The Afterword

Musings on the byways of popular culture

Menu

Navigation

You are here: Home / Forum / A Suede Pilgrimage

A Suede Pilgrimage

by 17 Comments

Hello, just about my first post for six years – what’s been going on?

My son is flexing his writing muscles – and i think folk here might enjoy a quite Word-esque piece from his Substack about a Suede Pilgrimage…

https://shallwebail.substack.com/p/stranger-than-autofiction?utm_source=post-email-title&publication_id=6313443&post_id=187940241&utm_campaign=email-post-title&isFreemail=true&r=pmxiy&triedRedirect=true&utm_medium=email

1

Comments

  1. Superb piece! I thoroughly enjoyed it. I always liked Suede, especially their second incarnation. Having read that, I’m keen to see them live.

    I equate them to Roxy Music. I saw them in the noughties, nearly thirty years since my previous time. They were soooo much better. I think the technology and readily available tuned guitars make the live experience incredible compared to the seventies, and, seemingly, the nineties.

  2. Oh brilliant, thank you for reading!

    Agree on both points
    1. Roxy Music – saw them, in particular, on their last tour – a really impressive O2 outing that paird the spectacle/staging with still some glorious, and odd tunes.
    2. On Suede – their recent run of albums is no retread. The devaying Southern suburban shtick doesn’t tire and helps to set them apart. Brett’s books – particularly the first – are illuminating and genuine. And live, he is just ON.

    This is also a great watch.

    But I’m stealing my boy’s thunder – he says it better….

  3. That’s lovely, really enjoyed reading that. As a Haywards Heath resident for 20 years I never really bought into Anderson’s tale about staring up the tracks towards London because… it’s only 40 minutes away and there’s a train every 10. I grew up another eight stops further south and we were going up to London on a Saturday from age 15 onwards. You didn’t really have to yearn for the bright lights of the big city. You could nip up there and still be home for tea.

    My favourite description of the town comes from a satirical website that mocked its appeal: “There is ample parking in Haywards Heath, just a short drive from the town centre.”

    Lindfield, where Brett grew up, is not a suburb of a suburb, it’s a lovely little village which chose not to take the mainline south coast train line in the late 19th Century and therefore kept its upper-middle class English charm while its neighbour took to commerce and bloated into an ugly town full of the briefcase brigade. Like most picturesque hamlets it has some social housing hidden beyond the High Street but the Anderson house is only a few minutes’ walk from the duck pond, the Co-op and your choice of three pubs. Not a lot of diesel or gasoline in those leafy streets, to be honest. I think all that came later.

  6. I was raised two stops north of the M25 and I recognise a lot of that. When I moved there aged 4, my grandparents and their neighbours had been there for decades. I left when I was 17 and, one by one, their neighbours had died or retired, and commuters moved in.

    To look at, a pretty village with a mix of old and council housing and a bustling pub. But most of the land was owned by either farms or a golf course. It wasn’t really very welcoming.

    One Sunday was so boring, my neighbour and I even tried trainspotting.

    There was a lot of staring up the tracks towards London. I sort of get where Brett was coming from.

  7. That’s a nice article, I particularly like the idea of visiting a town on a Sunday when its true character cannot be hidden.

    I have this idea that music fans don’t tend to come from big cities. Rather, they come from commuter belts or dull provincial towns and music becomes a form of escapism. I have a notion of starting a “Tell me about your home town” thread on this place to test the hypothesis.

    • Ah, the NWOBHM would be a fascinating sub-thread, Freddy. Basically, Heavy Metal is made by unfashionable people from unfashionable places for unfashionable people from unfashionable places.

      Show me a Metal fan, and you’ll see someone from a place with a League Two football team.

      • You’re not too far wrong with that but it’s actually the Eastern Counties First Division. The FIRST division, mark you.

        NWOBHM, heavy metal/rock whatever you call it was never really for the cool kids but we didn’t care. We were oblivious and in thrall to power chords and spandex.

        I’m very grateful I never got round to buying those black and white spandex trews.

      • I was browsing in Foyles a few weeks ago and I had a quick look at Michael Hann’s Denim and Leather, the rise and fall of the NWOBHM as there is some crossover with my youth in suburban London, particularly DJ Neal Kaye, who ran nights at variously The Bandwagon at Kingsbury, The Headstone, North Harrow, The Clay Pigeon at Eastcote and The Queens Arms(?) Wealdstone. Good memories of The Headstone mainly, even if I was too young to legally get in. I think I’d more or less stopped going to that sort of thing by the time I was 20 or so.

      • Explains a lot … born and bred in Reading who spent my formative years yo-yo-ing between Division 3 and Division 4, and are now firmly League One.
        No wonder Iron Maiden, Judas Priest and Motorhead floated my boat.

Leave a Reply