These Are The Suede Songs 004: To The Birds/My Insatiable One
When one mentions Suede, one of the first things that will inevitably come up, is the sheer strength of their B-sides, which stand shoulder to shoulder with some of the greatest A-Sides of their contemporaries, even surpassing them. Perhaps it wouldn’t be much of a stretch to argue they even eclipse the quality of their own A-Sides at times.
Not to wear out the comparison, but this is another factor Suede have in common with The Smiths; more on that later. As a business decision, it’s certainly clever. It’s obvious, but a factor many artists fail to consider, and that’s keeping sales of singles consistently high alongside album sales. Whilst in the 1970s it may have been commonplace for artists to discard just another album track as a B-side, keeping the spheres of album and single purchases entirely separate, towards the eighties and into the early nineties, it became the norm to include specifically recorded tracks as the flip side, as the gap between the single and album markets closed. This was of course due to wider societal shifts; the singles charts were typically seen as the realm of younger consumers with less disposable income and more freely roaming eyes, and albums of proper, “grown-up” music aficionados. There was always a subtly gendered dichotomy at play here, too, which fortunately as time went on, reduced significantly though never quite went away. Women who are music enthusiasts, like myself, often have our love for the artform reduced to a mere frivolity, whilst our male counterparts are taken more seriously, even if they have much less to say on the subject. We’re “singles” people. Men are “albums” people. Quality B-sides, though, legitimised the single in the eyes of many, and whilst they should be considered an essential part of pop music and pop culture no matter the contents of the other side, proved that a single can be a worthy purchase if only to hear the bonus tracks you won’t hear anywhere else. To this day, it’s still something of a joke among musicians and music fans alike. I remember watching an episode of the cartoon Steven Universe as a teenager, where the titular character’s father Greg, a musician, dismisses a song he wrote and views as inferior as “just a B-side”, and I think this is representative of the general attitude towards them, which bands like Suede and The Smiths, and even dare I say Oasis, were essential in dispelling.
The first of our songs today isn’t technically a B-side at all, rather the double A side of The Drowners, included on the 12 inch release: To The Birds.
This track started life in the dying throes of Suede Mk.1, shortly before Frischmann’s departure and after Gilbert’s recruitment, as The Bike Tragedy, owing its title presumably to the opening line, “Don’t take your life ‘cos your bicycle won’t fly”. It’s an ode to those small glimmers of optimism in otherwise bleak times, whilst touching on the bread and butter of Suede lyrics - infatuation and sacrifice and submission to love. Brett Anderson writes from the point of view of our protagonist, in a state of despair, watching and singing to, as the title suggests, the birds at his side, or, perhaps the woman he sees “by the window”. This takes on a double meaning, of singing to literal birds (the animal) or to a woman, or women (“birds” being a colloquial, usually Estuary-ism referring to women, often considered to be demeaning, though commonly used in English slang, indicating the shift towards shying away from flowery music-isms and more towards the gritty, often vulgar, language Anderson heard from those around him throughout his childhood and early adulthood). As To The Birds became a pivotal part of Suede’s live set around 1992, in fact, yet another layer of meaning is added. There’s a pretty equal gender split in terms of Suede’s fanbase, though there was always the vague air of them being viewed as a “girls’” band. Mat Osman recalls seeing advertisements for club nights in London in the 1990s, listing music from the blokey Britpop lot of the day, and it reading plainly “Sorry girls, no Suede”, and taking a great deal of pride in this, in being seen as a “girls’” band, separate to the rampant misogyny, leeriness and toxic masculinity so omnipresent in so much British music of the time. With this in mind, despite the obvious old-fashioned connotations of the word, Anderson himself is singing “to the birds” at his side, and that would perhaps save him from a life of office drudgery. God forbid, of course.
Seeing “her” by the window has this effect, also. We can take this as mere innocent love for a neighbour or friend, or perhaps a partner, with whom our protagonist is infatuated with, whether platonically or romantically, and will later in the song cross the bustling traffic, and submit themselves entirely to their feelings. However there’s another, more seedy and perhaps Suede-esque meaning, which would probably be more obvious coming from the mouth of somebody like Pulp’s Jarvis Cocker (love him though I do), and that’s one of sexual voyeurism. Anderson is a master at creating these multiple, layered meanings that explore the contradictions of our lives and of the human condition. His lyrics are almost a kind of poetic rorschach test. In this sense, To The Birds contains such powerful, vivid imagery, but each and every person who listens to it will come away with a different interpretation.
Onto My Insatiable One, which is the first many think of when Suede B-Sides are mentioned. It’s a melancholic breakup song, and it’s been said, by the man himself even, that Anderson wrote the lyrics from the perspective of Justine Frischmann, writing from the point of view of an ex in the same way as he would on Head Music’s He’s Gone years later, but that hasn’t stopped interpretations of the song hovering around homoeroticism for some fans, the ambiguity and use of a male pronoun being viewed in the same way as it was on The Drowners. Anderson has explicitly refuted this and has positioned Frischmann as the POV character, and has stated that the song is about himself as viewed through her eyes. Personally I’ve always sided with Anderson’s description, but I find his attitude somewhat dismissive. Artistic intent is one thing and cannot be ignored, but to tell people, straight-up, that their interpretation is wrong is rather harsh. When a work gets put out into the world, it becomes the audiences’, there for them to enjoy and interpret however they see fit. That doesn’t devalue an artist’s original intention, however, both can co-exist.
