Hello.

I am pregnant, and I haven't got a job any more. I am a pregnant artist, and maybe I'll do some writing.

I have no real obsessions at the moment, I'm a bit emotionally normal, but I have been thinking on the power of memories, not least for making art from.

SUEDE

I want to write about Suede.

I should also draw about Suede.

The writing and drawing could be part of the same project.

I've been finding the youtube clips... There was one of the Wild Ones live at the Phoenix festival '95. I was there. I think I screamed. Brett was wet. He wore a little tie.

I was just remembering a photocopied list of bootlegs that I had. I ordered the cassette of the Phoenix festival concert. I got it, but didn't listen to it, by then I had started to go off them for one reason or another, the post-Bernard songs not turning me on being key. I don't remember the order of things clearly, but there was feelings of disgust and acute embarrassment going down. Wotta palava.

Why write about Suede?

Suuueeeeede

It was the first time I got into being a fan. Specifically.

I was consciously a fan, among warm swarms of other fans, quite happy with that idea, reaching out a clammy hand.

It was a sex-thing that separated me from parents and Hannie. It was culture that was a bit about sexuality and sexuality imagery, though in quite a girl-appealing abstract amorphous way a lot of the time. When sex is all imaginary and potential.

The blue nose poster incident.

I had a cheap black and white poster of Brett that I had probably bought outside one of the concerts. he was sitting on a stool looking straight ahead all intense, pleasing to me but easy to mock, it's easy to see. My sister came in my room with a blue colouring pencil and coloured in his nose. I was seething with outrage. I could have burst with anger. She was cackling with glee. She was a bit younger, but there was a personality issue too, I think she found it all too funny in its earnestness, cruising for a bruising with its floppy hair guitar solo cheekbone nonsense.

All the times I've hated and loved and dismissed them since...

I've revisited Suede a couple of times, but from different times in my life, it's funny how memories and past loves can re-shape themselves and allegiances take on different colours with time. Now I'm going back to it in a blog way, as is my these days thing.

It was liking something that not everyone likes... kinda valuable and stimulating. Not like liking the Beatles. Liking something like that divides, differentiates you, makes you not neutral. Not a floating voter.

I noticed at the original 90s time the hostility to suede and forms it took. A lot of normal straight men didn't get it or found it silly. Though a lot of the normal straight boys at school liked Bernard for his ninja manly guitar shenanigans, and hated Richard Oakes (17 year old replacement Bernard) for being no kind of an aspirational man and not much older than them. Bob doesn't really get it, though he does kind of take my word for it.

Richard Easter on Steve Wright in the afternoon did some sketches mocking Suede and Brett's silly voice, when they were most hyped. I doubt I would find that even on the internet. And apparently there was a spitting image puppet. And I looked for the clip where George Dawes on Shooting Stars dressed up as Brett, which was very funny, but had no luck with that yet either.

Suede was the kind of thing where the fans felt 'we get it' and though Mark Goodier on Top of the Pops kind of says they're a talked about band, and they were even on Jay Leno once, most people weren't really going to get it by definition, because to really feel it you had to feel it intensely, it was very teenage. They were the perfect thing to like as a teenager. At the actual suede gigs the sweaty wiggling was more uninhibited, we were all friends, kind of. But not really. But it could feel like that. Some euphoric alienated togetherness, bit like with Morrissey, but different. I think Morrissey is much easier for everyone to look at and 'get'.

Bernard does a right weird face before his guitar solo.

What's good about the music. It's wibbly wobbly... like a wobbly tape... people think of it as mannered, but I find it most immediate and affecting of 'britpop'... or that era... like it gets in your guts and it's sex, it's sincere and brave and it's about the extreme things that happen in imagination. people think it's pretentious in its darkness but it's not really dark, it's a certain colour of whimsy. It's what I intuitively always thought art should be, an honest reflection of some decidedly real interior landscape, and honest in that.

It's only british in that it's in a silly british accent and from british minds, it's not all self conscious like Parklife or Oasis. Or about reacting against America or against grunge. In fact it's all international in its scopey wope.

