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.
