![the act of just being [t]here](https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!McXN!,w_80,h_80,c_fill,f_webp,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep,g_auto/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Fab2fad98-6f90-4e0d-bd57-65f637318d2f_500x500.png)
![the act of just being [t]here](https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!Cdwc!,e_trim:10:white/e_trim:10:transparent/h_72,c_limit,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F5847ef94-3036-47ca-9b03-809c7e95fb65_1344x256.png)
![the act of just being [t]here](https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!McXN!,w_36,h_36,c_fill,f_webp,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep,g_auto/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Fab2fad98-6f90-4e0d-bd57-65f637318d2f_500x500.png)
“My Insatiable One”
Suede: a retro-flection, PRELUDE
Welcome to the first dispatch from the act of just being [t]here, aka my mid-life crisis. Mind the mess; scraps of my psyche are scattered everywhere. I meant to tidy up before inviting folks over. You know how it is, though; cleaning house is the last thing on your mind when the bottom drops out of your drive to write, and you are left staring into the void created by the disappearance of all that once felt comfortable, safe, and soothing. But I am here now, safely ensconced in 2025, with soul-crushing writer’s block a thing of the (still pretty recent) past, and ready to write about music released in -checks notes- 1992.
I never intended to start with Suede. They weren’t even on my radar when I began hatching the idea of a Substack focused primarily on the formative musical obsessions I never got to write about in real-time. Starting with Suede (and with a B-side rather than a single or full album) makes a lot of sense, even though they are not at the start of the timeline I intend to cover here.
If you know me from my work on DOMINIONATED, you're aware that I've spent most of my adult life writing (almost) exclusively about Canadian artists. However, my early infatuation and love affair with music discovery knew no geographical boundaries. Starting around age 10, I fell deeply in love with music, beginning with Top 40 pop and quickly branching into “alternative” music of the time. Always interested in discovering new and up-and-coming artists, it didn’t take long for me to fall into a pattern I think may be familiar to many of you reading right now: needing to discover and know about an artist before anyone else around me. It got so intense at one point that one of my neighbourhood friends made up a song by a fake band and asked me if I had heard of them, to which I replied, “Yes.” In my defence, she made up a generic band name (I don’t remember what it was) and said the song was “Heaven.” I thought maybe she was talking about “Heaven” by Psychedelic Furs.
Regardless, the drive and desire to be the first in-the-know musically among my peers was strong; insatiable, you might say. Which brings us to 1992, when 19-year-old me was heading off to university and leaving home for the first time. I was (and still am) a classic introvert, part of a couple of small social circles with no close connections to anyone save for one close friend. He and I shared a love of music, comic books, Twin Peaks and anything David Lynch-related (may he rest in peace). Our friendship mainly consisted of going to the movies, shopping for records, and (for me, at least) trying to one-up each other by discovering the latest “coolest band in the world” before the other.
At the end of the summer in 1992, our tribe of two was breaking up: he was off to the University of Toronto, and I started at the University of Waterloo, but we had tickets to see Morrissey at Maple Leaf Gardens in support of Your Arsenal on September 15th. That night, Morrissey covered “My Insatiable One,” a B-side off of Suede’s debut single, “The Drowners.” I was unfamiliar with Suede, but in the two short weeks we had been apart, my friend had already one-upped me, discovering and falling madly in love with them. He had gotten hold of “The Drowners” single a few days earlier. He was rhapsodizing about them all night, so when Moz launched into “My Insatiable One,” my friend lost his shit, and my envy kicked into turbo gear. Who was Suede, and what was so great about them? And how could it be that he had discovered them first? (It still stings my ego to admit that all these years later!) I got a copy of the single as soon as possible. I searched every bookshop for any UK music magazine and the weekly inkies I could get my hands on that mentioned Suede. It didn’t take long to sell me on “The Best New Band In Britain,” as declared in Melody Maker in April 1992, weeks before they put out their first single.
Suede checked many boxes for me: glammy indie rock that reminded me of Bowie, sly and ambiguous sexuality that smacked of Morrissey, and cheeky showmanship oozing with confidence and style. Suede’s singer, Brett Anderson, was so intriguing to me. He had a smile and a sneer that I found utterly fascinating. It was the kind of look you see on someone’s face when you turn a corner and catch them pulling up their fly and adjusting themselves after doing something illicit. It was the look of someone who didn’t care if they got caught with their pants down, someone so assured in who and what they were that it didn’t need a label or explanation. I wanted to be as cool and self-confident about their style and sexuality as all of Suede appeared to me.
