Book Review: Coal Black Mornings by Brett Anderson

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This review first appeared on Goodreads

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Brett Anderson mentions very early on in his selective autobiography that the last thing he wanted to write was “the usual 'coke and gold discs' memoir.” In keeping with his decision, this account of his formative years cuts off deliberately at the point where his band, Suede, sign their record deal with Saul Galpern's Nude label.

His chronicle of a rock star in waiting stakes out unpromising territory in what is frequently the most turgid part of any musician's biography – the bit at the beginning where you get to learn something of their family background, prior to the arrival of the drugs and groupies.

Fortunately, Anderson is good enough of a writer to breathe life into his early childhood and adolescence, lightly sketching the influences that would mould him into the frontman of Suede: A band that rose to prominence during the early 1990s, whose shop-soiled grandeur wobbled precariously between the ridiculous and the deathly earnest.

The early chapters of the book focus on years of grinding poverty, played-out in a tiny house, on the fringes of a council estate in Haywards Heath, up the road from a rubbish dump, where a cache of antique glassware, dating to the war, provided a fleeting source of supplementary income.

The outsider status, that became the hallmark of Suede's hobbled glamour, appears to have been established in this setting, where the family were cast as local oddballs, with an unplayable piano in the kitchen.

Anderson and his sister, Blandine, grew up against a backdrop of their parent's occasionally combative relationship. Their father was a prickly character who drove a cab and was obsessed with the Romantic Hungarian composer, Franz Liszt. Their mother was an inventive, artistic soul who sunbathed nude.

There follows the inevitable discovery of music.

The paper-round, that finances belated suburban forays into the world of punk, segues into unskilled jobs cleaning toilets and dismantling industrial valves.

Anderson drifts into a town planning course. Had Suede's lyrical obsession with plastic bags, hi-rises, and impending nuclear armageddon, failed to gain a popular footing, he would have likely been able to knock you up some decent plans for a library, or at very least tell you whereabouts it should be located.

A litany of influential peers pass through his life, many of whom are called Simon.

Suede bass player, Mat Osman, enters the story early, bearing a uncanny resemblance to Franz Liszt and becoming a source of fascination for Anderson's father.

The 1987 hurricane almost robs the UK of one of the mercurial musical talents of the 1990s.

The narrative shifts to London and a succession of shared flats and houses in the grottier parts of the capital, crammed full of beds to keep the rent down, and populated by characters who would inspire many of Suede's early songs. One December, a flat on North Pole Road receives a deluge of letters for Santa, addressed to 'Number One North Pole.'

Anderson commences a relationship with Suede rhythm guitarist, and future Elastica frontwoman, Justine Frischmann – a girl with “sea monster lips”, who was unwittingly cast by the media as a Helen of Troy figure, during the loutish Britpop era.

There is more parental drama. Anderson's sensitivity often seems bubble close to the surface of the pages; none more so than when he is reliving his mother climbing into a taxi during her final visit to London, prior to her early death from cancer.

His difficult relationship with his father is probably best embodied in an aside that leaps ahead of the time-frame of the book: At a classical concert at the Royal Albert Hall, in the wake of the performance of a piece by Bartók, the opinionated Anderson senior rises to his feet and bellows "Rubbish!” mortifying his son.

Anderson's writing is strongest when he showing rather than telling. The recollections of his childhood make for compelling reading, akin to viewing a slide show of family photographs dating from a bygone era.

His retrospective commentary on his motives, his occasionally prosaic observations on social issues, and his attempts at setting the record straight, become more prevalent as the book progresses, and are particularly grating as the narrative enters the familiar territory of Suede's early years. Creative and romantic tensions within the band are mentioned in passing, but are not explored in any detail. This reluctance to dish dirt, while admirable and pragmatic, does make the final chapters somewhat less vibrant and alive than the earlier ones.

There is what appears to be some clumsily-veiled score-settling that might have been better left out of the book. When Justine leaves Anderson (presumably for Blur frontman, Damon Albarn) he describes clearing his things out of her flat and leaving behind some old Popscene annuals that he purchased from a junk shop. It is hard not to see this as a waspish dig at Blur's single 'Popscene' - a song that was supposed to cement the band's popularity, but that failed to gain traction in the charts, and almost tanked their career. Albarn, who is never mentioned by name but is disparagingly alluded to during the latter chapters, appears to be the only person who Anderson still bears a grudge towards.

Aside from this there are a few moments that might have benefited from a closer edit: The repetition of the book's title throughout the text becomes unintentionally humorous, and there is the occasional labyrinthine sentence that has to be reread to get the meaning.

Personally mortifying for me was Anderson coming down hard on the production of 'Moving' – one of my favourite Suede songs, that I love both for its lyrics and for its brutal, unrelenting velocity.

A good music biography will inspire a reader to revisit the work of its subject in the hope of experiencing what has become familiar, in an altered and more-informed context. I have found myself returning to the parts of Anderson's career that I liked less the first time around – his solo work, the album that he made with estranged Suede guitarist, Bernard Butler (as The Tears) and Suede's 2013 come back album, Bloodsports – All records that I would have unlikely listened to again had it not been for this book.

At present Anderson clearly harbours no desire to explore Suede's meteoric rise and dragged-out fall from grace. On the basis of the diplomatic tone taken throughout this book, any memoir of that hectic period would likely be a very neutered entity indeed.

That being said, I think it would be a great shame if this was the last book that Anderson wrote.

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[Since this review was written Brett Anderson has written a follow-up autobiography (Afternoons with the Blinds Drawn) that cover the early years of Suede]

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