Suede: "Metal Mickey"

16 September 1992 (with further value judgements in place of actual substantive pop critique here)

"I like his jackets, his haircut, the things he says and the fact that he looks like a rent boy from King's Cross. And I like the bags underneath his eyes."

— Richey James (aka Richey Edwards, aka Richey Manic, aka 4REAL)

I like that Richey's concern is for the state of pop. Not rock. Not self-righteous indie nonsense. Pop. 

I like that he clearly didn't bother to listen to any of the thirteen new releases Smash Hits tasked him with evaluating. I sure fancied myself as the type who could write a masterful book report despite never having read anything but it never really worked out for me. Perhaps it was because I tried to act like I had read Timothy Findley's The Wars or Carol Shields' The Stone Diaries when it would have been obvious to my teachers that I had done nothing of the sort. Richey went in a different direction: he makes a series of broad claims about every act and their role in the pop music scene. He appreciates a valuable contribution to pop and has nothing but contempt for anything that demeans it. 

I like that he doesn't seem to mind The Beautiful South. Paul Heaton "looks like a football player" but Richey is big enough to look past this glaring flaw. A positive side effect of him not having played any of the singles is that we're spared Richey's take on "36d" being problematic. I mean it is problematic but I think there's something nice about wanting to know more about a Page 3 model than simply her bust size. Who's her favourite author? What kind of food does she like? Is she a fan of Reg Holdsworth on Corrie or does he infuriate her? (The fact that he infuriates everyone is precisely why he was such a good character but clearly not everyone agreed) Isn't there more to her than a body? So, what's wrong with that?

I like that he points out the "bags" underneath Brett Anderson's eyes. Save for a five day trip to Jakarta in 2008 in which I stayed at a nice hotel and slept as much as I could, I've spent my entire adult life with periorbital puffiness of one size or another. It didn't make me look too bad when I was in my twenties and was just about what might be called handsome but now that I'm in my mid-forties and look more and more like Gene Hackman, they do me no favours. But hey! A few better choices, plenty of wrong ones as well, a drug habit that would be the envy of Lord Byron, a voice elastic enough to front a solid guitar band and I might have been just like Brett. Or Richey. That said, I'm happy with the mediocre life I've led, bags and all.

I like that he's more than willing to take a giant dump on Pearl Jam and Kris Kross. Bloody hell, American music sucked in the nineties. Even traces of it that I could bring myself to listen to seemed to be made by the worst people imaginable. Not the jocks that Kurt Cobain fretted over but the indie jerks who were really just rock classicists and the hip hop fans who were always going on about rap's "message" but not having anything to say themselves.

I like that Suede never really became the group that everyone had them tipped to be. They never became the "future of British music". Come to think of it, why the hell did anyone think so? Predicting the future seems to doom the prediction. I'm sure if anyone had marked Blur or Oasis or The Spice Girls as future saviours they wouldn't have amounted to much. I also like that Richey doesn't bother with any of this crap. Nor does he bother praising "guitar hero" Bernard Butler (difficult to do so when you haven't heard him play) nor the group's overlooked rhythm section. All that matters is Brett's looks and intelligence and I'm not so sure he's wrong.

~~~~~

Also Reviewed This Fortnight

Boy George: "The Crying Game"

I don't like Richey's claim that George O'Dowd is a "sad old man who doesn't know what he's doing anymore" (even if he wasn't wrong; I mean he didn't have to say it, did he?) nor his description of the Pet Shop Boys as "mak[ing] the worst kind of English music, like when you're walking home from the pub and you're down on your knees staring at a pile of your own sick". I guess he couldn't bring himself to use tried and tested homophobia in knocking Tennant and Lowe, so that's to his credit I suppose. But I call bullshit. Just as Richey's best mate Nicky Wire wished Michael Stipe would die of AIDS, this is just the sort of "shocking" statement made by someone who doesn't want to own up to having been a fan all along. I will never be able to prove it but I am certain he loved the Pet Shops. Not even necessarily for their music but for the same reasons he loved Kylie, ABBA, The Bee Gees, Duran Duran and, yes, Suede: because of what they did for all things pop. But that's okay, I had to be something of a closet Pet Shop Boys fan myself — even if this was thrown out when I made a Behaviour t-shirt in shop class.