Brett Anderson (2018) Coal Black Mornings.

Brett Anderson is the lead singer of Suede. I’ve heard of the band, but not listened to any of their records. His first love was Justine Frischmann. She was also was a founding member of Suede and later became the frontwoman of Elastica. They both attended University College London in the late seventies.

Nope. Never heard of her either. I can’t therefore be described as a fan. I don’t listen to music. I’m not likely to erect a flagpole and fly the Union Jack (more likely a tricolour on my part to piss folk off) on Winston Churchill’s birthday or that of the Franz Liszt as his dad Peter. Nor am I likely to drive to the Hungarian composer’s birthplace in an old jalopy and bring home foreign soil.

The last pilgrimage I made was to Seville in 2001 for Uefa Cup final and to watch my team, Celtic, even though I didn’t have a ticket. I suppose some folk would find me similarly half-cracked.

I did warm to Brett’s dad, as the book progressed. He was a handy man in lots of ways. His sister Brandine shared his life with mum and dad in a boxy little house in Lindfield near Sussex. His mum, Sandra made their clothes and made-do on dad’s single wage. Most working-class women also had to make-do in the same way. Nice in a warm way.

What interested me about Brett’s book—apart from picking it apart to find out how it became a Sunday Times bestseller—was his opening line.

Perfect: ‘This is a book about failure.’

Great hook. And he tells the reader he’s writing it for his son. So he knows what it was like before dad became a superstar. A kind of love-letter none of us ever get around to writing. And certainly not publishing.

I suppose I better mention his musical influences, even though they interest me only as stages in life’s journey, an explanation, non-music lovers can’t really understand. While Brett’s parents provided the emotional scaffolding for a larger life than working-class servitude, his musical identity was forged through a mixture of punk and reverence for all types of music and people. The androgynous glamour of Aladdin Zane/David Bowie. Raw energy of bands like the The Clash. The poetic despair of The Smiths’s frontman, Morrissey, now predictably a Tory-right-wing cunt, selling a different kind of alienation.        

Coal-black mornings, indeed. Read on.

Unleash the Beastie! https://bit.ly/bannkie