May 20, 2011 11:05
Suede kick off three-night album residency in London Suede
'You've got to have a bit of disrespect about albums' says Brett Anderson
Suede played the first of their three-night residency at London's O2 Academy Brixton last night (May 19), playing their 1993 self-titled debut album in full.
The reunited band are due to play 1994's 'Dog Man Star' tonight and 1996's 'Coming Up' at the venue tomorrow. Before the gig singer Brett Anderson was keen to stress that he feels the live shows have a strong contemporary feel despite showcasing their early work.
"You can't be too historical and you got to have a bit of disrespect," he told NME. "You can't have self-parody and slapping your arse."
Read moreSuede's Brett Anderson announces new album and live datesBrett Anderson confirms that Suede are working on new materialSuede, The National, Paolo Nutini to headline Latitude - ticket details
The band – without original guitarist Bernard Butler, who has not been part of their reunion – played the whole of 'Suede' in order. This was followed by a selection of b-sides including 'To The Birds' and 'My Insatiate One', from their first single 'The Drowners'.
"It's strange being tied to a sequence," Anderson said before the show. "Normally 'So Young' tends to come towards the end of a show when we normally play it."
He added: "I'd sequence the album differently now, it's very up, down, up, down. But there’s a historical element and you have to be faithful to it. Live, however, you can’t ramp up the rock dynamics like you can with normal shows. You have to give it its own headspace. We're playing lots of stuff we don't play often live. Things like 'She's Not Dead' and 'Breakdown'. It’s really exciting because sometimes when you’re touring you can switch off – with this you have to engage and maybe learn something new."
http://www.nme.com/news/suede/56785
3 night reviews
Re: 3 night reviews
mojo
http://www.mojo4music.com/blog/2011/05/ ... erial.html
Suede's Quality Material3:48 PM GMT 23/05/2011
Suede
Brixton Academy
May 20, 2011
There's an amusing moment tonight when, standing in profile atop a stage monitor, Brett Anderson makes a V-sign behind his back at the audience and then impishly sticks up a third finger as if he was really counting something or other. The singer - still lanky, trim and floppy of fringe - is a great showman, and the twinkle in his eyes, visible from afar, suggests he knows it. Twixt songs, he parades along the lip of the stage, smiling at the roars of approval coming from the crowd, which follow him along like a sort of sonic Mexican wave. The cult of Brett is in excelsis tonight, a somewhat belated outpouring of respect and affection for a man, and a band who for a short while in 1992 and '93 were regarded as the saviours and future of British pop, the return of something reassuringly arty and English after the demise of Madchester and amid the onslaught of Subpop and Nirvana.
But then life for Suede didn't turn out quite as they, or their admirers, imagined it would. Like an obscure type of hominid, they became an evolutionary sidebar as Blur and Oasis beat them to mainstream prominence, stealing their thunder and worse (Blur's Damon Albarn pinched Brett's girlfriend Justine Frischmann). All of a sudden a bunch of willowy aesthetes drowning in their own narcotic, Blakean visions, and dark, occasionally overblown, psychedelic glam-rock shapes seemed at odds with the laddish, Mod-minded regeneration of Britain in the mid-'90s. Moreover, by Britpop's dawn Suede had waved goodbye to guitarist Bernard Butler, the grounded, musicianly Johnny Marr to Brett's arch, esoteric Morrissey. Which brings us neatly to this evening's gig...
This is the second of a trio of shows re-creating Suede's first three albums. Last night flashed back to 1993's self-titled debut, replete with the punkish, Bowie-shaded glam-pop songs that - misleadingly - seemed to portend a '90s that would look to the '70s for its inspiration rather than to the '60s. Tonight it's the turn of 1994's Dog Man Star, its slicker, widescreen sequel.
Butler quit the group during the final recording sessions, following his father's death and increasing friction with Anderson over their direction (the guitarist favoured a more experimental path). In 1994 the emergent album offered evidence of Suede's growing maturity and depth, twinned with a gothic druggy weirdness still obvious from the opening lines of tonight's first number Introducing The Band. "Dog man star took a suck on a pill / And stabbed a cerebellum with a curious quill," sings Anderson, at once explaining Suede's dark genius and the reason they could never be a Blur or Oasis. The crowd go bananas. When the narcotic sway of Introducing... gives way to pulsing rock of We Are The Pigs, Brett makes it clear he's here to hoover up whatever adulation the audience are ready to heap upon him, bouncing enthusiastically on the spot and geeing up the band to give it some welly.
The players - drummer Simon Gilbert, bassist Mat Osman, plus post-Butler mainstays Richard Oakes (guitar) and Neil Codling (keys, guitar) - dressed in black, don't look vastly aged from the mid-'90s (are you sure about this? - Ed) and are punchy and well-drilled, tackling the expansive, haunting beauty of The Wild Ones and thundering New Generation with the care and attention they deserve. Oakes throws himself into Butler's joyful, snaking lead-rhythm guitar lines, Johnny Marr meeting Mick Ronson, with commendable respect for their original forms: for substantial swathes of this set we could, in fact, be back in 1994.
