Suede - Stardust memories

London band Suede have gone from bright young things to Britrock institution. RUSSELL BAILLIE runs a few things up the flagpole to see if singer Brent Anderson will salute.

Here we are talking to Brett Anderson, singer of Suede, and the conversation has turned to standards.

No, not how the English band have tried to maintain theirs through four albums and seven years of artful, pouting pop rock, much of which echoes that bloke who will perform the first gig of the new millennium in Gisborne.

No, standards as in flags, specifically the one of Crack in the Union Jack, a late-arriving ballad on the band's new album Head Music.

On title alone, the song might be construed as a eulogy for the flag-waving Britpop years which Suede preceded - first emerging in a storm of rock media hype only bettered later by Oasis - and have now outlasted.

But Anderson says the track is about the difference between Britain the trademark and Britain the grim reality.

"I guess it's about the difference between a country and a flag. Britain can be quite a jingoistic place ... I like living here, but there are horrific sides to it as well.

"There's more to it than the image and Britain. It's like the David Bowie of countries, it's certainly got a strong image, it's got a strong brand and it's probably not very accurate anymore."

Funny how Bowie's name comes up just like that where Suede is concerned. It always has and it still does.

The eyecatching video for HM's first single, Electricity, looks reminiscent of the London street-setting from the cover of The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars. And later, when it comes to other aspects of Head Music - especially its slinky mix of scratchy funk and wiry rock - you offer that some of it sounds a little like Uncle Dave's Scary Monsters, only to have Anderson correct you with a mix of fan talk and a tired sigh.

"Yeah but it wasn't his grooviest album. He'd already done Young Americans and Station to Station. Oh, I don't know. I don't give shit any more. I think he's great. I'm really surprised that people still compare us. Perhaps because so few people do kind of draw from him it's the only reason it comes out. If you listen to the songs you can probably hear the Beatles more than you can hear Bowie - but everybody does that, so no one mentions it."

Beatles or Bowie aside, Anderson says Head Music is a more rhythmically-oriented affair, and an intended departure from their three previous albums.

"We learned how to write a certain kind of song and I think we got pretty good at that," Anderson says. "We learned certain buttons to push. We consciously said this time that we weren't going to have huge wall-of-sound guitars and we weren't going to write huge swaying choruses. And there's certain tricks that as a songwriter you learn and it's very easy to rely on them and we just tried not to do that this time."

But Anderson says Suede aren't trying to play catch-up on these rock-gone-electronic times with their use of samples and loops.

"No, not at all. I'm not claiming we've changed the way music is made. We've changed the way Suede music is made but I've got no real interest in being truly ground-breaking.

"I don't really want to be a spearhead for a new movement. I'm quite prepared to take stuff from anywhere and steal it and use it my way. I don't really want to be unlistenable and hip."

Well, the hip factor seems to be holding up - they can still command the covers of The Face or our own Pavement (who declare them "the Best Band in Britain" from a long way away).

However, Suede still don't mean a lot outside their home paddock. Even there, Head Music entered the British charts at No 3 then quickly slumped.

But Anderson says that parts of the EU are still nice to them. "The weird thing is that the two places that think we are massive are Ireland and Denmark.

"There's a lot of places in Europe where we are bigger than we are in England, like Denmark and Sweden, where it's us versus Mariah Carey. The rest of Europe we seem to be doing all right and we don't really go anywhere else."

Not even to wave the flag.