In the era before YouTube, I relied solely on print media to get to know my musical heroes. We didn’t have cable TV at home when I was growing up, so I didn’t have easy access to MuchMusic. I didn’t have a way of seeing music videos or live performances as frequently as my friends did, so my impression of the band members came solely from their records, what I read in interviews, and what I saw in print. As a frontperson, Anderson was— and still is —magnetic. I found Bernard Butler, their modest and ridiculously talented guitarist (and Anderson’s co-composer), just as compelling. I identified with Butler’s stand-at-the-back-and-be-brilliant aura and was not surprised to learn he’s a fellow Tauran. Like me, he appeared to be a quiet and highly observant creative individual, brimming with energy and ideas that needed to find an outlet. Bassist Mat Osman and drummer Simon Gilbert both struck me as atypical rock stars, and for that reason, I loved them. Long-haired and lanky Osman always seemed to be photographed with an impish grin that suggested a playful and light-hearted soul, bringing levity and light to the band. At the same time, stoic and stalwart Gilbert appeared to be their steady and stable base, grounding even the most sweeping and gossamer moments of their sound in the lived reality of the band’s humble origins.
I don’t know if it’s due to “My Insatiable One” being my first exposure to Suede, but for the longest time, I much preferred it to “The Drowners,” the official debut single’s A-side. “My Insatiable One” is the sound of someone teetering on stacked heels for the first time, confidently marching into a crowd of gawking onlookers and leaving them slack-jawed and in awe. To me, it is a song that has always sounded soaked in sexuality, less so in direct lyrical content than in attitude and delivery. The internet is littered with references to Anderson saying the song is about “gay anal sex,” but in his first memoir, Coal Black Mornings, Anderson admits that it’s written about himself from the perspective of his ex-lover and former bandmate Justine Frischmann (who left him for Blur’s Damon Albarn and went on to front Elastica), “fictionalising a situation where she was regretting her choices.” Though he initially says “My Insatiable One” was “a bit of an afterthought,” it’s validating to read in his second memoir, Afternoons with the Blinds Drawn, that Anderson feels it to be one of Suede’s more superior songs: “relegating ‘My Insatiable One’ to the status of a B-side was the first in a long line of bad judgements that [Suede] made, exiling classics to the wastelands of the flipside.”
Very louche, very exotic, and very English, Suede felt like a level up from the musical tastes of everyone else around me. Loving Suede among my university dorm's Tragically Hip-worshipping brotherhood made me feel sophisticated and worldly. Suede fed into my compulsion for new musical discovery more than any other band before or since, because they came along at just the right time. Living away from home, on my own, with the freedom and pocket money to shop for records and music magazines whenever and wherever I wanted, I dove head-first into a quest to discover and consume as much music as possible—the more obscure the artist, the better. The less well-known a band was in North America, the more I needed to be an authority on them. The harder it was to track down an import-only CD single or album, the more time, energy, and focus I devoted to the quest.
Time has tempered that compulsive fire somewhat. Still, some 40 years later, a part of me vibrates when I make a new musical discovery. It’s harder to claim these discoveries as my own in the internet age. I no longer have anyone like my high school friend to compete with, so it’s less about the rivalry and more about the thrill of discovery. Nowadays, the first person I think of when I come across an interesting new artist is my 15-year-old nephew, who reminds me of me at his age, looking to establish his own identity through the music he loves and connects with.
Of all the artists in space and time he could discover for himself, he’s developed a love of the Church, the Australian band from the 80s, who are still active today. I never got into the Church and know almost nothing about them. I saw some of myself in his appreciation and interest in their music when he first disclosed his interest in them. Shy and reticent, I interpreted his hesitation as fear of revealing this particular and very personal side of his tastes and interests. There was zero judgment on my part. Far from it, actually. If I was feeling anything, it was envy. Though I am mature enough to let a 15-year-old have a 40-plus-year-old band as his new favourite without getting into them myself, I still felt the familiar twinge of jealousy listening to him talk about his newest musical obsession.
Maybe that feeling won’t ever go away. Maybe I never want it to.
