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Coal Black Mornings

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Coal Black Mornings

By: Brett Anderson
Narrated by: Brett Anderson, Matt Thorne
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About this listen

Listen to the end for an audiobook exclusive: Brett Anderson in conversation with Matt Thorne, author of Prince.

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.

©2018 Brett Anderson (P)2018 Little, Brown Book Group
Entertainment & Celebrities Music Celebrity Funny

Critic Reviews

A remarkable feat, utterly true. This decade's Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius (Douglas Coupland, author of Generation X and Girlfriend in a Coma)
Coal Black Mornings is a triumph . . . a bracingly honest work raised way above the celeb book fray by Anderson's obvious talent for writing . . . revelatory and delivered with writerly panache (John Harris)
A rich, sad and honest tale (Olivia Cole)
Beautifully crafted and brilliantly well-written . . . his memoir is a thought-provoking meditation on how our childhoods form the people we become, as well as a love letter to London . . . The book is perfect as it is, but there's no question that we need a second volume (Anna van Praagh)
Coal Black Mornings is excellent: evocative, thoughtful and frank; an instant hit in a minor key. Anderson is particularly good on his unusual upbringing . . . as accomplished a writer of elegant prose as he was of narcotically enhanced lyrics about urban ennui (Neil Armstrong)
Few rock memoirs are worthy of critical note. Brett Anderson's richly melancholic Coal Black Mornings was an exception. Eschewing the "coke and gold discs" template, the Suede singer recounts a childhood of bohemian poverty and traces his band's vivid prehistory (George Eaton)
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)

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Couldn’t stop listening! Very compelling

As a suede fan from the 90’s, I lived through the story in real time. Liked how the prose offers great vignettes of early 90’s England. Fabulous insights and moving storytelling.

Avoids the Cocaine and gold discs cliche and narrates us instead to the human side of the outsider on the brink of cataclysmic music and cultural shift

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