• "Suede World! That's exactly it. But I don't attach huge meaning to the words. They're used for their sound. People always think I'm a self conscious lyricist and there are lyrics that I have really thought about and consciously refined but a lot of it is instinctive." - Brett
• "Anyway, we can't talk about food for legal reasons. It's in our contract. No talking about food. We wouldn't want anyone thinking that we actually ate, would we? That would ruin our whole persona!" - Brett
• "My advice to the Melody Maker readers is this: don't do it [drugs]. No." Then the interviewer said: Our readers' mums are going to love you, Brett. And then Brett said: "Yes, they'll be going 'that Brett Anderson's such a nice young man after all. You can tell whether he's a boy or a girl and you can hear all the lyrics. It's got a good beat'."
• "I don't write indie music. When I write a song I pretend Mariah Carey or Tina Turner would make a worldwide hit with it." - Brett on songwriting
• "I didn't want to split the band up because Suede seems too important to allow it to be sullied by one person. I think Suede has always had strength to it beyond the people in it. There were changes before Bernard arrived but there's always been a spirit, a heart... and I suppose the heart's me." - Brett
• "Being famous is just like not being famous, except more people look at me, I have to wash my hair more often, and I can't buy pornography." - Brett
• "The only pressure we feel is from ourselves. We've only wanted to impress each other." - Brett
• "We're quite insular as a band. We don't even allow people to hear tapes of us playing." - Mat
• "I don't think there's anyone else who makes the sort of music that we make. I certainly don't have any ambitions to make the music that any of my contemporaries are making. I feel as though all the rest of them are trying to make one sort of song and I'm trying to make another sort of song. And there's not much intermediate space where we meet, and I like that." - Brett
• "I think people like that are incredibly demeaning to their audience, saying, 'We're every bit as dull as you, don't worry,'" - he says in a fit of passion. "That is what they're saying, you know. No one's an ordinary person, really. Everyone sees themselves as some enormous virtual deity. I don't want people to say, 'Ah, they're just like us' - I want them to want to be like us." - Brett
• Why the name Suede?
  "It has something to do with the tragedy of beauty," - says Brett, sweeping back the dark brown curve of hair that constantly falls over his left eye. "In a way it's kind of a brutal thing. It's an animal's skin taken to give beauty to a human. It seems to crop up in pop history, too. You know, like Blue Suede Shoes?" - Brett
• "The songs I write are like mental excursions. Not every single lyric is a page from my diary, but they're feelings I've interpreted. Personally, I do feel androgynous, which is very liberating because then you're not dragged down by gender stereotypes. I don't feel I have much in common with men, anyway. I suppose I'm a bisexual who has never had a homosexual experience." - Brett
• "Maybe that's why people think Suede are a serious, unaffable band - cos we keep our comedy songs tucked away." - Brett
• "I see us being in a long line of classic bands... Beatles, Stones - bands who brought all sorts of eclectic influences together and made great music." - Brett, September 1992
• "I suppose there's an arrogant side to us, a pent-up side, an unhealthy side, which people don't really like. But it has to do with wanting to achieve excellence, which I've always wanted." - Brett
• "One of our strengths is that we don't particularly get influenced by what's going on around us. Some people might say that's a failing, cos you're not taking stuff in. I think Suede have definitely always had their own sense of style, they always had their own direction." - Brett

