Photo de l'auteur

Brett Anderson

Auteur de Coal Black Mornings

8+ oeuvres 168 utilisateurs 4 critiques

A propos de l'auteur

Brett Anderson is the restaurant critic and a features writer at the New Orleans Times-Picayune. The winner of two James Beard awards for journalism, Anderson has written for such publications as Gourmet, Food Wine, and the Oxford American.
Crédit image: via Goodreads

Œuvres de Brett Anderson

Coal Black Mornings (2018) 83 exemplaires
Afternoons with the Blinds Drawn (2019) 56 exemplaires
Cornbread Nation 6 (2012) — Directeur de publication — 14 exemplaires
Brett Anderson (2007) 2 exemplaires
Slow Attack 1 exemplaire

Oeuvres associées

Best Food Writing 2007 (2007) — Contributeur — 112 exemplaires
Best Food Writing 2006 (2006) — Contributeur — 99 exemplaires
Best Food Writing 2005 (Best Food Writing) (2005) — Contributeur — 99 exemplaires
Best Food Writing 2008 (2008) — Contributeur — 83 exemplaires
Best Food Writing 2011 (2011) — Contributeur — 71 exemplaires
Best Food Writing 2004 (2004) — Contributeur — 65 exemplaires
Best Food Writing 2002 (2002) — Contributeur — 58 exemplaires
Best Food Writing 2012 (2012) — Contributeur — 43 exemplaires

Étiqueté

Partage des connaissances

Date de naissance
1967-09-29
Sexe
male
Nationalité
England, UK
Lieu de naissance
Lindfield, Sussex, UK

Membres

Critiques

I devoured this book on one sitting. Beautifully wrote, very honest, too honest in places. Brett Anderson looks wryfully looks back to the period of his life before he signs a record deal for Suede. When it comes the death his mother, I found tears rolling down my face.
 
Signalé
chantalr24 | 2 autres critiques | Apr 25, 2023 |
Well written and captivating auto-biography from Suede frontman Brett Anderson. (Suede is one of my favorite British bands so I was curious to read Brett’s story.) The book focusses mainly on Brett’s early years... childhood, school, starting the band, and takes place in the 70’s, 80’s, and the 90’s. The book ends when Suede are ready to reach some well-deserved success. Brett wrote a follow-up bio “Afternoons With the Blinds Drawn” which I will have to read soon. An interesting read from a very talented man.… (plus d'informations)
 
Signalé
SandraLynne | 2 autres critiques | Dec 20, 2022 |


I was a nervous, twitchy, anxious child, prone to bouts of insomnia and lonely, terrified hours awake staring at the grotesque faces that the folds at the top of the curtains seemed to make. Once the sun rose, I would wait for everyone else to wake up, staring for ages from my window at a pair of trees growing near the abandoned mushroom factory at the bottom of our road. One I called The Mouse and the other I called The Clown, and I would gaze transfixed as they swayed and billowed, seemingly locked in their immutable dispute, buoyed and buffeted by the eddies and currents of the high wind.


This book is a far cry from the gossipy fan-y book named "Suede: The Authorised Biography" by David Barnett; the latter is a book that dances feyly through drugs, bitchiness, Suede's fall-through and rebirth, where this book begins with Anderson's beginnings, and ends at the cusp of Suede breaking through.

This book is actually very well written. Anderson's curtness with language is instantly on display, as is his self-proclaimed two-pronged love for honesty and hatred for irony, where both his song lyrics and this book is concerned. As he writes, there is no absolute truth where memoirs are concerned, but, as he puts it, perspective.

Anderson, currently over 50 years old, is still a kind of rock star, as far as one can be these days, but seems far more interested in ordering his family around with handling the garden at home than doing drugs. However, he still has a knack of combining poetry and the mundane, often taking the language of the common person, twisting it until you have a decent song at the end.

If one listens to Suede's debut, eponymously named album today, one is quickly left with insight as to how good the album still is, and how even the band's b-sides were extraordinary.

