Coal Black Mornings by Brett Anderson

I have to explain, my experience with reading music autobiographies is almost non-existent (the only one I've ever read is the bitchy and outrageously pretentious Autobiography by Morrissey) but Suede are my absolute favourite band in the world, so I was really excited to read the once-magnetically-androgynous and now still stylishly attractive Brett Anderson's memoir (I'm that person who still sort of has a crush on him). I really can't say much for the literary merit of this book, I guess I have to make allowances because my standards are very high, but I felt like the style was hovering annoyingly between too contrived and too informal (Brett can never use the words 'utterly', 'bizarre' or 'hilarious' for the rest of his life, he's exhausted his allowance of those words in this book). My primary impression is that Brett is a real-life Dickens character. And I'm not talking about the grinding poverty or the terrible living conditions, but in terms of personality. He's incredibly kind, sweet, loyal, self-deprecating (seriously, he is humble to a ridiculous degree) and kind of both innocent and slightly stupid. I didn't actually know that people that nice exist outside Victorian novels, he never says a single bad thing about anyone. I was really surprised about how he writes about his father, who seems like a completely vile person who psychologically terrorised his entire family, but Brett keeps making excuses for him and saying that he 'doesn't want to seem unkind' by saying negative things about him. I really can't see how you can make excuses for someone like that, even if they are part of your family, it seems to me like some fantastic kind of innocence and unwillingness to see evil. And I always knew that Brett isn't exactly the sharpest knife in the drawer, I've always found his slight stupidity rather endearing (I'm obviously nowhere near as nice as he is), but some of his reflections and conclusions made me giggle with how superficial and obvious and cliche they seemed. I think the book fails to convey the feelings that the songs manage to get across to vividly, so I guess it's a good thing Brett is a songwriter, not a full-time author. I think I had somewhat foolishly expected to get an account of what it really felt like to live in such an exciting time with so many exciting people and creative energies, but that was described in a detached way, sort of 'telling rather than showing'. Really I think the biggest revelation for me reading this was the staggering amount of defeat and stubbornness involved in making a band successful. It seems like Suede spent literally years being ignored, rejected, passed over, disregarded and sidelined, no one came to their gigs, no one wanted to listen to their demos, and yet they kept trying, which seems completely incredible to me. I don't understand how someone has the strength to do that, and I was sort of in awe of that.
(One minor but extremely irritating thing: while normal writers use the title of a book once within the text, Brett chose to use it about half a million times, which made me want to die).