Suede – ‘To The Birds’

Suede were everything I had hitherto loved in one place, and this song in particular was a story I didn’t understand, and could only follow with difficulty that nonetheless enlightened and inspired me to go for broke, and to show other people the things I had been writing. Brett Anderson celebrates, I think, the moment when a person cracks gloriously, takes flight, and is past all earthly caring. On hearing it I could visualise the room in which it was written and the stage on which it was first performed, much in the same way as PiIL’s ‘Poptones’, about an abduction in the woods, reminds me of the colour and hues of seventies Britain, both songs vivid evocations of being alive in those different decades of my life. Moreover, the song, and Suede, addressed part of my adolescent motivation for writing, which however embarrassing and unseemly it is to look back on, was the desire to be “special” as an end in itself.

Suede went on to write a number of songs that tell stories that I loved without fully understanding, and on asking a member of the band what one of them, ‘Killing Of A Flashboy’, was about, and being told that without wanting to be reductive it was about someone getting twatted, I decided to hold off asking about another favourite, ‘Picnic By The Motorway’, and to avoid this line of enquiry forevermore.