David Barnett, Suede: Love and Poison - The Official Biography

David Barnett, Suede: Love and Poison - The Official Biography - I have to admit I was a little let down by this book. The promotional materials leading up to its release promised a shocking account of all sorts of rock 'n' roll excesses to an extent nobody but the band knew about. Then mostly, it just said that the band, erm, did quite a lot of drugs and misbehaved, and there were some arguments, and well, their first guitarist was a bit unhinged by all the publicity. Needless to say, the content of stories was, well, expected.

Having said that, it's interesting in that Barnett had unprecedented access to his favourite band and they were all very forthcoming about their feelings. It would have helped if Bernard Butler had agreed to take part, but Bernard had already spoken to someone else about his days in Suede, and didn't want to participate in an official release by the band he left very acrimoniously, which is fair enough. The book starts off with Brett Anderson as a child and moves through to the release of their final album, A New Morning. It features lots of interesting information about the early days of the band, but seems to take Anderson as its focus and somewhat diminishes the importance of the other members of the band. Despite Butler's refusing to take part, the account doesn't so much go against him, Suede admit where they failed him as friends and why the relationship fell apart, but he could have provided further insight, particularly as to some of his inexplicable actions (e.g. saying horrible things to the press about his bandmates while he was still in the band).

Where the book falls short is that it really doesn't seem to give a context to the story of Suede. While it's obvious that the author loves the band, he never explains why that band are important enough to have their own book. How did Suede change the musical landscape? What is their legacy? We know from John Harris' book about Britpop that Suede were the unwitting catalyst for Britpop, the thing which took the indie scene mainstream (or killed it, depending on how you look at it) and launched the careers of the far more massive Blur and Oasis (and Radiohead, to a degree). It would have been nice for Barnett to explore this, to discuss the importance of Suede's subject matter, their graphics, their whole "look." Barnett makes several references to a giant file of the band's press clippings to point out exactly how much press they received in the early days, so why not make use of this file to add relevance to his book? It was a short book; I read in about 4 hours, so 100 more pages would not have harmed it and could have given it far more impact.

Overall, if you're a fan of Suede then you'll like it, if not, then the drug tales might shock you, (but they shouldn't - Brett's told far grittier ones in recent interviews than anything that went into the book), but you may not see the point of the whole exercise.