Dog Man Star has always divided opinion, and the passing years haven't helped unify the two divergent Suedes it showcases: the punkish and the theatrical. Still Life and The Power are still overblown, and you could argue that the lyrics of We Are The Pigs touch uncomfortably on the ludicrous. (A fanzine back in the day ran a photo of Brett and Bernard on-stage with speech bubbles reading "We are the pigs, we are the swine" and "That's it, I'm off!", respectively.) Yet there's a dark psychedelic bent to these songs, and the mind-blowing nine-minute Asphalt World, that confirm that Suede without Bernard would never be quite the same.
With a encore that includes coruscating versions of Animal Nitrate, Metal Mickey, So Young and B-side (that could have been an A-side) Killing Of A Flashboy, Suede depart on a high, set to meet their audience in 24 hours' time to recreate their tidier 1996 follow-up Coming Up.
We're left, perhaps predictably, with a lingeringly bittersweet sensation. Once, Suede could have been the new Smiths, and forced Blur and Oasis to deal with a genuine third, markedly non-blokey challenge to their mid-'90s dominance. It wasn't to be, but what a rush to be transported back to a moment when the future was, as yet, unwritten.
Pat Gilbert
Photos courtesy of Paul Khera
http://www.mojo4music.com/blog/2011/05/ ... erial.html
Suede's Quality Material3:48 PM GMT 23/05/2011
Suede
Brixton Academy
May 20, 2011
There's an amusing moment tonight when, standing in profile atop a stage monitor, Brett Anderson makes a V-sign behind his back at the audience and then impishly sticks up a third finger as if he was really counting something or other. The singer - still lanky, trim and floppy of fringe - is a great showman, and the twinkle in his eyes, visible from afar, suggests he knows it. Twixt songs, he parades along the lip of the stage, smiling at the roars of approval coming from the crowd, which follow him along like a sort of sonic Mexican wave. The cult of Brett is in excelsis tonight, a somewhat belated outpouring of respect and affection for a man, and a band who for a short while in 1992 and '93 were regarded as the saviours and future of British pop, the return of something reassuringly arty and English after the demise of Madchester and amid the onslaught of Subpop and Nirvana.
But then life for Suede didn't turn out quite as they, or their admirers, imagined it would. Like an obscure type of hominid, they became an evolutionary sidebar as Blur and Oasis beat them to mainstream prominence, stealing their thunder and worse (Blur's Damon Albarn pinched Brett's girlfriend Justine Frischmann). All of a sudden a bunch of willowy aesthetes drowning in their own narcotic, Blakean visions, and dark, occasionally overblown, psychedelic glam-rock shapes seemed at odds with the laddish, Mod-minded regeneration of Britain in the mid-'90s. Moreover, by Britpop's dawn Suede had waved goodbye to guitarist Bernard Butler, the grounded, musicianly Johnny Marr to Brett's arch, esoteric Morrissey. Which brings us neatly to this evening's gig...
This is the second of a trio of shows re-creating Suede's first three albums. Last night flashed back to 1993's self-titled debut, replete with the punkish, Bowie-shaded glam-pop songs that - misleadingly - seemed to portend a '90s that would look to the '70s for its inspiration rather than to the '60s. Tonight it's the turn of 1994's Dog Man Star, its slicker, widescreen sequel.
Butler quit the group during the final recording sessions, following his father's death and increasing friction with Anderson over their direction (the guitarist favoured a more experimental path). In 1994 the emergent album offered evidence of Suede's growing maturity and depth, twinned with a gothic druggy weirdness still obvious from the opening lines of tonight's first number Introducing The Band. "Dog man star took a suck on a pill / And stabbed a cerebellum with a curious quill," sings Anderson, at once explaining Suede's dark genius and the reason they could never be a Blur or Oasis. The crowd go bananas. When the narcotic sway of Introducing... gives way to pulsing rock of We Are The Pigs, Brett makes it clear he's here to hoover up whatever adulation the audience are ready to heap upon him, bouncing enthusiastically on the spot and geeing up the band to give it some welly.
The players - drummer Simon Gilbert, bassist Mat Osman, plus post-Butler mainstays Richard Oakes (guitar) and Neil Codling (keys, guitar) - dressed in black, don't look vastly aged from the mid-'90s (are you sure about this? - Ed) and are punchy and well-drilled, tackling the expansive, haunting beauty of The Wild Ones and thundering New Generation with the care and attention they deserve. Oakes throws himself into Butler's joyful, snaking lead-rhythm guitar lines, Johnny Marr meeting Mick Ronson, with commendable respect for their original forms: for substantial swathes of this set we could, in fact, be back in 1994.
Dog Man Star has always divided opinion, and the passing years haven't helped unify the two divergent Suedes it showcases: the punkish and the theatrical. Still Life and The Power are still overblown, and you could argue that the lyrics of We Are The Pigs touch uncomfortably on the ludicrous. (A fanzine back in the day ran a photo of Brett and Bernard on-stage with speech bubbles reading "We are the pigs, we are the swine" and "That's it, I'm off!", respectively.) Yet there's a dark psychedelic bent to these songs, and the mind-blowing nine-minute Asphalt World, that confirm that Suede without Bernard would never be quite the same.
