Review: Brett Anderson - "Afternoons with the Blinds Drawn"

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.

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Posted from my blog with SteemPress : https://niklasblog.com/?p=23670

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