Anderson has an acute and precise way of delivering his childhood onto pages:
I was a nervous, twitchy, anxious child, prone to bouts of insomnia and lonely, terrified hours awake staring at the grotesque faces that the folds at the top of the curtains seemed to make. Once the sun rose, I would wait for everyone else to wake up, staring for ages from my window at a pair of trees growing near the abandoned mushroom factory at the bottom of our road. One I called The Mouse and the other I called The Clown, and I would gaze transfixed as they swayed and billowed, seemingly locked in their immutable dispute, buoyed and buffeted by the eddies and currents of the high wind.

I'm utterly glad for having read this book on an electronic reader that allowed me to check its built-in dictionary constantly, mainly because some words were far too tricky for me. Still, they were really worthy of checking the meaning of. How often can one really say that?

One such word is "penury", which means "severe poverty". Anderson's family grew up under completely desolate straits, monetarily speaking. Also, Brett's relationship with his father is delved into, and a lot of analysis and therapy has seemingly gone into handling him:
Living under my father’s roof involved picking your way through a complex wilderness of seemingly pointless rules. He once wryly described his only indulgences in life as being ‘an ounce of tobacco and a copy of the Radio Times’, which he would jealously guard with a Gollum-like grip. Woe betide anyone who removed it from its special tartan holder, or got to it before he could schedule his listening pleasure with a series of Biroed circles, or even more transgressively took it from its home under the small wickerwork stool where he liked to place his feet while puffing and wheezing endlessly on his ever-present briar pipe. There were other rules about the proper time to eat plums and the ‘correct’ way to tie a tie, which on reflection don’t quite translate, but at the time seemed narrow and petty, always betraying a sense that he was desperately trying to wrest control over the moving pieces of his world.

[...]

Although he never physically harmed me, my dad’s brooding rages were terrifying and have probably left me with my own legacy of neurosis. He could be very controlling – always demanding to know where you were going if you left the room. To this day it’s impossible for me to even go for a piss without telling my wife. It’s like that scene in The Shawshank Redemption when Morgan Freeman’s character gets the job as a bag-packer in the supermarket. At other times he could be hugely confrontational and would make outrageous or quixotic statements about politics and music. When I eventually drifted towards adolescence and began to challenge him, we would continually clash in increasingly bitter, cyclical debates over the relative merits of pop and classical. Christmas after Christmas would end in fraught, charged arguments as we sat glumly at the table in paper hats while he passionately but pointlessly tried to prove to me that the Pathétique was ‘better’ than ‘Satisfaction’. The experience made me highly opinionated about music and probably prepared me wonderfully for a lifetime of over-explaining my own.

I won't go into detail on that more, but it's safe to say that Anderson's relationship with his father was complicated, which is the word Anderson feels best can describe it, both when the father was alive and today. He also describes his loving relationship with his mother, detailing how she not only constantly mended but also created clothes for the family, due to their poverty. He also writes frightfully and horribly sad passages on learning that his mother was diagnosed with terminal cancer and had a mere six months left to live.

There's fun in the book, too. Anderson's sentences reveal a wry and dry humor, which left me chuckling a couple of times. Otherwise, though, I got the sense that his hunt for The Truth often left the text leaning that way, and never into...Chas and Dave territory.
I don’t think our dad’s growing reputation as Haywards Heath’s answer to Edith Sitwell or my mother’s habit of sunbathing nude in the garden really helped, but slowly we were accepted and absorbed within the community, although we were always seen as outsiders – ‘that lot with the piano in their kitchen’.

[...]

Crisps were one of the few foods I really craved as a child, and I clearly remember a fantasy I would occasionally allow to spool in my head whereby when I was grown up and had enough money I would buy myself a small mountain of them. It’s something I really should do one day just to commune with my ten-year-old self.

