Decent sense catches up with all us, even the ones who make an art from evading it. For all the prevarication of band bust-ups, Brett Anderson's bad smack habit and even badder hair styles, in the four years since their critically-mauled Head Music album, Suede found penance in an unlikely way. They moved to the countryside.

"It was very blissful," recounts guitarist Richard Oakes over the phone. "I think Suede have always been associated with being cold, paranoid and urban, but now there's a more pastoral feel. We played a lot of football, did a lot of cycling. It was quite bizarre."

Very. They've always been reliable myth-breakers, but now Suede maintain a position of Britpop veteranship even they might consider modest. To their detractors, they remain the preening, Byron-esque subset who took sixth-form Ziggy Stardust fixations an extra adolescence too far. While to their fans, they've long upheld that sense of urbane outsider ennui in the tradition of Morrissey and Marr upwards. Now, only after over a decade into their career has that opinion-splitting been less of a matter.

"That's the sort of thing you say when you're young isn't it?," reflects Oakes. "When you start out, you wanna be part of a gang, you wanna take on the world. These days, It's not a case of love us or hate us, I only want people to like us. The whole polarising our audiences thing has gone out of the window. You don't have to be a bloke in your twenties living in decaying London to appreciate Suede at all. We're making music for everyone."

If their contribution to Britpop's wider forces (ie: they kickstarted it) has endured with time, they're certainly not pretentious enough to force that legacy on us. Says Oakes: "It's gratifying but not something you should dwell on. We never think that if it wasn't for us, things like Britpop wouldn't have happened. We don't deserve to be gilded. For as many people who say Suede revived British guitar music, there'll be just as many people who'll say Suede are a bunch of pretentious arseholes who make shit records."

Three years in gestation and costing a reputed one million pounds to make, Suede's fifth long-player A New Morning already has a feeling of do-or-die to it. If that sounds surprising for a band who patented the Britguitar template and rescued us from the asexual whack of grunge and shoegazing, then just as surprising is how hard it's hit them . After the critical lashing given to 1999's Head Music album and subsequent rumours surrounding their future and Brett's mental health, Suede were faced with a cold, hard creative rethink.

Says Richard: "The only criteria we had writing the new record was that it should be entirely song-based. With the last album, there were too many half-arsed ideas which kinda reflects how the band were at the time. We weren't communicating very well. But yes, if people thought we were disappearing up own arses then it's a fair point, they were right to think so. I think we were treading water for a while."

The subsequent reshaping (they've now been augmented by ex-Strangelove keyboardist Alex Lee) and rethink has led to a more back-to-basics, organic Suede of old. The skewed electro tappings of the disastrous Head Music are traded for a shinier happier Suede that should make as much sense to passing trade as Suedeheads of old. And the countryside faction?

He laughs: "I don't think we're gonna take this rural idyll thing too seriously. But then again, it couldn't do our image much harm."

Suede play Academy 1, November 3. A New Morning (Epic) is out now.

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