Misogyny in the music industry strikes again! This time it’s directed at Wet Leg, the award-winning indie band fronted by Rhian Teasdale and Hester Chambers.
The Times published a bizarre article over the weekend featuring Teasdale’s ex-boyfriend, Doug Richards, claiming he deserved credit for several Wet Leg songs (and their famous band name), noting that he “probably should get recognised.”
You know the trite and outdated saying, “Behind every successful man, there stands a woman”? Let me present you with my own modernised version: “Behind every successful woman, there stands a man saying it was all because of him.”
Wet Leg has had a lot of success lately, with hits like ‘Chaise Longue’ and ‘Wet Dream’, as well as two Grammy wins in 2022, and two Brit Award wins this year.
“For years, me and a couple of friends had lists of stupid band names,” Richards says. “Anytime you’d think of a funny combination of words, you’d write it down. One of them was Wet Book. My brother misheard me and said ‘Oh you should call it Wet Leg. Rhian wasn’t sure. Seems to have worked, though.”
He continued to claim that he co-wrote two songs with the band, ‘Oh No’ and ‘Too Late Now’, saying, “I feel frightened to try and approach the subject. But I did write [on those songs], and they are on the record.”
So, why has he ‘spoken out’? Well, he felt that “the only way I can shift this eggy energy is to say something,” reasoning that “It feels a bit like airing your dirty laundry. But so much has already been made public, I sort of felt I had to speak out.”
To surmise: Doug was in a band. He dated someone in the band. They broke up. He left the band. The band got successful. And now he appears to be feeling jealous and bitter. In one paragraph, he seems to say as much: “It’s just been completely surreal, watching them get massive. I keep thinking, ‘Why does it have to be the No 1 album? Could it not just be No 4 or something?’” Not much of a story, really, is it?
“A woman with the same story and feelings would be brandished as ‘scorned’, ‘petty’ and ‘gold-digging’”
Doug is in his own band, currently called ‘Plastic Mermaids’. They have 9.5k monthly listens on Spotify, Wet leg has over 2 million. Richard has a fiancée, too. So, he’s in a new band and relationship, yet he still believes he has been hard done by. Rhian owes him nothing, but his entitlement is palpable.
This isn’t just about Doug, it’s a familiar narrative, and one that needs challenging. For example, Adele’s ex-boyfriend asked her for royalties after she first enjoyed success with her debut album ‘19’, claiming she owed him money for the songs she wrote about their failed romance.
He believes some of the band’s songs are about it, with lyrics that take ‘jibes’. Even if they are, which is not confirmed, I still can’t see the problem.
Art and creativity has been inspired by love and breakups for-literally-ever, but this only ever seems to be a problem when women do it. Taylor Swift was berated by the media for writing about her love life early-on in her career, and her John Mayer made very Doug-ish comments too “It was a really lousy thing for her to do. … I was really caught off guard, and it really humiliated me at a time when I’d already been dressed down.”