Anderson goes to lengths to explain that really, he does not wish to shed any bad light upon his parents or other persons because of malice, and I believe he does not; he further explains that he himself now is a father, and as such, truth must out, in order for himself to become and/or stay the person he is.
My dad’s sister, my auntie Jean, was a spirited, rambunctious woman who was obsessed with cats and Elvis Presley, and would totter and clop in her high heels and miniskirt around Haywards Heath under a huge, swaying, dyed-blonde beehive hair-do. She was the manageress of the local branch of Dorothy Perkins and lived with her husband, a sweet, meek man called Vic, in a flat above the shop on South Road with their burgeoning brood of children, a white long-haired cat called Kinky and a large illuminated tank full of tropical angel fish. I remember she used to drink Babycham out of those small painted seventies’ glasses, and my mum once made her a purple draught excluder in the shape of a snake. She is only a misty, washy memory for me, though, as her life ended in 1980 in a tragedy of almost iconic scale. She was found dead in a car with a man, who was presumed to be her lover, after they both succumbed to carbon monoxide fumes. As a child, overhearing the babble and conjecture at the time, it was unclear to me whether it was an accident or a suicide pact or even murder, as the gossip-mongers and the tittle-tattlers speculated and raked over the scant facts.

I think the coroners returned an inconclusive verdict of ‘misadventure’, which only added fuel to the fires of rumour that burned fiercely in our sleepy town. It was naturally a drama of giant proportions within the family and a crushing tragedy to her surviving children and husband. It formed the inspiration for a song I wrote well over a decade later called ‘She’s Not Dead’, where I tried to borrow some of the detail to paint a probably highly stylised sketch of the heartbreaking episode. One of the original lines was ‘carbon monoxide sang as the engine ran’, and to be honest I don’t know why I didn’t keep it. It seems strange to me now, and not a little callous, that I can sit here and talk about how I have turned personal events that have crushed and redirected people’s lives into songs. Part of me feels that it’s a somewhat shaming and trivial thing to do, and I hope I’ve never cheapened anyone’s memory, but I think it’s important to realise that art generally is just a process of documenting and interpreting and channelling one’s experiences and turning them into something that lives in a place beyond reality. In my defence, at least the song is a good song, if that doesn’t sound too glib, and the characters in it hopefully have a certain grace and dignity. Well, that was honestly the intention.

Speaking of how poor the Anderson family was:
When I was a young child I don’t think I was particularly conscious of us being poor. I was too locked within my selfish, narrow child’s world to really have any sense of perspective. It never occurred to me that other children didn’t help their mothers pluck dead birds or skin rabbits, or that most people didn’t just huddle around a single open fire in the winter evenings for warmth; not that Oathall was full of rich kids – it was a Haywards Heath comprehensive school – but I gradually became aware that our lives, if not unique, were certainly marginal. One particular grim ritual forced home the cold, hard truth. As my father earned so little I was entitled to free school meals. For some reason, rather than doing it privately and discreetly, the unfortunate kids that fell into this unenvied little band were forced by the school to queue up in public for their special tickets in the large echoing canteen in full view of all the other sniggering, jeering children. To say it was a humiliating experience is a crushing understatement. It was like a Dickensian workhouse scene; a punishment for being poor, like being pilloried or put in the stocks: brutal, completely unnecessary and pointlessly cruel.

The experience was truly scarring and made me utterly fearful of poverty. The memory of it often haunts me and makes me shudder with the fear that my own boys would ever have to go through anything nearly so horrible. A similarly crushing experience happened when on a Christmas day trip to London my father’s car broke down right outside Harrod’s department store in Knightsbridge. My mother, my sister and I had to get out and push while my father twisted frantically at the ignition key and pumped at the pedals to a dissonant chorus of angry car horns. The symbolism seems ridiculously appropriate and almost grotesque, our poverty spotlit against a backdrop of opulence and power; four insignificant figures lost in a desperate struggle while symbols of wealth gazed indifferently on.

On music:
Meanwhile, The Smiths’ colossal shadow of influence was ever growing; theirs was such a unique place in the world of pop – cultish and still distinctly marginal but with the reach to make thrilling little forays into the mainstream, so being a fan felt just as transgressive as being into the Pistols years earlier. They had hovered around my consciousness until one solitary evening when I was listening to Peel on late-night Radio 1 and heard Johnny Marr’s gnawing, insistent guitar hook coming through my tiny transistor speaker and Morrissey’s saturnine promise of leaping in front of a flying bullet, and that was it for me.


I'm sure Morrissey will reserve a new place in hell for Anderson, as he undoubtedly will learn that "Cemetry Gates" is misspelled in this book.

