Single of The Week - Metal Mickey

SINGLE OF THE WEEK

SUEDE

METAL MICKEY (Nude)

BRAND loyalty be buggered. This snatches the pink rosette and a pouty kiss for first prize not because of any sense of obligatory alliance, but for its rakish, swanky abandonment, for its wit and swagger, cheek and suaveness; for all the things that mark Suede as special, in fact.

"Metal Mickey" lunges wantonly in with a sub-Hendrix crash and the roar of a tinsel-bedecked Concorde on take-off, which is quite a party entrance, when you think about it.

There's old glamour chops himself, Brett Anderson, delivering his trademark falsetto, all swoops and glides, in madly alliterative lyrics guaranteed to cause terrible trouble with drunken singalongs, of which there will no doubt be plenty. “All the people shake their money in time,” he sings, of the A&R cheque book enthusiasm that must swamp them at every turn. Oooh, the chic of the man.

On the flipside, there's “Where The Pigs Don't Fly", which has yet to be played live, and I can kind of see why. It's not your characteristic, sexy, snake-butt stomp, but would rather suit a spot of end-of-evening snogging on the dancefloor, a last lurch before a bag of chips and the night bus home. And “He's Dead” is sonic soulmate to "The Birds", with Brett singing “I wake up- every day/But don't want it that way", so drained from ennui that he leaves the rest of the track to Bernard Butler's seriously weird guitar turn.

Suede are still deliciously drunk on creative confidence, and this is another hat-trick of alarmingly casual allure. Sweet treats.