Suede set to play for thousands of fans at Audley End this summer

When Suede step out onto the stage for this summer’s big Heritage Live outdoor show at Audley End, they’ll have 10,000 adoring fans roaring their approval before them. With smash hits such as Trash, Beautiful Ones and Saturday Night, plus classic tracks from nine hit albums including three that reached No 1 on the setlist, Suede’s Saffron Walden show promises to be a spectacular night.

But it wasn’t always like that – in their early days there were often more people on stage than there were in the audience! And, as he looked ahead to the big Audley End show on Thursday, August 1 that also features Johnny Marr and Nadine Shah, Suede’s bass player Mat Osman revealed it was those difficult early shows that helped them become the award-winning, multi-million-selling band they are today.

“I think people forget that we’d gone three or four years being completely ignored,” said Mat as he looked back on the group’s formative years. “We were completely out of step with the times. We spent a long time playing pubs to four or five people. We regularly did gigs where we outnumbered the audience. But the thing about that was that it gave us a chance to learn and improve - lots of bands don’t get that.

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“We made our mistakes in private, or as near to it as you could be with five people in the audience. So it meant that when we did emerge and when people caught on, we were battle-honed. We knew how to write songs, we knew how to perform and all of those kinds of things. We had a long and boring apprenticeship but it was really good for us because, when it did happen, it was great.

“We were all from very ordinary backgrounds, we hadn’t really been anywhere, we’d never really been listened to – so to suddenly have people hanging on to every word and people all around the world singing your songs back to you, it was an extraordinary experience.”

After forming in 1989, the breakthrough came in 1992 when Melody Maker proclaimed them “the best new band in Britain” and their self-titled debut album shot to No 1 the following year.

They could have been forgiven for thinking that sort of success would never come in their early days, but Mat always felt they were on the right track.

“We weren’t very good when we first started,” he chuckled, “but then we started writing songs that I just knew were good and rehearsing them just knowing that if we could get them to people’s ears, it would work. The thing about a band in the beginning is that you’re kind of your own fan. You’re the only person who can go ‘This is great, this works’.

“So we were pretty confident that we were good but that doesn’t necessarily mean you’re going to be successful. It just took a little while for the rest of the world to catch up.”

Once the world did catch up, they went mad for Suede. Their knack of producing memorable guitar-based pop songs was, quite literally, music to our ears and, with the charismatic Brett Anderson at the front, they had the look and sound that was guaranteed an audience.

“For a lot of people, they’d been waiting for a band like us to come along for a while,” reflected Mat. “Before us it had been about the Stone Roses and The Smiths - the sense that they wanted to propel a band like us right to the top. We’ve had this history of propelling the outsidery, quite eccentric stuff [he quotes John Lydon, Kate Bush and David Bowie as examples] right to the centre of it.

“The pop music that me and Brett grew up on – The Pretenders, Blondie, The Jam and stuff like that – I liked the fact they were really cool and had a cool image but at the same time they were No 1 and had the tunes that the milkmen were whistling. In Britain you can do that – you can combine those two things.

“There was pressure to do it but we enjoyed it. I love the sense that I lived in Camden at the time and all my neighbours were having top 10 hits. It’s such a weird experience – you’d go to the pub in the evening and be on Top of the Pops the next week and it’s the same people.”

But in 2003 the bubble had burst and Suede decided to go their separate ways. Three of their first four albums had reached No 1 and the other wasn’t far off, at No 3 - but 2002’s A New Morning had run out of legs by the time it got to No 24.

When they reformed in 2010, however, the band made sure they’d enjoy every moment and not end up in the same situation again.

“It had always been about the audience and connecting and being part of something,” said Mat. “But we’d made a couple of records and we’d just really lost our mojo. We were floundering around, we were trying stuff out but we just lost our way. We all thought we’d rather make no records than bad records and, to be honest, it was the best thing we ever did. We’d never done anything else. Me and Brett had met at college and we’ve been playing together ever since.

