Brought To Book
MAT OSMAN
THE SFX AUTHOR INTERVIEW
Capital gains: Suede’s bassist discusses his new career as a novelist
Words by Jonathan Wright /// Portrait by Tom Medwell
GO BACK THROUGH THE HISTORICAL records and it can be tough to access the lives of those who, in their own time, were considered unimportant. Yet, says Mat Osman, British history is full of people who “were kind of kept down but were incredibly ambitious and wanted to make their voices heard”.
He’s talking about the kinds of characters who inhabit his second novel The Ghost Theatre, a tale of Elizabethan England centred on the world of child actors who live and work in Blackfriars. The theatre was the “Netflix of its time”, but young actors had little power and could be press-ganged into walking the boards.
“They were the most famous working-class people in London,” says Osman of these boys, “but at the same time they were incredibly lowly. Acting was seen as on a par with prostitution – and was tied up with prostitution. You were genuinely the lowest of the low, toilet-cleaner level.” There are parallels, he adds, with boy bands and girl bands in the ’80s and ’90s, fronted by singers whose stardom generated vast sums of money they never personally saw.