[Wild-ones] The Tears Interview

[Melissa Lawrenz]

Here's a link to a Tears interview in the Guardian:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/arts/fridayreview/story/0,12102,1464839,00.html

and here's the article:
_____________________

'Frankly I hated Suede' 

In 1994, Brett Anderson and Bernard Butler's band
Suede were the biggest new act in Britain. Then the
two fell out spectacularly and the group disappeared.
Now they're back as Tears - but still not friends,
finds Alexis Petridis 

Friday April 22, 2005
The Guardian 

 
'We've still got a lot to sort out'... Brett Anderson,
left, and Bernard Butler. Photograph: Sean Smith
 

Even at a time when indie bands long consigned to the
pages of history seem to be reforming on a weekly
basis, it would be fair to call the reunion between
Brett Anderson and Bernard Butler unexpected. In 1994,
the duo were, respectively, the singer and guitarist
at the heart of Suede, then the biggest new band in
Britain: the previous year, their eponymous album that
had become the fastest-selling UK debut since Frankie
Goes to Hollywood's Welcome to the Pleasuredome, and
won the Mercury music prize. Their songwriting
partnership was talked of in the same breath as
Morrissey and Marr. Then they fell out, as Anderson
puts it, "very publicly and vitriolically". Butler
took to flicking Vs behind the singer's back onstage.


Depending on whose account of their demise you
believe, Anderson may or may not have had Butler
locked out of the band's studio and his guitars thrown
into the street, while Butler may or may not have
accused Anderson of being a paedophile. According to
John Harris's Britpop history The Last Party, the
final words Butler uttered to Anderson for nine years
were "you're a fucking cunt". As Suede soldiered on
and Butler forged a solo career - both with varying
degrees of success - they continued to snipe at each
other in the press. Somehow they did not seem due for
a chummy rapprochement.
And yet, here we all are, in the East London offices
of their publicist. Anderson, now 37, looks
considerably healthier than you might expect for a man
who was addicted to heroin and crack "for ages": "I
just really, really enjoyed drugs. I gave up by
myself. Didn't go to rehab, just stopped doing it. Did
it the hard way, which is the best way, because you
feel the pain. You're never going to do it again if
you have to go through that pain."

Butler, a 34-year-old father of two, infuriatingly
looks exactly the same as he did a decade ago. If the
atmosphere between the pair isn't exactly wrought with
backslapping bonhomie, at least they're in the same
room, promoting the debut album by their new band, the
Tears. A collection of brash pop songs and bleak,
slightly disturbing ballads that recalls both early
Suede and Butler's soul-influenced work with David
McAlmont, Here Come the Tears packs a considerable
punch. Nevertheless, Anderson admits he felt
trepidation at suggesting the reunion. "He could have
picked up the phone and told me to fuck off," he says.
Not for the last time in the interview, Butler
disagrees. "I always knew this was going to happen at
some point," he smiles mischeviously. Contrary to a
reputation for surly prickliness, mischievous smiles
rather seem to be Bernard Butler's thing. "When he
split up Suede, I thought, 'Hmm, I'm going on holiday
next week, I wonder if he'll ring before then?' I was
pretty prepared for it."

The pair were inseparable friends during Suede's early
years: The Last Party depicts them dressing
identically and smoking the same brand of perfumed
cigarettes. It's certainly a difficult image to
conjure today. They seem like diametric opposites.
They even sit differently. Anderson reclines back
expansively on the sofa, Butler perches nervously on
the edge. Suede's ignoble demise - drug problems, a
disastrous final album, a sudden decline in commercial
fortunes - seems to have done nothing to dim
Anderson's star quality. He somehow manages to be
simultaneously friendly and slightly aloof: "Having
experienced extreme criticism and extreme praise, I'm
wary about the media."

Meanwhile, Butler turns out to be neither surly nor
prickly, but an absolute hoot, wryly witty about the
vagaries of the music industry (his second solo album
was, he concedes, "universally seen as the shoddiest
work of all time"), and the nature of his reunion with
Anderson. "I think he's really underestimated," he
says of his partner, "possibly because he hasn't been
quite in the right place at the right time, he hasn't
been wearing the right trousers for the few years.
It's like he's been going to the football with a
helmet on or something." In an era of PR spin, there's
something oddly endearing about Anderson and Butler's
refusal to pretend to be best buddies once more.
Although both claim recording Here Come the Tears in
Butler's attic studio was "surprisingly easy and
enjoyable", they prefer to be interviewed separately.
Anderson bats away any attempt to probe too deeply
into their relationship: "It's not really a topic I
want to talk about because we've still got a lot to
sort out between ourselves." Butler is even more
blunt. "It's about making a record," he says. "It's
not about keeping our golfing holiday on hold for
2007."

