Coal Black Mornings - Softcover

Anderson, Brett

Softcover

ISBN 10: 140871048X ISBN 13: 9781408710487

Publisher: Abacus, 2019

Synopsis

Evening Standard Book of the Year. Observer Book of the Year. Guardian Book of the Year. Sunday Times Book of the Year. Telegraph Book of the Year. New Statesman Book of the Year. Herald Book of the Year. Mojo Book of the Year.

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.

About this title

About the Author

Brett Anderson is the founder and lead singer of Suede.

Review

2018 Music Book of the Year: A brilliant account of how growing up can be impossible and full of possibility, all at the same time―Victoria Segal, Q

a thrillingly energetic, bracingly entertaining snapshot of a writer hitting his first full flush, leaving you wishing two things. One: that you'd formed a band. Two: that he changes his mind about documenting the coke-blurred mornings to come―Record Collector

a tough-minded and emotionally acute account of the Suede singer's childhood and teenage years, about his relationship with his parents and the route map that pop music provided for him to march away from his suburban origins―Herald

As an antidote to all the drug-fuelled destruction, I recommend Brett Anderson's elegant Coal Black Mornings, in which the Suede frontman looks back on his pre-fame days―Telegraph

Richer and stranger than any tale of narcotic excess and success―Guardian

Revealing, funny and moving―Mail on Sunday

Personal and moving, unpolished and demure . . . Coal Black Mornings is a bravura performance―Times Literary Supplement

Perfect prose, thanks to which Coal Black Mornings does the job of describing the beauty in the banality better than any music memoir since Patti Smith's sublime Just Kids―Classic Pop

It shouldn't have come as a surprise that one of British pop's most original lyricists would write a book almost poetic in its language and painterly in its eye for detail, but this illuminating, moving and generous memoir by the Suede frontman still had the power to confound . . . Coal Black Mornings is a thing of beauty and a work of art―Sunday Times

His memoir is melancholy and evocative, a dreamy ballad recalling the time before the drugs and the band break-up―Sunday Express

About this edition

• Publisher: Abacus
• Publication date: 2019
• ISBN 10: 140871048X
• ISBN 13: 9781408710487
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 224