THE first line of Brett Anderson’s memoir – "This is a book about failure" – feels disingenuous given that by the end of it he is claiming to have laid "the foundations for the music that defined a decade".

He did, of course, and what the second half of this book documents is the gathering momentum of Anderson’s band Suede on London’s indie-rock scene of the early Nineties, severing just before their mighty breakthrough which invented Britpop. It’s the first half – a portrait of the artist as a young man – which comes with the sharp tang of "failure", detailing the crushing poverty of Anderson’s childhood in Haywards Heath, in his own words "a drab, dreary little train stop between London and Brighton". The pungent memory of the place gives Coal Black Mornings its body and life, in rather the same manner that Morrissey’s similarly-themed Autobiography evoked a boiled-cabbage Manchester of the early Seventies.

Anderson vacillates between a weary sigh at the conformity of this "anonymous commuter town" and an empathy for the lives which teem there. Any Suede fan will recognise in this the modus operandi which made the band special: the locating of beauty in the everyday. He is a natural and stylish writer, bombarding the reader with the peculiar sensations of lower-class England – its "landlord magnolia" and "the wintery fug of three-bar fires" and a sweet-shop’s "ancient, gloomy calm" – or making a catechism of London place-names like Hounslow, Dollis Hill and Seven Sisters.

It’s clear that the man’s nerve-endings were over-exposed to the elements in those early years. There’s an acute sensitivity bordering on the melodramatic when he writes of the "breathless shivers of love" or of trees glimpsed from his bedroom window, which "swayed and billowed, seemingly locked in their immutable dispute, buoyed and buffeted by the eddies and currents of the high wind". Such baroque turns of phrase perform the same high-wire act which Anderson did as Suede’s frontman, hovering between sincerity and pomposity.

His characterisation is superb though, thumbnail portraits a specialism. A whole life is suggested in the brief description of a visitor who would "waft by and sit around the flat like a quiet Victorian ghost talking to the cat". The book abounds with such poetic cameos, giving it the rolling, queasy realism of a South England Under Milk Wood, peopled by everyday oddballs.

It is Anderson’s parents who emerge most fully-formed as the twin wraiths haunting his memories, draped in vivid detail and writhing with neuroses. His curmudgeonly father, who drifts between low-paid jobs, is obsessed with the composer Franz Liszt, dresses as Lawrence of Arabia and yells "rubbish!" after a Bartok piece at the Albert Hall. His mother lives in some Wicker Man–esque arts-and-crafts fantasy, attended by her children "like a high priestess being worshipped by her acolytes". Through them we see why Anderson’s vignettes of proletarian England, on Suede’s early albums, contained a greater complexity and depth than those of his Britpop peers. Such working-class bohemians are a far cry from the characters who populate Oasis’s lager-drenched anthems or Blur’s ironic pastiches, and the psycho-drama between Anderson’s parents forms the most compelling and rich segments of the book. When his mother dies from cancer it comes as a body-blow to the reader too.

On the other hand, anyone looking for gossip about the infamous love-triangle between Anderson, Elastica’s Justine Frischmann and Blur’s Damon Albarn, the heat from which generated three classic Nineties albums, will be disappointed by his coyness on the matter. Albarn is referenced with all the obliqueness of a journal entry – "Justine met someone else" – or is implied in tart ideological asides about "groups of patronising middle-class boys making money by aping the accents and culture of the working-class". One would admire Anderson’s restraint, had the advance publicity for Coal Black Mornings not frothed with the promise of him telling all.

Given the absence of salacious music-biz tales, it’s hard to work out who this book will appeal to beyond Suede cultists. There’s probably enough style on display to attract readers of literary non-fiction. It’s unlikely, however, to be lapped-up by the same bovine elements of the rock herd which Suede wilfully alienated, and to which Anderson’s Britpop rivals pandered. It’s one "failure", you suspect, which he wouldn’t have any other way.