Why I'm going to Athens next week

He was singing “ we shake shake shake to the trumpet, and through the slippery city we ride, skyline swine on the circuit, where all the people shake their money in time” and we were dancing. It was the ‘90s, when Suede, with the unique Brett Anderson as their frontman, would pave the way for a movement called “britpop”, a movement that culminated in the years to come and produced names like Damon Albarn’s Blur, Gallagher brothers’ Oasis, even –the already existing but not very successful until that time- Jarvis Cocker’s Pulp.

Come November 20^th, Brett Anderson, older, creative and more attractive than ever, will be in Athens, playing at the Polis Theater. In his suitcase, he carries his second solo album, entitled Wilderness.

He was born on September 29^th of 1967, in West Sussex. According to those who knew him, he spent much of his childhood playing sports and changing hairstyles. His occupation with sports was serious, since for some years he held his school record at 800m. As he had said “it was the only way to avoid being beaten up. All the bullies tended to leave those who did well in sports alone”.

Music was always on his agenda. One of his first jobs was DJing in Manchester clubs. During his teen years, he had formed many bands, like the Pigs (that were the root for the song called “We Are the Pigs”), or Geoff, which he formed along with Mat Osman. During the late ‘80s he formed Suede, along with Mat and his then girlfriend, Justine Frischmann. If you recognize the name, that is because she is the singer of Elastica.

It didn’t take them too long to discover Bernard Butler, through an ad in NME magazine. Butler became an integral and neuralgic part of Suede during the first years.

That was the time, in 1991, when Justine left Brett for Blur’s Damon Albarn. Even though she was still a part of Suede and living with Brett Anderson, Justine would flaunt her relationship with Damon, always be late for rehearsals and never care about the band. That led her to see the exit sign pretty soon, and also caused an early rift in the britpop scene.

Brett always had an idea of how the perfect band should be, and implemented that (with huge success) on Suede. Even before their first record was out, his androgynous style and vague “confessions” about his sexuality stimulated the british music press and brought Suede in the spotlight. In 1993 their record, Suede, climbed at the top of the british charts, while Brett’s style (a little bit of Morrissey combined with a taste of David Bowie’s theatricallity) gave the band immediate acknowledgment and fame.

Success in Europe, of course, did not mean success in the United States too. The grunge air, and the wrath of Kurt Cobain, Pearl Jam, Alice In Chains, that had covered the country was clashing with Suede’s lyricism. Moreover, the band had to change its name, due to the existence of a folk singer called Suede in the US. That displeased Brett Anderson a lot, and he never wholeheartedly accepted it.

That was the way he accepted the term “britpop” as well. As he confessed, speaking to the Guardian,

“we were never really at the party, and Britpop was like a big party: people slapping one another on the back and getting beery and jingoistic. We could not have been more uninterested in that whole boozy, cartoon-like, fake working-class thing. As soon as we became aware of it, we went away and wrote Dog Man Star. You could not find a less Britpop record. It's tortured, epic, extremely sexual and personal. None of those things apply to Britpop”.

Despite the success that followed, Anderson’s dependence on drugs soon led the band to a compulsory hiatus, in the end of the ‘90s. As he told the Guardian, “in the 90s, I became a bit of a wild boy. I was trying to keep my world together enough to document it. But I always felt that I couldn't document it unless I was in the middle of it. I felt that it would have been patronising to be sitting behind my typewriter, writing about unhinged people, if I wasn't slightly unhinged myself. Although I'm sure that, deep down, it was also a good excuse to take lots of drugs”. In 2003, after their Singles record was released, Suede were disbanded.

In 2004 Brett Anderson formed, along with Bernard Butler, Will Foster, Makoto Sakamoto and Nathan Fisher, the band The Tears, that was met with mixed critique.

On May 2006, he announced the details of a solo album, entitled Brett Anderson, which was released on March 26^th, 2007. This year his second solo album, entitled Wilderness, was released. As he says, in his webpage, “it was one of the most satisfying records i have ever been involved with.it is simple, personal, bleak, raw, romantic and soulful and is full of the jagged edges and hiss and crackle of the studio”.

According to the Guardian, Anderson’s solo work speaks in notes “ the emotional development of a generation: from the flippant nihilism of youth to the stark choices of middle age”.