THE TRACK THAT REMINDS ME OF MY CHILDHOOD
Rhapsody on a Theme of Paganini by Rachmaninoff (1934)

"Most of my waking hours as a child were filled with my father playing all these old geezers – Liszt, Rachmaninoff, Berlioz, Mahler. It was a constant dribble in the background. Sometimes, he'd bring me into the front room, sit me down and say: "Listen, son, this is absolute genius!" And I'd be [whinily]: "I don't like it, Dad." He was obsessive, to put it mildly. When Liszt's birthday came around, he'd drive to Hungary in his beaten-up Morris Traveller, take a piece of soil and wear it round his neck in a phial for the rest of the year.
This Rachmaninoff piece has stayed with me, though. It's romantic and sweeping and there's definitely a similar feel to some of our records. Now I think my dad's obsession was quite beautiful, really. A taxi driver living in a tiny council house with such a huge love of music – he definitely fed mine." - Brett, The Guardian, 2013

​

"Dad obviously hated every bit of punk. I heard this late, having been nine at the Sex Pistols' height – I hadn't exactly been pogoing down at the 100 Club. But musical scenes seeped very slowly through the country before the internet and it took years for punk to get to Haywards Heath properly.
Bodies is a proper rabble-rouser. It gets your blood up and we still play it before shows. The Sex Pistols were a huge influence on Suede too, which people don't always get. Playing Animal Nitrate at the Brits was completely inspired by them, a real two-fingers-up-to-the-industry, glam-terrorism thing. The Brits? I haven't been since, although we've had nominations. Going to sit on some table with a load of stuffed shirts talking about downloads… I can't think of anything worse." - Brett, The Guardian, 2013

"I'd heard the Smiths. The first time it really really got through to me I was listening to John Peel, like most kind of kids did who had any sort of taste in 1983. You know, I heard 'What Difference Does It Make'. There's a line in 'What Difference Does It Make' which is "but still I'd leap in front of a flying bullet for you" and it really struck me , really powerful and beautiful. From then on I did really love The Smiths. They were a very important band for me growing up...I was sort of like going through adolescence at a time when they were at their peak and lots of their material was about the confusion of adolescence so it kind of resonated with me doubly at the time." - Brett, 2011

"'She Sells Sanctuary' is one of the greatest rock records ever made. It's an astoundingly brilliant record. It's still amazing today...I went to see them at the Albert Hall a couple of months ago..they suddenly played that song. The whole place erupted because it's an amazing song and it's one of the greatest riffs." - Brett, 2011

"I was really quite obsessed with a T-Rex album called 'Tanks'. For some reason it really connected with me. It's a kind of quite obscure album. I just really like the whole T-Rex thing...There's a song called 'Broken-hearted Blues' which I really love actually...It's kind of like a mid-tempo ballad song but it's beautiful." - Brett, 2011

"In the wake of David Bowie’s death, I call Suede’s original guitarist, Butler – who left in fairly bloody fashion during the making of their second album, Dog Man Star – to ask about his favourite Bowie song, and he tells me about the “golden moment” of him and Anderson, in the summer of 1991, plotting Suede and listening to Bowie’s Quicksand over and over again. He sounds like someone remembering their first serious girlfriend years later, a reminiscence that is unexpectedly moving." - Michael Hann, The Guardian, 2016

“We started to see ourselves as a little force,” says Butler. “We used to say, ‘We have the power’, like from Bowie’s ‘Quicksand’. It didn’t matter what anybody else thought, as long as you had hold of this thing called The Power.” - Bernard.
'Quicksand' was an influence for 'The Power'

​

​

​

​

​

"The first time I heard the primal, urgent throb of 'New Big Prinz' and him squawking on about what sounded like the 'hip priest' being 'nuts' was a real defining moment for me. This was extraordinary music; marginal, esoteric, surreal even but undeniably extraordinary. I remember it striking me as both wonderful and sad that something this brilliant wasn't loved by more people .
There's something fundamentally unique about the Fall. They occupy a space that is completely their own. Their style is so distinctive that to borrow anything too obviously is almost to immediately drift into parody . As they get older they seem to strangely become less compromising and more relevant; the last time i saw them live was at Shepherd's Bush Empire a few years ago around the time of Your Future, Our Clutter. Typically they played only new material and even though i'd never heard a note before and Smith spent most of the gig staggering around or hunched over the guitarist's amp fiddling with the settings, the experience was utterly compelling; the music so simple and urgent and so totally effective but somehow never predictable.
I think the influence on Suede was huge. The awful, lazy 'glam' references that sometimes get chucked at us were i suppose born of a desire to emulate the visceral pulse of 'New Big Prinz' and 'Mr Pharmacist' and '2X4' rather than being some horrible, ironic nod to the 70s. Mysteriously though, once these things come out of the blender they never quite taste how you imagined. But that surely is the point."
- Brett

"It became a sort of ritual for us boys to fall asleep to The Per Shop Boys' 'Rent', a clever, beautiful poem of nineteen eighties city life that I still adore and which never fails to remind me of those first wonderful days when I began to fall in love with London." Brett, Coal Black Mornings. Pg 97

"If I had to just listen to one song for the rest of my life it would be '1/1'. It's not just a mellow thing - I've listened to it in the morning and it's beautiful and I've listened to it last thing at night. I've listened to it as a stimulant and a calming thing, it does something very physical, very chemical to me. I'm always fascinated by how he made that track. Did he sit there and play it live for 17 minutes? Did he smoke some dope first? I've always meant to ask him, I'm always bumping into him and I always forget. I see him having coffee in a café near me and we always have a nice little chat. He's a lovely chap. I never let onto him how much of a fan I am because that would be weird and a bit distasteful. If I ran up to him saying, 'How did you do that track?!', he'd probably start backing off slowly." Brett, The Quietus