the albums

• "I want to write the album of the '90s." - Richard
• "The album is much more universal - it's not so caught up with adolescence and small-mindedness. I come from a place where everyone's got a small mind. A lot of it is a celebration of mental liberation - a love affair with the modern world. Travel brings a lot of things, a lot of awareness. And success as well is incredibly liberating because you don't spend all your time being bitter and crap. I spent 24 years of my life pissed off with everything, and it's not nice to be." - Brett on Dog Man Star
• "It's actually meant to be a quite happy record, but quite a realistic record as well. And it's saying that it's too easy to say life is shit, and that the key to life is to try and be optimistic about it no matter what shit is thrown at you." - Brett, on Coming Up
• "This is our album to do your hair to." - Neil, on Coming Up
• "I actually think Sci-Fi Lullabies is a better way of getting into our history than buying Suede and Dog Man Star. There's more breadth to it, more highs and lows. The principal drive through the b-side album, though, is that we never wanted to put out any shoddy material, and we never did. Everything had to be brilliant and it was." - Brett
• "You can see our history so clearly on this album - It's almost a month-by-month account." - Brett, on Sci-Fi Lullabies
• "It's probably not as violently three-and-a-half-minute as 'Coming Up'. But there's a pop element to it. It's not Dog Man Star."- Brett on Head Music
• "It's very varied, much more than anything we've done. We've been not so much starting with the song and working, down as starting with the sound and moving up." - Mat on Head Music
• "Just a phrase I heard people start saying. It wasn't meant to have a big meaning or anything. We'd be in the studio and we'd just say, 'This sounds like head music'. At first, it meant that what we were doing sounded quite theoretical. It just grew from there really. I found it intriguing." - Brett on Head Music
• "It's like a box of chocolates. Of course I'm very objective, but actually this is one of the best cd's ever made! We're like one of those door-to-door salesmen. We promote our cd to everyone. Make me rich!" - Richard on Head Music
• “I couldn’t still be trying to fit myself into a Brett-shaped coffin. It’s too self-destructive. Maybe this isn’t what people want from me. But if I had carried on, that would have been the end. I could have written another glam, sexy Suede album about running around London with cocaine streaming out of my nose. But I’d be artistically dead.” - Brett on A New Morning

the songs

• The Drowners: "I love it. And it did feel important. It was quite a turning point, something that encapsulated the way music should be going. It was a good record, it had a lot of guts and cheek. No one else was doing that. When we first started, it was an essential part of what we were doing - that we didn't fit in and were completely against the grain, and I think that's what generated a lot of the excitement." - Brett
• My Insatiable One: "People thought we were insane to chuck it away on a B-side - But we wanted to be huge - and I studied for it. When The Smiths put out a single, all their B-sides would be amazing, a world you could live in for months. I always thought it was a brilliant idea, something that Suede should do. I had so many ideas of how the perfect band should be." - Brett
• Savoir Faire: "One of my favourite songs on the album is called Savoir Faire. If I was going to have a blueprint for the whole album that's exactly how it would sound. It's quite sort of mechanical but quite groovy at the same time. But it still keeps a lot of the dynamics of the music of Suede as well, so Savoir Faire is my fave." - Brett

the videos

• "I can't explain. Just try to imagine it." - Neil, on Electricity video during the shoot

• "I wanted to be the quiet one with the fringe, the quiet guitar genius, but I was never quite good enough at the guitar." - Brett
• "I like being in a band and the power of being in the band," he says. "It's too pretentious to go solo. I've never wanted to be Morrissey, so why should I start now?" - Brett
• "He's got some pretty dodgy boxer shorts. Oh, and he always wears odd socks - he's got a superstition about them. If you meet him look at his feet, he always has odd ones." - Brett on Neil
• "Neil's like my picture of Dorian Gray. I just deteriorate behind the scenes and write these songs while he stands there looking cool." - Brett on Neil
• "Old Molly Codling - He came to borrow a suit from Simon and just sort of ended up staying." - Brett on the arrival of Neil
• "He's just an incredibly Suede person. He's becoming a real key member of the band." - Brett on Neil
• "He's unfazed by the whole business of being in a band. He's not interested in any of the trappings. Most musicians get titillated by somebody saying they're great. Richard's very removed from that." - Brett on Richard
• "He just had this absolute confidence. Not the kind of confidence that's trying to bluff. It was the confidence of being good." - Mat on Richard

• "Losing a key member like Bernard, there's a chemistry that's been destroyed." - Brett
• "I'd always known Bernard was going to leave. Totally known it. It was a matter of when." - Brett
• "My only regret is that we didn't take it any further. Bernard left the band when there was a lot more in us." - Brett

• "We've got a lot of loyal fans that listen to the heart of the music and get a lot of comfort out of it and stuff like that and really feel the music. I dunno really. I don't think we've ever done anything in a cheap way. I've almost tried to make the music speak and for everything to come from the music. And it's always been the music first and the music's just informed everything else." - Brett
• "I'm sure there are people who like us just because they think we write good tunes, but there's a huge element out there who really are Suedeheads." - Brett