Then, there's this:

There was a student cafe on Gower Street called the Crypt or something, and one day I was sitting with my cup of tea and she came over to me and started talking. The first thing I noticed up close was that she had brown, discoloured teeth and what I thought at first was a speech impediment. Through her nervous, lisping drawl I managed to make out that her name was Justine. Justine Frischmann.


Described as one of his two great loves of his life, Anderson also fleshes out how she enters his life, as Bernard Butler does a bit later, and they form Suede.

Famously, Frischmann leaves Anderson for the singer of Blur, which causes calamity and severe heartache. Frischmann left the band, and didn't speak with Anderson for years. Still, this made Anderson and Butler gel more, and a hell of a lot of lyrics got written after that. Anderson is not one to shy away from detailing the meanings and inspirations for his songs, and a lot of that's in here.

Speaking of which, I can't help pointing this out, which must serve as a slight:

There was this bit of graffiti on a wall in Marble Arch which I noticed one day and that we both began to love saying simply Modern Life is Rubbish in stark white letters. We drove past it countless times and it never failed to fascinate us [...]


All in all, this book makes for a lovely read, not only for "musos" and Suede fans, but for anybody, really, who can identify with Philip Larkin's notes on what parents do to you, and for somebody who has ever wanted to escape a situation and did something about that. There's plenty of insightful, intelligent, and funny analyses here, enough to last. I'm glad Anderson didn't delve into gossip nor bad judgment. This is a good book, and it deserves 4/5 for being so well written, seemingly without bars or a real safety net, even though it's safe to say Anderson knows how to treat the media.
… (plus d'informations)
 
Signalé
pivic | 2 autres critiques | Mar 23, 2020 |
I enjoyed Brett Anderson’s first autobiographical book, “Coal Black Mornings“, immensely. Anderson proved to be eloquent, engaging, and terse, all in good ways.

This second book should never have been. I mean, the first chapter of the book is “The book I said I would never write”.

The first one finished where Suede was just about to hit the big time, which they did.

The response to Suede was so disproportionate that there seemed to be very few historical parallels, and while it’s not something that I’m particularly proud of it’s something that needs to be addressed as it became an integral element to our story. For those who weren’t there or who have forgotten it might give a sense of the scale of the media reaction to say that even before the debut album was released we would end up gracing nineteen front covers. It was a phenomenon that of course was bound to have pernicious consequences, not least with Bernard’s later rejection and drift away from the band, but while the frothy delirium still seemed like fun we just gripped on to the seat in front of us and enjoyed the ride.


There’s a lot to be said for Anderson’s ways of going about “the ride”.

Most rock bands tend to follow the same predictable trudge along the same predictable roads through the same predictable check-points, as preordained as the life cycle of a frog or something and so the tale is always going to have an air of inevitability, especially when everyone knows what happens in the last chapter. So instead what I’m going to try to do in these pages is to use elements of my own story as a way to reach out and reveal the broader picture, to look at my journey from struggle to success and to self-destruction and back again and use that narrative to talk about some of the forces that acted on me and to maybe uncover some sort of truth about the machinery that whirrs away, often unseen, especially by those on whom it is working, to create the bands that people hear on the radio. This might seem a little ambitious but it’s my way of trying to claim some sort of ownership over the second part of my story, a story that was so assiduously documented by the media and which certainly doesn’t need another retelling in that conventional form.


This is, miraculously, what saves the book from becoming another predictable book in the annals of rock lore. Anderson is acutely aware of the fact that he did become a bit of a rock cliché where drugs—and what Neil Tennant from Pet Shop Boys calls “the imperial phase”, i.e. the timespan where a band thinks it’s mastered the artform—are concerned with all the problems that easily and quickly follow.

Hindsight is a wonderful thing, and it is very beneficial in this case.

As a Suede fan back in the day—for the first two albums, I must add—I recall Anderson and Bernard Butler’s sniping words at each other via music mags. It was a complete debacle, a fight that I think shouldn’t have happened in public. Anderson writes about it in beauteous and apologetic fashion without drawing it out for too long. This is but one example of the many strengths of this book and how hindsight really does play a major key. Or, to quote Anderson quoting Heraclitus; I paraphrase:

A man does not step in the same river twice. The man is not the same and the river is not the same.

