Brett Anderson and Charles Hazlewood have been having fun making Death Songbook, an album of very depressing tunes

Death Songbook is a very brilliant and original new collaboration just out from Suede’s Brett Anderson and Paraorchestra conductor Charles Hazlewood, both friends of the Idler. It’s a collection of 12 songs – one original and 11 cover versions – on the uplifting theme of death. The 13 piece orchestra includes such luminaries as drummer Seb Rochford, singer Nadine Shah and guitarist Adrian Utley of Portishead.

The album opens with a rousing and beautiful version of “Killing Moon” by Echo and the Bunnymen and offers a number of Suede B-sides. There are also reimaginings of Japan’s “Nightporter” and Jacques Brel’s “My Death”. Brett’s voice is rich and lovely and pained throughout.

Death Songbook was conceived in lockdown and mostly recorded in a day at the Donald Gordon Theatre in Wales. Hazlewood, who was an organ scholar at Oxford in the late eighties, says they had a lot of fun making this gloomy Goth orchestral soundscape.

“I think Brett was quite joyfully titillated by the experience. Not least because it’s a great irony – having fun making an album called Death Songbook. And the Suede B-sides – they’d previously been played by guitar, bass, drums in a kind of gritty, cynical environment. To hear them aerated with recorders and flutes and clarinets and cellos was, I think, a real breath of fresh air for him.”

The proect was inspired partly by Brett and Charles’s shared love of the eighties pop they grew up with.

“Post Punk, New Wave, New Romantics – everything was bubbling up at that time and it had a furious intensity about it. It wasn’t just Duran Duran – though they were a great band as well. I always think that the Duran Duran are the poor man’s Japan. Brett and I were happily were obsessed with the 80s, and we had the eyeliner and the hair and the padded suits and all of that. And, so we thought, wouldn’t it be interesting to make an album which is about death, about the death of love, about anxiety, about heartbreak, and about loss, but which somehow enables a kind of transcendence.”

Brett, likewise, is a fan of the melancholy in art. “I’ve always found happy songs depressing,” he says. “It’s been the murkier themes that have somehow sounded more joyous to me. Songs about doubt and fear and grief confront feelings we all struggle with, so to know that we are not alone in that fight can be quietly life-affirming.” Brett’s gloomy memoir Coal Black Mornings won him the Idler of the Year Award in 2019.

The new song on the record is called “Brutal Lover” and was co-written by Brett and Charles.

“Brett and I had started talking about writing together and the first fruit of that new partnership was this song, which we sketched out in my old swimming pool studio in Somerset. And it just sort of took flight. Have a listen to it. See what you think.”

Death Songbook is now out on World Circuit. Download, stream or buy vinyl here.

See Death Songbook live in London in 24 April and Manchester on 26 April. More info here.

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