SUEDE : LOVE AND POISON : by David Barnett

This is not that book. This is the real deal. Warts and all. Even the bits that, as the singer confesses, make him look like a total prick.

Allowed total, unprecedented access to the band, first time author David Barnett, founder of one of the first Suede fanzines and now in the enviable position of running the band’s fanclub, has seen it all first hand since the band first hit the big time. All ten years of tears. Almost every show, everywhere, onstage, backstage, and on the front page.

Drug addled threesomes in nightclub toilets? Petty theft from the record company? The band raiding their own office safe for drug money? Punchups? Errant accountants running off with all the cash? Alcoholism, bisexuality, infidelity, suicide, overdoses, record company politics, and the pressures of fame, fortune, and failure. Smack. Crack. Black. Big Macs. The band have done it all. And it’s all here.

It’s a veritable check list of the seven deadly sins.

This is as near to the facts and the truth as you will ever get about Suede. This is the no holds barred, needles and all definitive account of a bands rise, fall, rise, fall, and rise again. Of global domination and personal abomination. Of success, excess, and progress.

This is about a great band that happened to become high on diesel and gasoline and psychotic drum machines. And who managed, by the way, to make some of the best pop music of the past decade.

It’s got it all : and then some. It’s the tale of four (and then five) aspiring nobodies desperately escaping from their nowhere Asda Towns, and somehow becoming the best (and for a while, biggest) British band of their time. It’s the tale of young geniuses, ripped to the tits on drink and drugs pissing it all up the wall in a fit of egos, drug paranoia, and sexual depravity, and somehow, at the same time, managing to sell millions of records, and tour the world time and time again.

Fuelled by ambition and opportunity, Suede did everything. Everything but Devil Worship. (And if you want that look at Motley Crue’s The Dirt instead).

This is everything you ever wanted to know and never thought you would. This is the inside story of one of the most talented and depraved bands in British history, told shamelessly and openly, with no holds barred, no stone unturned, no rock uncooked, no secret left untold.

One of the best rock biographies ever. Can’t get enough.