Another quote:

Young men plunged into the crucible of success are by their very nature immature and instinctive and impetuous. These are the fiery ingredients that also spark drama and creativity and the thrilling imbalance and sense of potential disaster that make the spectacle so exciting to witness. Without this essential ‘flaw’ in their characters the whole thing would be far less interesting but of course it’s a precarious house of cards, always teetering on the point of collapse. Sellotaping over the cracks and disregarding the damage we spluttered on regardless.


Superfan David Barnett wrote “Suede: The Authorised Biography”, a highly gossipy and insightful book. Where Anderson’s first book did not go, was into that territory, which this one dips its toes into. It’s not a bad thing, but if I were to chip away at something, it’s some minutiae that’s, frankly, boring; recalled stuff from Suede recordings, quotes from Anderson’s personal driver, etc. just turned me off. Luckily, there’s not much of it in this book.

One of the good things with this book is that it’s not merely a look back in time. Here’s an example:

This will probably get me into trouble and I’d love to be proved wrong and maybe I’m too out of touch to be able to see it clearly but unfortunately I just can’t see where the game-changing scenes and the movements of the digital age are likely to come from. I feel that the defining cultural event of our times – social media – has cast such a huge shadow and even though people still passionately love music it has become more of a lifestyle accessory rather than a central, defining core of their being and because of that its impact and its generational resonance has waned.

And while I’m up on my soap-box I may as well take the opportunity to blather on a little about some other broader issues. I think it should worry everyone deeply that since the decimation of the music business at first by internet piracy and then by the proliferation of streaming services it is increasingly hard for artists who make left-field marginal music to make a living. Of course there are always anomalies but I’ve noticed that the sort of new bands who would have had healthy lucrative careers back in the seventies and eighties and nineties making interesting, non-commercial music are struggling to survive.

Clearly this raises class issues. Are we to assume that working-class voices will be virtually unheard in alternative music in a few years’ time because it’s just no longer seen as a viable career and the only way left-field bands can survive is if they are bank-rolled by well-off parents? However there are wider and even more troubling implications beyond this. Right now it’s a phenomenon that probably doesn’t unduly worry those denizens of the upper echelons of the music industry who are still earning big money making mainstream pop music but it really should.

The strata of the creative world are all linked and in many ways co-dependent rather like an ecosystem. Not wishing to sound over-simplistic it seems to me that the more creative marginal musicians have always been the creatures that the commercial artists have fed off, diluting and sanitising and popularising their ideas. In the same way that if plant life were to die out it would create a chain of events that would lead to the extinction of carnivores, so I believe that the work done at the margins of the music industry is utterly essential to the health of the music world as a whole.

Without this motor that generates ideas we can envisage a sort of bleak cultural vacuum whereby the only starting points that commercial artists have are increasingly based on copies of previous historic successes leading to a horribly nostalgic, ersatz musical landscape that is meaningless and devoid of any traction or worth or vitality. Some might argue that we arrived at that point many years ago; the success of The X Factor and Faux-town amongst other pop movements would seem to support their case and mainstream music has always had a proclivity towards sentimentalism, but at least there are glimmers of interesting work…


Some of the honest insight laid bare in this book is among the most painful to read:

Bernard’s father, who had been ill for some time, died on the eve of the tour. Ashen-faced, we all received the news while in a hotel in New York. For some insane reason instead of cancelling the tour and giving him the time to grieve and the space to try to recover we just truncated it. It was a terrible, terrible mistake as Bernard became understandably more and more withdrawn and distant as the days wore on and I, yet to develop the emotional maturity to be able to reach out and comfort him as a friend, began to cravenly hide within the excesses of life on the road. As we pulled in different directions our relationship began to splinter and we began to demonise each other creating a chain of events from which we would never ever recover.


Altogether, this is a quite beautiful book, one that sparkles with its many terrific stories and insights. Few writers possess the quiet élan of Anderson, a writer who is as good in book form as in his song lyrics, a rare gem among writers.
… (plus d'informations)
1 voter
Signalé
pivic | Mar 23, 2020 |

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Statistiques

Œuvres
8
Aussi par
8
Membres
168
Popularité
#126,679
Évaluation
3.8
Critiques
4
ISBN
16
Langues
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