Our very own Ed from the Libraries team in the Curve reviewed Coal Black Mornings By Brett Anderson. Sounds like an engaging read!
I first saw Suede in the mid nineties at the Doncaster Dome they had won the mercury prize and had a fantastic guitarist, Coal Black Mornings ends before any of that success. The book tells the story of the creation of the group and influences on Brett Anderson, lead singer and author of the book. The book talks of growing up in a small town, to busking, to developing the sound and style to getting signed. The book is well written as you may expect from a song writer what might be more surprising was how scientific his education is. The book is of obvious interest to Suede fans but also for the social history that is referenced. In quiz knowledge the final line up of Suede included pointless question master Richard Osman’s brother Matt.
Synopsis
Brett Anderson came from a world impossibly distant from rock star success, and in this book he traces the journey that took him from a childhood as 'a snotty, sniffy, slightly maudlin sort of boy raised on Salad Cream and milky tea and cheap meat' to becoming founder and lead singer of Suede. Anderson grew up in Hayward's Heath on the grubby fringes of the Home Counties. As a teenager he clashed with his eccentric taxi-driving father and adored his beautiful, artistic mother. He brilliantly evokes the seventies, the suffocating discomfort of a very English kind of poverty and the burning need for escape that it breeds. Anderson charts the shabby romance of creativity as he travelled the tube in search of inspiration, fuelled by Marmite and nicotine, and Suede's rise from rehearsals in bedrooms, squats and pubs. And he catalogues the intense relationships that make and break bands as well as the loss of his mother.