My Insatiable One was written, apparently, unusually quickly and with surprising ease. Bernard Butler and Anderson apparently wrote it in around an hour, and it was a rare occurrence of a song just appearing fully formed. Like the previous songs discussed, the instrumental swaggers and moans, which makes a sexual interpretation all the more likely, and I find it hard to believe that Anderson and Butler were not aware of this. Lyrically, it’s simple and short, but there’s still evidence of the Suede tropes we would later come to know and love (or loathe, if you hate fun, I suppose). We have mentions of “the high life”, possibly a reference to Frischmann’s wealth, abd mentions of escalators - a fixture of the London Underground, cementing the use of imagery based around, not Britain, but around London specifically. This is another aspect that sets Suede apart, and why I refute the Britpop label when it’s haphazardly slapped onto them. There’s nothing celebratory about this portrayal of London life. It’s rather sad, in fact. It’s merely observational. Anderson said that he wanted to write about the life that he knew, which entailed “standing in dole queues, staring at the dandruff on the neck of the man in front of you, and feeling the throb of last night’s hangover.” You can really feel this with My Insatiable One. If you’ve ever been on the Underground with a bastard of a hangover, you’ll get it. The song conjures up imagery of standing there as you descend (or ascend), rubbing your temples, swaying slightly, focusing on not being sick, whilst the throngs of commuters and clueless tourists continue on the Merry-Go-Round that is Britain’s capital. I’ve definitely been there. It’s not a romantic or glamorous image. It’s not even cool in a gritty, grotty kind of way. It’s just a bit sad, and that’s what Suede sing about. It’s not romantic or cool, they’re not even trying to find beauty in it, they’re just talking about it. A world we know and live in.
Mat Osman puts it perfectly when discussing this song in the 2018 documentary The Insatiable Ones by Mike Christie, when he mentions Brett Anderson using words that you’d never normally come across in pop music, such as “leotard”. It’s really just a shame that he chose to rhyme it with a slur. I don’t hold this against Anderson whatsoever, it’s an unfortunate fact that a certain slur that rhymes with the word above was in common usage at the time, and if, as we’ve established, the lyrics are from Justine Frischmann’s point of view, whilst I can’t say for certain, when you consider that Elastica’s original name and the title of one of their songs is derived from another similarly derogatory term, one that rhymes with elastic, it’s likely this word was in her vernacular. It’s a relatively minor transgression in the grand scheme of things that musicians have done, and I’m not about to make a “Your Fave Is Problematic”-esque post or call for Suede and Elastica to be “canceled”, far from it. However, if I didn’t point this out, I would have somebody point it out for me, and it’s important to have an open dialogue about aspects of art you find to be troubling or have aged poorly. Whilst immediately writing something off as “problematic” is harmful, so is consuming everything you watch, read or listen to entirely uncritically, and defend absolutely every decision the artists have made. This is what this project is all about. I adore Suede, but I’m not exactly here to fawn over them. At least not all the time.
Around this time, Suede were not only making waves amongst the public and the music press, but were being championed by their own inspirations, notably David Bowie, and Morrissey. That’s right, Morrissey was an early champion of Suede, and even covered My Insatiable One as part of his live set. Legend has it that he was spotted at the back of a gig, scribbling down the lyrics in a notebook, though it’s more likely Moz was introduced to the song by his guitarist, Boz Boorer, who recalls buying the 12 inch of The Drowners and rehearsing it. Boorer even mentioned having to detune his guitar by a semi-tone in order to play it.
Anderson recalls being handed a bootleg of Morrissey’s performance of My Insatiable One, and it feeling rather like a full-circle moment. Of course, as we’ve mentioned, The Smiths are one of Suede’s biggest influences, and this can even possibly be connected to the quality of their B-sides, though this time did see Suede and Anderson in particular attempting to distance themselves from Morrissey. Of course, it was around this time that he started to adopt some slightly troubling imagery, based around 1970s skinheads, and some might argue, the National Front - a neo-fascist political party characterised by racist and homophobic violence and pedaling antisemitic conspiracy theories. Anderson spoke of this as just a crass adoption of 1970s imagery, but disparaged Morrissey’s music and backing band, but hindsight is 20:20, and it would later turn out that Morrissey has some incredibly conservative views, and some which could be interpreted as racist. It’s argued that this was a shift that none of his fans could have seen coming, but it’s no real surprise that he would go down this route. Writers of colour have pointed out statements made in the 1980s such as “I don’t hate Pakistanis, I just dislike them immensely”, and talk of conspiracy theories about the BBC trying to push a “black agenda” in music. This, of course, went over the heads of white indie fans, but during a time that we as a nation were becoming more aware of racial, sexual and class inequality, it was probably a good move to distance themselves from him.
















