Heartfelt loyalty

For more than two years now, Brett Anderson has been the subject of a parody Twitter account. The imposter has produced nearly 1,900 acerbic musings in all - painting the Suede singer as a monstrously egotistical dandy grumbling his way through middle age. "As I get older," says one tweet, "I'm less inclined to view litter on the breeze as a romantic metaphor for modern genderfluid love. It's just a nuisance."

The real Anderson, still dandyish at 45 but rather modest with it, finds it mildly funny. "It's obviously someone close to the band," he says, folding himself onto the sofa in his manager's office in west London. Bassist Mat Osman, his friend since their school days in Haywards Heath, West Sussex, laughs: "It really sounds like you."

It's a compliment to Suede's enduring pulling power that someone cares enough to pose as the singer: it's been 11 years since the band last released an album, A New Morning, to a lukewarm reception, and they have toured only a few times since.

But maybe it's not so odd: the Suede name still exudes a certain doomed-romance glamour, which acts as an aphrodisiac on what Anderson calls "an army of lost people". That's how he views their fans: as a tribe of beautiful, conflicted outsiders who cluster around the only band who make music about people like them. "Lost people, yeah," Osman says. "I noticed at the original gigs that a lot of people were pale and interesting. The first time we played LA, there was a queue outside the venue, and my wife said, 'Where did you find 5,000 people like this in LA?'"

Though less numerous than in the mad Britpop days of No1 records and their 1993 Mercury prize win (for their eponymous debut album), the fans are still queueing. Two days before this interview, the band played a live studio radio session on a snowy morning. An hour before the doors opened, the queue stretched the length of the building. Most people had clearly taken the day off their proper jobs, and their reaction when the band appeared was authentically ga-ga.

Part of that must be attributed to the fact that the band have aged unusually well: Anderson and Osman have skinny, young-man physiques, and the singer's hair and cheekbones seem unscathed by periods of drug addiction. Anyway, the fans have stuck with them through the peaks and troughs of five albums, and now they are about to be rewarded with a sixth: Bloodsports. The record powerfully disproves the idea that it's impossible for veteran bands to reignite the spark: the songwriting and playing feel as vital as that of their early albums, while Anderson sounds half-unhinged with neediness and loss.