There seems little doubt that Suede's meteoric rise
had much to do with their estrangement. These days,
rock historians tend to depict Suede's success as a
kind of amuse bouche before the earth-shattering
arrival of Britpop's main course. It is easy to forget
how fantastic and unexpected their career trajectory
seemed in the early 1990s. Their debut single The
Drowners was released in April 1992, a snottily
confident marriage of heavy-duty glam rock guitar
riffs, and sexually ambiguous lyrics. Within days, the
cover of one music press weekly proclaimed them the
best band in Britain. Ten months later, they were the
opening act at the 1993 Brit Awards, performing the
ferocious Animal Nitrate, their third single and a top
10 hit. "I felt Suede were the first band to be
treated in that kind of way, the first band to be
picked up by the media like ... not guinea pigs, but
we were going to places nobody else had been to," says
Anderson. "And now it's even more so - a year ago no
one had ever heard of Franz Ferdinand or Keane and now
they're huge. Even with Suede, we didn't get to that
level that soon. You wonder where it will go next."

Stardom allowed Anderson to adopt Morrissey's old
mantle as a quotable music press provocateur. A decade
on, his conversation is noticeably purged of the kind
of confrontational bons mots that once peppered his
interviews. He refrains from suggesting that he is a
bisexual who has never had a homosexual experience, or
that "America is a thing to be broken, like an
insolent child". He even makes a fair fist of sounding
chastened about all the youthful spouting off - "it
was probably the wrong thing to do" - although the
suspicion that he relished every minute is hard to
dispel: "I wanted to put myself in people's faces, but
that was born out of youth and a musical climate where
everyone was content to be saying nothing and doing
nothing. You have to put it into context. It felt as
if I had something to say and I was going to say it at
the cost of pissing people off."

Unfortunately for Suede, among the ranks of the pissed
off was Bernard Butler. Mention of the group's salad
days does not bring forth the expected torrent of
dewy-eyed reminiscence. "Every band hated you because
you were getting all this attention," he sighs.
"Frankly I hated us as well because the focus wasn't
on the music. It was on all this stuff that I didn't
understand. I just found it embarrassing to be
honest."

Tensions between the two were further exacerbated by
spiralling drug use - Anderson spent one contemporary
interview discussing with great seriousness a creature
he had invented called Jaquoranda, which had a deer's
head and wore a sari - and a disastrous trip to
America, which doggedly declined to be broken like an
insolent child. They finally erupted during the making
of Suede's second album, Dog Man Star. At the time,
Dog Man Star was seen as the stuff of
career-smothering disaster. Bursting with florid,
camply dramatic arrangements and lyrics about stabbing
cerebellums with curious quills, packaged in a sleeve
featuring a grainy photography of a man's bum, it
shared shelf space in HMV with the considerably less
complicated pleasures of Oasis's Definitely Maybe
("Dadrock," sniffs Anderson. "Proper music, made of
wood, like something out of the Arts and Crafts
movement.").

Today, it sounds astonishing, the last of those grand,
intriguing, destructive follies that make for great
retrospective features in Mojo. Try as you might, it's
impossible to imagine any current band attempting
something similar, which is presumably as reassuring
for the music industry as it is depressing for the
music fan. "You simply wouldn't get Coldplay doing
that now," chuckles Anderson. "No disrespect to those
kind of bands, but they're much more sensible than
that."

"When I look back at Dog Man Star, I don't regret for
a moment that I didn't compromise about it," says
Butler. "I still say to this day that the producer
made a terrible shoddy job of it." I tell him that's
what Anderson told me. Another mischievous grin -
"Yeah, he says it now, doesn't he? It's no bloody use
saying it now. When I said that at the time, they
fired me."

And yet, personal issues aside, the pair seem
artistically reinvigorated by each other's company.
Anderson talks excitedly of Tears songs like the
ballad Asylum, inspired by his father's struggle with
depression, as having moved away from "Suede cliches
or Brett Anderson cliches ... it's not, you know,
opiated fop territory". There's even a hint of the old
provocative flash and arrogance when talk turns to the
future: "Here Comes the Tears feels like a debut. It
will be massively bettered." On this at least there's
no hint of disagreement. "This album's like rocking
the boat a bit. There's been a few splashes," nods
Butler. "Next time, I want to get rid of the sails and
see what happens."

· Tears's single Refugees is out on Monday. The album
Here Come the Tears is out on June 6.