Photo by: Nadia Gottfried
Published Books by Suede
"I’d been writing short stories for a long time and one of them just stuck, so I expanded it to the point where it was 30,000 words and a novel stopped looking so terrifying."
- Mat Osman, Metro, 4th August 2021
The Ghost Theatre
Mat Osman
Bloomsbury
Publish Date: 11 May 2023
TO LOVE IS TO FALL . . .
On a rooftop in Elizabethan London two worlds collide. Shay is a messenger-girl and trainer of hawks who sees the future in the patterns of birds. Nonesuch is the dark star of the city's fabled child theatre scene, as famous as royalty yet lowly as a beggar.
Together they create The Ghost Theatre: a troupe staging magical plays in London's hidden corners. As their hallucinatory performances incite rebellion among the city's outcasts, the pair's relationship sparks and burns against a backdrop of the plague and a London in flames. Their growing fame sweeps them up into the black web of the Elizabethan court, where Shay and Nonesuch discover that if they fly too high, a fall is sure to come…
Fantastical and captivating, The Ghost Theatre charts the rise and dramatic destruction of a dream born from love and torn apart by betrayal.
England on Fire: A Visual Journey through Albion's Psychic Landscape
Stephen Ellcock & Mat Osman
Watkins
Publish Date: 10 May 2022
This is a book about English art like no other.
Forget the tired rogues' gallery of lords and ladies, forget the tall ships and haywains. These images cut to the heart of England's psychic landscapes to portray an Albion unhinged, where magic and rebellion and destruction are the horses to which the country is hitched. On these fabled shores we are all castaways, whether our family has lived here for four thousand years or for four.
Here you will find depictions of ancient trackways, chalk carvings and standing stones, of animal-masked community rituals, of streets set ablaze in protest, of occult dreams and psychedelic prophecies. There are over 200 images by artists ranging from William Blake, J.M.W. Turner and Samuel Palmer to Paul Nash, Louis Wain, Bill Brandt, Derek Jarman and Ithell Colquhoun to present-day visionaries such as Paula Rego, Cathy de Monchaux, George Shaw, Jamie Reid, Matt Collishaw, Tacita Dean, Lina Iris Viktor, Yinka Shonibare, Nick Waplington, Dan Hillier, Nicola Tyson, Sutapa Biswas and Chila Kumari Burman.
The mind-blowing selection of images is accompanied by short texts by Mat Osman, exploring magic and mazes, ghosts and gardens, shipwrecks and cities. These poetic renderings of a spectral isle, together with Stephen Ellcock's hallucinatory visual journey, reclaim Albion as an eternally inspiring and anarchic domain - an England on fire.
So Young: Suede 1991-1993
Simon Gilbert
Watkins
Publish Date: 8 October 2021
So Young: Suede 1991-1993 is a deluxe document of the formative years of fastest debut album-selling, Mercury Music Prize-winning rock band Suede, now entering their fourth decade of a hugely important and influential career.
This book is packed with unseen photos, gig flyers, early posters and diary entries from the archives of Simon Gilbert, beginning with the drummer making his way to the capital in the early 90s, hellbent on joining a band and forging a career in music.
Taking the reader through the sensuous sights and sounds of the thriving London scene of the time, So Young 1991-1993 is a rip-roaring journal of a vital musical era; a must-read time capsule for those who weren't there and a potent reminder for those lucky enough to have experienced the chaos first-hand.
Respected radio DJ and journalist Stuart Maconie contributes the foreword to So Young: Suede 1991 – 1993. As a champion of Suede from their very early days, no one is better placed to open the story.
Afternoons with the Blinds Drawn
Brett Anderson
Little, Brown Book Group
Publish Date: 5 November 2020
The trajectory of Suede - hailed in infancy as both 'The Best New Band in Britain' and 'effete southern wankers' - is recalled with moving candour by its frontman Brett Anderson, whose vivid memoir swings seamlessly between the tender, witty, turbulent, euphoric and bittersweet.
Suede began by treading the familiar jobbing route of London's emerging new 1990s indie bands - gigs at ULU, the Camden Powerhaus and the Old Trout in Windsor - and the dispiriting experience of playing a set to an audience of one. But in these halcyon days, their potential was undeniable. Anderson's creative partnership with guitarist Bernard Butler exposed a unique and brilliant hybrid of lyric and sound; together they were a luminescent team - burning brightly and creating some of the era's most revered songs and albums.
In Afternoons with the Blinds Drawn, Anderson unflinchingly explores his relationship with addiction, heartfelt in the regret that early musical bonds were severed, and clear-eyed on his youthful persona. 'As a young man . . . I oscillated between morbid self-reflection and vainglorious narcissism' he writes. His honesty, sharply self-aware and articulate, makes this a compelling autobiography, and a brilliant insight into one of the most significant bands of the last quarter century.
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The Ruins
Mat Osman
Repeater
Publish Date: 11 February 2020
London, 2010: Icelandic volcanoes have the city in gridlock, banks topple like dominoes and Brandon Kussgarten has been shot dead by gunmen in Donald Duck masks. His death draws his twin brother — shy, bookish Adam — into Brandon’s underworld of deceit and desire.
A miniature kingdom sprouts in a Notting Hill tower-block, LA mansions burn in week-long parties, and in a Baroque hotel suite a record is being made that could redeem its maker even as it destroys him. As Adam begins to fall for his brother’s shattered family he finds that to win them for himself he’ll have to lose everything that he holds dear.
This intelligent, intriguing and emotionally-searing tale of fractured identities, narcissism and ambition questions how being loved for what others think we are differs from who we are to ourselves.
With echoes of Performance, The Talented Mr Ripley and Mulholland Drive, The Ruins delves into the dark heart of fame: magic, music and murder.
Coal Black Mornings
Brett Anderson
Little, Brown Book Group
Publish Date: 20 December 2018
Brett Anderson came from a world impossibly distant from rock star success, and in Coal Black Mornings 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 (who would parade around their council house dressed as Lawrence of Arabia, air-conducting his favourite composers) 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 devastating loss of his mother.
Coal Black Mornings is profoundly moving, funny and intense – a book which stands alongside the most emotionally truthful of personal stories.
