Suede frontman Brett Anderson recalls the thrills and freedom of early days on the road with his band

As the nineties lurched and spluttered into their fledgling years Suede emerged, blinking, from the debris of our rented rooms, dusting ourselves off from the threadbare chaos of our lives and from the scenes of quiet ruin that inspired those early songs. Ours however was the be the longest ever ‘overnight success’. I once described our career arc as being like ‘a pram that’s been pushed down a hill’ and it still seems like a fitting metaphor. It has always felt somehow precarious and out of control and ever-so-slightly terrifying. I suppose the ‘child’ in the pram was the four of us, screaming against the bitter slap of the wind as we tumbled into the traffic.

Of course before we picked up speed there were still many awkward evenings standing on stages trying to convince muttering crowds in back rooms of pubs and places like the Camden Underworld and the Islington Powerhouse – confrontations with seas of folded arms and grim, resolute black-leaned armies wearing ‘impress me’ faces – but once the tipping point had been reached there was a sense that we could almost at last surrender to the thrilling inevitability of the ride that was pulling us along and that it had started to become something that was bigger than us. I don’t mean to say that there was anything approaching a ‘scene’ yet because there wasn’t – our momentum was still our own and it felt that if we were in any vanguard then we were in vanguard of one. Music history has slightly rewritten itself over the years in that heedless way that it sometimes does in order to make the pieces of the past fit the truths of the present. On we staggered from stage to stage with holes in our shoes and a tangle of badly dyed hair smelling of Batiste dry shampoo and the musky, cloying bouquet of dead people’s clothes and slowly we began to piece together the brittle foundations on which all bands must build the edifice of their work – the fan base.

This was years before social media when word of mouth meant literally just that, when the only way to ‘make it’ was to get out there and play, pressing your sweating flesh against that of the front row, feeling the oily squirm of clammy palms and the report of the stage against the seat of your worn-out needlecords. Gingerly we started to cast our net outside London, for the first time chugging along the motorways in rented off-white Ford Transits to places like the Tunbridge Wells Rumble Club and the Brighton Zap. In those days travel, no matter how humble or prosaic, was still novel and so the journeys rattling around smoking Silk Cut and eating service-station sandwiches as our friend Charlie Charlton barrelled us along the M23 felt some sort of wonderful adventure. We used to have a fusty old mattress in the back of the van on which we would sit and jabber excitedly on the way there and drink cheap red wine and collapse on the way back while Mat sat up the from with Charlie lighting cigarettes and trying to keep him awake. For young men in their twenties there’s something thrillingly virile and tribal about being in a band and in that winsome period before the joylessness of repetition set in there was a powerful sense of belonging; it felt by very definition outré, like you were somehow getting away with it. We orbited from sound check to sound check around satellite towns and ring roads living on a diet of Walkers crisps and nicotine as the low frenzy began to build.

This extract is from Afternoons with the Blinds Drawn by Brett Anderson (Little, Brown, £18.99). Buy a copy here.