Suede: 'Everyone wants us to be tragic, cold and romantic'

The fans say they're too happy, but Suede have moved on. That's no bad thing, says Simon Price

'I'm in a straitjacket that I've made for myself," he says. "I get bored of having to be this alternative poet, this sort of dark, Byronesque figure sitting in the shadows being slightly troubled..." A decade ago, that dark, Byronesque figure captivated a generation – or at least, a subset of one – with the gleeful perverseness of Suede's eponymous 1993 debut and the gothic melodrama of its 1994 successor, Dog Man Star. The pallid, black-clad lad with the cheekbones and the lustrous fringe became a figurehead for an entire youth tribe.

Ten years on, Brett Anderson gazes out of his Notting Hill window and ponders the expectations which still beset him. It's been building for a while. By 1996, the time of Suede's third album, the pop-friendly, anthem-packed Coming Up, the dark Byronesque figure was dead, replaced by a new, smiling, dancing, invigorated Brett. At that time, dissent was crushed under a wave of Britpop optimism, but their fourth, 1999's Head Music, was roundly panned by fans, mainly for being too damn happy.

Even Anderson's physical appearance is subject to critical scrutiny: there was recently an outcry among the faithful when he was seen sporting a suntan and a blond hairdo (it's now a more Pre-Raphaelite russet). A permanent tension seems to exist between the Brett Anderson that thousands of Suedeheads want him to be, and the Brett Anderson that he wants to be.

"I'm not really sure what person I want to be," he says. "It's probably the whole thing of me not being a sickly boy any more. It's been over-emphasised, because it's only a matter of tiny degree, and I don't have any intention of becoming some brainless prat who spends all his time skiing either. I do feel restricted sometimes. I feel as though a lot of the hardcore fans... are obsessed with Suede returning to Dog Man Star, to be tragic, cold, dark, poetic and romantic. And yes, Suede will always be all those things, but the last thing I want is to return to those times, personally or professionally... Around Dog Man Star, we were dark, fucked-up loonies. We were fucking insane."

Tomorrow, Suede's fifth album, New Morning, will be released. It won't do much to please the misery fetishists: the original working title was Instant Sunshine. This, explains bassist Mat Osman, Suede's other founder member and the band's designated Funny One, had a lot to do with the circumstances in which it was made. Recording began in a countryside retreat during the summer of 2000. "It was very blissful, mellow, laid back, and that comes through in the music. I think Suede have always been associated with being cold, paranoid and urban, but this has a more pastoral feel. We played a lot of football, did a lot of cycling. It was quite bizarre."

Suede? Cycling? Football? Shattered myths all over the place!This rural idyll was abandoned, however, when it became clear that the songs they'd written, which were "very songwriterly, very structured", were incompatible with Beck producer Tony Hoffer, who they had hired to expand on the dance elements they had dabbled with on Head Music. According to some reports, the entire album was scrapped, at a cost of £1m, and started from scratch.

"It's pretty much true," confirms Osman. "Except the amount of money. It didn't cost a million pounds, that's a complete lie."

"I don't think we're at our best," Anderson continues, "when we're thinking too much. Our best records are quite instinctive. I'd like to make a record that is solidly more experimental. I have no intention of Suede turning into some worthy, dull band. But this time we were trying to weld a sound to the songs, and it didn't work." With disarming humour and humility, the band will be making the aborted songs available to download by anyone who buys the album. "There's always a danger when fans hear about alternate versions, they'll think, 'Oh, Suede with the guy who did Beck, it must be amazing.' Hopefully they won't then go, 'This is a load of crap, isn't it?' because obviously it's a load of crap. That's why we didn't release it."

Suede returned to the city, moved into a studio in Hammersmith, and started again with a more traditional rock producer, Stephen Street (perhaps best known for his work with Suede's erstwhile arch-rivals Blur). "We did the album in eight weeks," says Osman, "which by Suede standards, is a blink of an eye."

When Suede bring out a new album, Brett invariably confesses that its predecessor was made in a drug haze, but this time around they're totally clean, honest guv. "Yeah," he smiles, "I know. It sounds like bullshit but it's actually true this time... There were a lot of drugs around during the making of Head Music. And indeed all of the albums. But not this one, and that is the truth." If anything, New Morning sounds as though it was made under the influence of love. The single, "Positivity", and the standout track, "Obsessions", are both hymns to an unnamed female, the latter song listing random attributes in a "Lady Is A Tramp" style: "It's the way you don't read Camus, or Bret Easton Ellis/ Yeah, the TCP you use, it stings when we kiss..."

"There's always a real person at the heart of my songs," says Anderson, "but you do start making things up about them. It always turns into a fantasy thing. Most of my songs are inspired by women. That's the way I am." Does the specific person usually recognise that it's them? "It's one of those vicious things where loads of people assume it's about them," Osman interjects. "Including people I've never met," Brett shudders.

Elsewhere, on tracks like "Beautiful Loser", "Street Life" and "Lonely Girls", Brett returns to a favourite theme: depicting the lives of an imagined community of bohemian outsiders, the same characters which populated "Trash" and even "The Drowners".

"I don't try and consciously create a blueprint for people's lives. But I was a lot more conscious back then of speaking to an alternative community of people which I was sure populated the world. I always think of the Suede community as being this international society of suburbanites and loners..." "This kind of mongrel nation," continues Osman, "which only exists at the gigs and on the net, who live in these forgotten half-arsed pathetic towns." If that mongrel nation will always haunt Brett with the Ghost of Anderson Past, a living reminder of the old days has recently popped up again. Bernard Butler, the former guitarist who departed acrimoniously in 1994, has been making surprising overtures to the effect that he'd like to work with Anderson again in the future. What do Suede make of that? "It's been... very, very strange and very unlikely," says Osman. "He seems to have done the same thing with David (McAlmont) too, where they fell out and made up, so he's obviously had a change of heart about something. The one thing I didn't like was when he seemed to write off everything we'd done, which was a shame, because we did make some great records. I think it's cool that he actually seems... kind of proud of it now, whereas I don't think he did before. But what he's actually doing... I'm not quite sure." Meanwhile, Anderson taps his teeth with his knuckle, and says absolutely nothing.

'New Morning' is released tomorrow on Epic records