to model his new capsule line from Aquascutum. “I spent a long time not looking after myself,” Anderson explains, referring to his well-documented addictions, “but today I enjoy looking after myself – it’s become second nature.” And he’s sounding good as well: upbeat about life, proud of the work he put into the album and sanguine about the fact that it didn’t achieve quite the success his earlier work with Suede enjoyed, when songs like Beautiful Ones or Electricity were part of the soundtrack to Britain in the Nineties. In fact, to borrow the title of an especially magical track released in 2002, today Brett Anderson exudes Positivity.
Like healthy living, that’s not generally what’s been expected of Anderson, 39, who along with the drugs, the bust-up with girlfriend Justine Frischmann, the barneys with fellow band member Bernard Butler, at times exuded all the dark melancholia we look for in a particular kind of musician. But then Brett got “sick of the image of what I was”. Indeed, Positivity, which would prove way too jolly for followers who liked their Brett to be bleakly Byronic, was one of a number of songs “written almost as an attempt to alienate my fanbase. And it succeeded almost too well!” he jokes. Perhaps Anderson was being, by his own admission, “petulant, but I still like that one, I always really believed in that song”.
Fans of Anderson’s darker side need look no further than a track called Love is Dead on the latest album, which sounds like just what it says on the can, although the artist is keen to point out that while he sometimes feels like that (“doesn’t everyone?”), the sentiment in a song doesn’t necessarily reflect what he’s feeling at that precise moment. Besides, these were written back in 2004, around the same time that Anderson and Butler buried the hatchet enough to work together on a critically acclaimed album as the Tears.
When Anderson is writing, “normally the melody is my entry point and then the melody suggests a lyric”. But he hasn’t written anything for six months, “because I want to stop and want to think about exactly what I want to do with the next record”, which means suppressing his natural impulse to write every day. “I have a strong work ethic,” he says. He normally works from 10am until 5pm – a productivity he somehow managed even during the wildest, most hedonistic period of his life. “I’m not sure what the hours were,” he jokes, “but I definitely put the hours in. Maybe 10 at night until 5 in the morning.” Anderson grew up in Haywards Heath, knowing that he was going to be a pop star, “but not admitting that, it sounded so naive, as I didn’t train as a musician. I’ve become a better musician today and learned more about arranging, about the whole picture, during the process of making the last album as I had in all of the previous six albums… Being in a band is like being on a big ship that sails along regardless, whether you want it or not. Being solo is like being in a little boat. There’s less momentum, more manoeuvrability, which is a different kind of beauty.”
Unsurprisingly, given his Britpop past, Anderson finds “reference points” of the new collection for Aquascutum by Nick Hart (of Spencer Hart fame) “really interesting. That Seventies Roxy thing, that Fifties espresso bar look… Quite an old-school interpretation of style, with some ‘hunting party’ thrown in.” But the good news is that I don’t think Anderson is going to take up modelling full-time. He likes making music too much for that. Next up for Brett? An Asian tour, which he’s really looking forward to, and another solo album. Smart? Yes – and in more ways than one.
