Suede’s American Problem: The Britpop Band That Never Broke Through Stateside

‘As One: Remaking Suede’ By Rodge GlassNew Modern, 416 pages“America is a thing to be broken, like an insolent child.” That was one of the many outrageous and provocative statements delivered by Brett Anderson, the lead singer of Suede, while the English — definitely English, not British — act was having its first significant flush of success in 1993. Others included his head-scratching pronouncement that “I’m a bisexual man who has never had a homosexual experience,” which might have sounded cleverer and bolder back then than it does now.Certainly, the momentum appeared to be behind Suede and Anderson after the release of their eponymous debut album in March 1993. Since the release of their first single, ‘The Drowners,” in May the previous year, they had become the most talked-about band in a country that had been somewhat reluctantly in thrall to American acts like Nirvana, Pearl Jam and Guns ‘n ‘Roses. This had been fanned by the music press who, in a fit of patriotic fervor, called them ‘The Best New Band in Britain” before they had even released a record. There were constant suggestions that they were the first group that could combine the same cult-like devotion and mainstream success as The Smiths had done a decade before.Yet in spite of the Morrissey-Marr songwriting combination, The Smiths themselves never managed to break America, any more than Roxy Music — a similarly eccentric proposition — or The Jam had done. Even Mr. Anderson’s great idol and admirer David Bowie had to wait until “Let’s Dance,” fifteen years into his career, before he had a bona fide smash hit in the United States. It was therefore by no means a given that Suede would do anything different, but they could cross their fingers, strike some outrageous poses and hope for the best.Nearly a quarter of a century later, Suede have gone from being provocative and attention-seeking young men to, if not quite elder statesmen of the industry, certainly comfortably established. Their return in 2013 after a decade-long hiatus with the album “Bloodsports”saw them regain the prominence, if not quite the commercial success or cult fervor, that they had once enjoyed in their heyday. Since then, they have gone on to record another four albums, the most recent of which, 2025’s “Antidepressants,” saw them rise to number two in the British charts, their highest placing this century.2026 has also seen the publication of a new book about the band, Rodge Glass’s “As One,” that follows the band from their revival in 2010 with a one-off reunion gig at the Royal Albert Hall in London right up to the present day. It is a finely written, unabashedly celebratory book that largely focuses on the band’s guitarist, Richard Oakes, and keyboardist Neil Codling.Brett Anderson is an enigmatic, at times aloof presence in the text, as a man of mystery should be. (Around the time Suede reformed, I would occasionally see him in an upmarket grocery store in West London. Few men could make the act of choosing organic vegetables into such a performance piece as Mr. Anderson could.) It is one of the best and most incisive titles I’ve read in recent years about what it is like to be in a band — with all the tensions and joys that implies — and is a must-buy for anyone interested in Suede.Yet to purchase a copy in America will either require a download of the e-book or alternatively importing it from the UK. This is of a piece with the band’s conspicuous lack of commercial success in the United States. Not only have Suede not performed a solo headline gig in this country since an appearance at Coachella in 2011, when they toured with the similarly misunderstood Manic Street Preachers in 2022, the bands played relatively offbeat venues like the Kings’ Theatre in Brooklyn and the Orpheum in Boston. None of their albums have ever charted, let alone their singles. There might be some minor interest in Suede in outposts in Brooklyn and college towns, but compared to their Britpop peers — Blur, Oasis, Radiohead — they achieved far less commercial success.Mat Osman, Simon Gilbert, singer Brett Anderson, and musician Richard Oakes of Suede perform at the Coachella Valley Music & Arts Festival 2011 at Coachella, California. Via Charley Gallay/Getty ImagesThere are two reasons why. The first is a strange technicality. When they first performed in the United States in 1993, they had to change their name to “The London Suede’” because there was already an act called Suede, a pop and jazz singer who briefly appeared in Jonathan Demme’s “Philadelphia.”She sued them and their record companies for copyright violation and not bothering to check with the Library of Congress as to whether the name had already been registered. This led to a certain feeling of unease about the band — perhaps unfairly — and ‘The London Suede’ have never been a name generally recognized.But the second is more existential. Suede’s best songs — not necessarily their biggest hits — epitomize a grimy, vaguely hopeless sense of lowe middle-class Englishness with bohemian flourishes that reflects Mr. Anderson and bassist Mat Osman’s upbringing in the dormitory town of Hayward’s Heath, 40 miles or so from London. Their music features thrift store casualties or “jumble sale mums,” picnics by the side of freeways, and bored young men with no money, no prospects and nothing to do.Bruce Springsteen may have sung, stirringly, about the possibility of escape from dead-end towns, but Brett Anderson and his original co-writer Bernard Butler were writing music for people who were never going to get out of the frustrating existence that they had been born into. This is the opposite of the American dream, with its themes of self-improvement and triumph. Suede’s decidedly British pessimism always played well at home, as it does to this day, but even those who had thrilled to the bleak sentiments of Nirvana found all this pallid bedsit nihilism too much.At an early showcase gig in New York, Mr. Anderson sneered after performing one vigorous B-side, “That’s for you lot in America — you like noisy rock, doncha?” One audience member, speaking for his peers, shouted back “It’s not loud rock, it’s good rock we like.” The British weekly music magazine Melody Makercovering the gig sighed, “Apart from the pre-converted Anglophile worshippers at the front (the seeds of Suede’s Stateside cult-to-be), the audience seem underwhelmed, like they’ve seen just another pretty good English band.” There was a little interest from college radio, but MTV weren’t persuaded, and American fame withered on the vine.Brett Anderson on the cover of Select Magazine in April 1993. Via InstagramIt may not have helped that Brett Anderson loudly disdained American rock, Patti Smith and Iggy Pop excepted. Bernard Butler was similarly Anglocentric — but the androgyny, barely-concealed homoerotica and reluctance to spend long months touring and ass-kissing poisoned the commercial well. The death of Butler’s father meant that their hearts were barely in the tour that they did undertake, and by the time that they returned to Britain, a split not too far in the future, the early excitement had long since worn off.It seems unlikely that Suede will ever return to the United States on their own solo headlining tour, or that any of their songs will be used on the soundtrack of a hit film or Netflix series. While they enjoy a decent level of popularity throughout Europe and the Far East — like Spinal Tap, they are big in Japan — giving the lie to the idea that their songs are simply parochial, the vast success in the United States that could have transformed them into a global phenomenon always eluded The London Suede. And that, you feel from both their music and Glass’s book, is exactly what they would have wanted — to remain one of the biggest cult concerns in the world, able to connect to their beloved fans, rather than playing the hits to a distant corner of a stadium with all the joie de vivre of a disgraced televangelist on the comeback trail. But if ever Suede do return to the East Coast, or any other town near you, don’t miss them. They really are that good.

Suede’s American Problem: The Britpop Band That Never Broke Through Stateside

Suede’s American Problem: The Britpop Band That Never Broke Through Stateside

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