It's successfully its own thing, they created a world to be in. It's completely successful in that. That doesn't score you points for being influential or for 'winning' supposedly important laddish culture-fights, but it's the only thing I care about sometimes. And that created/evoked world isn't for 'escaping' reality, it's for uniquely and eloquently articulating aspects of reality, in time and mind, so you can go there and know what they mean.

Brett was a grownup and I was 15, I didn't want Brett to be my boyfriend. He was an aspirational icon type thing. I think he was alright at being that. He sat on a stool in my bedroom. Even after the blue nose incident.

I probably threw away all my fanzines and posters during one of the times when I thought I hated Suede/ was embarrassed by the ferocity of my former ardour. (I found that stupid phrase coming out of my mouth on the phone to Scott, thought I might as well give it space.)

Being a teenager involved a lot of 'fuck it' committing to things that were potentially embarrassing, then feeling embarrassed a lot when some of the passion fell away.

All my best and most inspired art I feel like has been done when I've been going out on a limb, unsure if I have any support at all, doing something with zero guaranteed audience, but being sure of some ferocious inspiration that was leading me somewhere. Those were the sorts of feelings I had about Suede, just before I truly thought of myself as an artist or knew how to articulate any of this.

I had forgotten how he moved in concerts. The wiggling and the grinning. I always thought his face wrinkled up in a pleasing way. There are a lot of distinct angles and planes on it, I feel I'd have a field day drawing it now. The first concert in Exeter, the bit that stuck in my mind, that grabbed me, was the shape of that haircut at the back of his neck where it was short. It's often specific visual cues like that that are the initial bait for my bigtime cultural crushes/muses. (Paul McCartney's eyebrows in Hard Day's Night, Orton's profile) Of course then I was too young to properly understand the concept of useful muses, and I was frustrated in every way. But now I'm frustrated in less ways, and I can go back and validate the ways in which I WAS onto something. The ways in which I was right.

All the time that's passed... fifteen years or so.... all the things I've been indifferent to in that time. My increasingly 'sophisticated' understanding of where cultural idioms come from, learning about the sixties and all that crap. Repeated suspicions that pop music feels a bit dead, as if it was all one great big living organism that's run out of steam. And that boys in guitar bands feel now especially pointless and stale, people who assume we need boys in bands are indulging in a small 'c' conservatism that I find dogmatic. Not that all boys in bands have to be bad, I just don't like that assumption that they will always now be there. I don't like assumptions that come from a lack of imagination, or a clinging to the familiar, in a medium that's supposed to be about now and about being alive. What if the Decca people had been taken at their word when they said to the Beatles that guitar bands were out? That would be an interesting alternate timestream.

So looking back on Suede I have immense affection for them and for my memories of how it felt. Because then some boys in some bands felt to me like they were trying to say something about right then, and to say it kind of honestly and with integrity, and some musicality too.

It was sweaty and wiggly in those concerts, and there was a great intensity.... I'm glad I bothered to participate, and felt something passionate and hormonal enough to overcome my default shyness, quietness, solitude.

Bernard said he saw colours, brown for he first album, dark green for Dog Man Star. Then those were the colours of the album covers. It feels like he and they were quite visual music makers, which is part of why it was so easy for me to adopt them.

I've always thought of most arts as being plastic arts, material or pseudo-material realms in which to carve out carefully the visions and truths that visit your mind. Like you could squidge music or compose paint. So I guess looked at like that, no arts can die... but people can talk themselves into staleness, and maybe good things and good times should be recognised for what they are. Pockets of somethingness.

Though I'm talking about a kind of 'good' that is only partly about posterity and charts and objective comparisons. It's more about its power in my own memory and imagination. Perhaps this is asking to be subjective, internal music in that way, and loses out in those other earthly competitions.

And some of the lyrics are joyously funny to me now, 'Does your love only come in a Volvo?', 'On the escalator, we shit paracetamol'...'I don't give a shit if your bicycle's in bits'. it feels now like they're meant to be a bit funny. All the best things are at least a BIT funny. Well, that's how I feel at the moment. But I'm trying to figure out how to turn everything into cartoons.