Who is Brett Anderson?
Short Answer
The waifish voice of Suede who sang like a starving poet and looked like one too. The glam outsider who made androgyny and anguish feel romantic again, just before Britpop turned it all into lad culture.
Long Answer
Brett Anderson was never of Britpop. He was the beautiful misfit who accidentally opened the door for it. While everyone else was waiting for Blur and Oasis to start scrapping, Suede were already three singles in and howling. Long before Union Jacks and lager breath took over, Brett was onstage in a blouse, clutching the mic like a lifeline, and singing about council estate boys who wanted to be girls and junkies with hearts.
He didn’t write for stadiums. He wrote for bedrooms. For anyone who felt out of place but couldn’t stop looking in the mirror. Morrissey comparisons were lazy, Bowie ones closer to the truth. But really, Brett was his own thing. Fragile. Feral. Completely committed.
Suede’s debut came out in '93 and cracked the door open. Dog Man Star kicked it off the hinges. Grand, grimy, overblown in the best way. Then Bernard Butler left and the tabloids got their claws in. The band lost a guitarist and gained a drug habit. The usual story. But even as Suede sagged, Brett never lost the ability to make pain sound like pleasure.
By the time Britpop was turning into an episode of Men Behaving Badly, he was already over it. The records got glossier, then patchier, then stopped. And then, years later, he came back. Older. Cleaner. Still sharp. Still singing like the end of the world was a minor inconvenience worth documenting.
Brett Anderson is the dandy prince of Britpop’s strange prologue. More eyeliner than ego. He didn’t win the culture war. But he made it look poetic while it lasted.