“You get so caught up in it and it’s weird, almost anything can become ordinary after a while. And it got to the point that that life became ordinary even though we were flying off to award ceremonies in Sweden, recording in LA and playing gigs to people who loved us. It became ‘oh this is just what we do’.

“I think we took our eyes off the ball and didn’t really know what we were doing. But when we came back it was transformed because you suddenly realise the magic of it. I remember doing that first Albert Hall gig and the physical sensation of it, the noise, the crowd singing back at us, and thinking ‘how did I ever think this was normal?’

“Since then we’ve worked really hard to make sure we keep that so it doesn’t become ordinary again. So we don’t do a lot of shows, we don’t tour like we used to and we are so painstaking with the records now – we’ll write 50 or 60 tracks for each one.

“It’s a real grind but it’s about making sure you do something new that captures what Suede are about but at the same time doing something that we hadn’t quite done before.

“It was the best thing that ever happened to us and we come to everything - every record, every gig - with that sense that it’s fragile and it’s magical and it might all end tomorrow. And I’ve got to say, I enjoy myself more on stage now. It’s a privilege rather than a job.”

Mat says he had become “very disenchanted with the music industry” and turned his hand to writing during the band’s hiatus, becoming a successful journalist and novelist.

An invitation to perform at London’s Royal Albert Hall for the Teenage Cancer Trust seven years after the split captured the band member’s imagination however. Although it was supposed to be just a one-off reunion…

“We hadn’t talked about reforming at all,” admitted Mat. “Everyone was happy with what they were doing and we were in a good place. “Then we got an offer to do the Teenage Cancer Trust gig at the Royal Albert Hall. It’s an issue that’s close to our hearts because I think everyone in the band has lost someone to cancer.

“We had this idea of what we would do is just do that gig and then never do anything else again.

“We thought it was such a cool idea because no one could say we were doing it for the money because it was for the Teenage Cancer Trust and because also it had kind of petered out the first time, it was like ‘this would be just a great full stop’.

“But literally we stepped off stage after that and the first thing I said was ‘we have to do that again’ and the day after we were saying ‘where else can we play? Where haven’t we been for a long time?’ You forget what it’s like. It’s such a rush, it really is. And I wanted it back in my life.

“It’s been amazing. We work hard at it but it’s such a lovely thing. There are so many people who have been with us – it’s such a cliche – on this journey, through the ups and downs, and we are part of their lives now.

“It’s a really moving experience sometimes doing these gigs and you see people who have been watching you for 30 years, often with their kids. It’s a different thrill from when we started but long may it continue.”

Among those people who have been through the ups and downs with Mat is his brother Richard Osman – now a household name thanks to being on Pointless and House of Games.

With Richard a regular face on TV and Suede regular visitors to the top 10 of the album charts again, the brothers are enjoying a purple patch in the entertainment industry, although Mat says you’d never have expected that when they were growing up.

“There’s loads of sibling rivalry but it’s quite good-natured,” he said. “I think if you’d known us at 16 you wouldn’t have thought ‘oh yeah, they’re going to go on to great things’.

“My brother’s super-geeky, he wasn’t a huge reader of stuff, really into sport and he had a column in a national gold magazine when he was 16, I think. He did local radio when he was 16.

“We both kind of loved music and TV and art, all those kinds of things, and we came from a family who never did any of that. There’s no performers or anything in the family. You wouldn’t have thought of us as performers, neither of us was particularly outgoing. But he had and he has a passion for really mainstream entertainment. He loves Saturday night TV and all those sorts of things.

“He’s not putting it on. He’s not one of these people who does mainstream entertainment and wishes he was Francis Ford Coppola. He’s not like that.

“We butted heads over music and all those kinds of things but he was really, really driven as soon as he left college and he’s made some brilliant TV shows and done some incredible things with his life. He’s much more driven than me, more ambitious.”

Suede will play at Audley End House and Gardens as part of the Heritage Live on August 1, with Johnny Marr and Nadine Shah. Tickets are available here.