Song 103: She Still Leads Me On

This is a song that, strange as it may sound, changed my whole opinion on Suede, or more specifically, Brett Anderson.

I've been, to some extent, a Suede fan since the beginning. My one cool friend at that miserable stage of school, the soon-to-be-expelled Snazzy Kesner, tried to get me into them, and I remember seeing Animal Nitrate on TOTP and, at a certain point, really hearing the chorus, and thinking "yes, i like that".

I wasn't really buying albums then, but I liked the singles from Dog Man Star, particularly The Wild Ones - still, arguably their greatest song. I read about the tension between Butler and Anderson, and took Butler's side. Anderson just seemed a bit the worst of both worlds - both pretty dark and seedy, but also a real dweeb. I didn't like that combo. I didn't like him clearly being on drugs on 'The O Zone' - we're kids watching here, for god's sake - or his self-important, try-hard pronouncements.

My certainty that the real genius was Butler was confirmed by what came next - Yes by McAlmont and Butler, the greatest single of the 90s, and the averageness of post-Butler Suede. I thought Trash and Beautiful Ones were pretty good, but nothing else after that, and the band seemed shorn of its extremes. For a man who vituperatively condemned his Britpop peers, their songs post-95 were the most archetypally Britpop going.

I was quite interested in The Tears - the reunited Butler and Anderson in 2005 - but after a decent first single, the rest was not good at all. In fact, the spectacle of them headlining the first night of Benicassim to growing dissatisfaction and disinterest and multiple shouts of "Play some fucking Suede!", was pretty miserable. 

I, almost certainly wrongly, assigned more blame to Anderson for the fiasco. I long held the view that his fatal flaw was overinvesting in the idea of himself as rock star. I felt he thought he possessed more of the base material than he did, and that imbalance was, for me, hard to watch.

Still, when Suede returned, there was a lot of enthusiasm for it. I saw them at Latitude in 2011 and liked, almost loved it, but still didn't quite buy into Anderson. I thought their new material decent. I went with Mikey to see them in 2016 playing all of their new album, Night Thoughts. To be honest, I don't remember that much, I got pretty drunk. Maybe the last time (pre-baby as it was), I've been that drunk. I remember returning home and aping Anderson's preposterous stage moves, though, so I assume I basically maintained the same view.

Anyway, on to 2022, the release of their well-reviewed new album 'Autofiction'. In the meantime, Brett Anderson had published two well-reviewed volumes of autobiography. I was still only a bit interested.

But my youtube algorithm brought me the band's performance of 'She Still Leads Me On', performed on Jools Holland. I've long since given up on Jools' show, it's a pretty hopeless, arid, environment, for rock bands, but Anderson and the band's performance blew me away.

For starters, it was loud. Louder than bands usually sound on TV. And his performance was fierce and magnificent. It helps that this is a great song. It's unmannered, it's personal, it's deeply moving, it's got a monster chorus. But, for the first time, silly as it sounds, I thought, jesus, he's a good singer. Like, in the all the years talking about Brett Anderson and his demi-monde lifestyle, his sexual ambiguity, his hatred of Damon Albarn, his feuds, his lyrical preoccupations with nuclear motorways, I really don't think I had read enough "Brett has a great pair of lungs on him". Or maybe it had been written, and I hadn't seen it.

And somehow, that's unlocked everything. I know that's ridiculous. But just realising that his main thing, above and beyond all else, is that he's a great singer ... music is so funny, isn't it ...