Monday, September 28, 2009

I Wouldn't Give A Shit If Your Bicycle's In Bits


Posted here as a sort of explanation for the title of the last post but mainly because I always really loved Suede. Not quite as much as my wife, who is still a member of the fan club, and not enough to tolerate Brett's dreadful solo output, but enough to jump up and down behind Simon Price's mohawk a half dozen times or so.....

Incidentally, Brett attended the same architecture school as I did although not at the same time. Remarkably, he's actually older than me. He was known then for wearing a bright yellow suit accessorised - when he was in the college workshop - with a pair of welding goggles.

I found Suede most appealing when at their most preposterous, circa either the camp bottom waggling hi-jinks of The Drowners or the stylised trashy outsider silliness of Coming Up, an almost, but not quite, unforgivably cliche-ridden album.

To The Birds also contains one of the best references to cycling in pop, as the title of this post testifies. It's not as good as Morrissey's magisterial and heart breaking line "When you cycled by, here began all my dreams" from Back To The Old House, but, then again, what is?