Even if you've never heard anything by Suede, chances are you've heard something about them.

Though their debut album is barely a month old, they've been the single most written-about band in Britain for the past year. That's partly because they sound like a cross between Morrissey and David Bowie circa Ziggy Stardust, partly because their frontman speaks in nothing but perfectly quotable sentences.

Talking about his sexuality, for example, he recently blurted out the memorable declaration, "I'm a bisexual man who has yet to have a homosexual experience."

"Yes, I regret that," Brett Anderson is saying recently from the London flat of bandmate Mat Osman.

"It was in the middle of a debate on sexuality, and what I was trying to say is I didn't feel like I fit into these categories that people around me were trying to get me to wave a flag for. But I have a terrible feeling I might've painted myself into an even smaller corner."

Anderson is equally forthright when it comes to the singer he most resembles, Morrissey, who, contrary to published reports, he has never met.

"If he was to phone me up one day and say, 'Brett, do you fancy going for a cup of tea?,' I'd go and see him," he says brashly. "I like loads of music he's produced, but meeting him is not an ambition of mine.

"I always find it strange that he says he lives a lonely, boring life, and everyone assumes it's not true. I think he might indeed be quite lonely and boring."

Given that assessment, don't expect Suede's Toronto debut this Saturday at the Palladium to resemble the kind of heavily ritualized veneration that goes on at Morrissey's concerts.

"If you look at a Morrissey show, it's almost a procession of people that get up and hug him," says Anderson, whose band turned down an offer to appear on this year's Lollapalooza in favor of headlining a club tour. "And it's completely impotent. You know people are doing it just because that's what they do. There's no expressiveness in it.

"To us, a really good gig is 1,004 people expressing themselves, four of whom happen to be on stage."

Given all the press the band has had in the past year, what's the biggest lie you've seen about yourself?

"Someone in England wrote that they'd seen us arriving at an interview dressed in jeans and T-shirts and talking like a bunch of public school boys. Then, before his very eyes, we transformed ourselves into Suede, with different accents and different clothes. That was very frustrating, because we're the least like that of any band I know. The way I'm talking to you now is the way I talk to people around me."

Anything else?

"That I'm a talentless little dwarf," he says, laughing.

"Which is perhaps closer to the truth than they realize."