With a encore that includes coruscating versions of Animal Nitrate, Metal Mickey, So Young and B-side (that could have been an A-side) Killing Of A Flashboy, Suede depart on a high, set to meet their audience in 24 hours' time to recreate their tidier 1996 follow-up Coming Up.
We're left, perhaps predictably, with a lingeringly bittersweet sensation. Once, Suede could have been the new Smiths, and forced Blur and Oasis to deal with a genuine third, markedly non-blokey challenge to their mid-'90s dominance. It wasn't to be, but what a rush to be transported back to a moment when the future was, as yet, unwritten.
Pat Gilbert
Photos courtesy of Paul Khera
Re: 3 night reviews
evening standard
http://www.thisislondon.co.uk/music/rev ... n-songs.do
O2 Academy Brixton SW9
Suede relive their youth through golden songs
Sorely missed: Suede played their albums in full over three gigs
By John Aizlewood
23 May 2011
Few things are exchanged quite so smoothly as money and old rope. Hence the trend of bands whom the present is bypassing to play favourite albums in full.
It makes for a stress-free evening: the audience know what they're going to hear (and in what order) and the band know the kind of reception they'll get.
Tellingly, though, of Suede's three Brixton nights featuring their first three albums, only the one featuring their second and best, 1994's Dog Man Star, sold out. In exhuming it, the problem remains that inspirational guitarist Bernard Butler departed between its completion and release. Despite a lukewarm 2004 reunion with Suede leader Brett Anderson as The Tears, you suspect that all the wild horses on Dartmoor wouldn't drag Butler (now a successful producer) into a Suede rematch.
As if bowing to the elephant who wasn't in the room, Anderson kept shtum during an evening comprised of Dog Man Star, plus assorted B-sides and non-album singles of the era.
Surprisingly, though, Suede were more engaged than you might imagine and while Anderson may not have spoken, the loose-limbed ham bounced his way through almost every song and between them milked the audience with the strut of a pop king and a grin as wide as the rift with Butler.
It all made for a special atmosphere: the crowd relived its youth and Anderson relived his fame.
Helpfully, Dog Man Star has aged rather well and, lest we forget, Richard Oakes was always an excellent replacement for Butler. The Wild Ones soared as both a great Britpop moment and arguably Suede's best, but the less heralded New Generation and the luxurious The Asphalt World were revelatory. For all Suede's brittleness of sound and voice, these golden songs from a bygone age were unmistakeably moving.
The lengthy, breakneck-paced encore corralled the missing links. Both Anderson's solo showcase, The Living Dead, a ghoulish, unflinching depiction of a love affair with heroin and the rip-roaring Killing Of A Flash Boy still seemed too strong to have missed the Dog Man Star cut.
So it looks as if we've missed Suede far more than we'd ever imagined.
http://www.thisislondon.co.uk/music/rev ... n-songs.do
O2 Academy Brixton SW9
Suede relive their youth through golden songs
Sorely missed: Suede played their albums in full over three gigs
By John Aizlewood
23 May 2011
Few things are exchanged quite so smoothly as money and old rope. Hence the trend of bands whom the present is bypassing to play favourite albums in full.
It makes for a stress-free evening: the audience know what they're going to hear (and in what order) and the band know the kind of reception they'll get.
Tellingly, though, of Suede's three Brixton nights featuring their first three albums, only the one featuring their second and best, 1994's Dog Man Star, sold out. In exhuming it, the problem remains that inspirational guitarist Bernard Butler departed between its completion and release. Despite a lukewarm 2004 reunion with Suede leader Brett Anderson as The Tears, you suspect that all the wild horses on Dartmoor wouldn't drag Butler (now a successful producer) into a Suede rematch.
As if bowing to the elephant who wasn't in the room, Anderson kept shtum during an evening comprised of Dog Man Star, plus assorted B-sides and non-album singles of the era.
Surprisingly, though, Suede were more engaged than you might imagine and while Anderson may not have spoken, the loose-limbed ham bounced his way through almost every song and between them milked the audience with the strut of a pop king and a grin as wide as the rift with Butler.
It all made for a special atmosphere: the crowd relived its youth and Anderson relived his fame.
Helpfully, Dog Man Star has aged rather well and, lest we forget, Richard Oakes was always an excellent replacement for Butler. The Wild Ones soared as both a great Britpop moment and arguably Suede's best, but the less heralded New Generation and the luxurious The Asphalt World were revelatory. For all Suede's brittleness of sound and voice, these golden songs from a bygone age were unmistakeably moving.
The lengthy, breakneck-paced encore corralled the missing links. Both Anderson's solo showcase, The Living Dead, a ghoulish, unflinching depiction of a love affair with heroin and the rip-roaring Killing Of A Flash Boy still seemed too strong to have missed the Dog Man Star cut.
So it looks as if we've missed Suede far more than we'd ever imagined.
Re: 3 night reviews
Tuesday, 24 May 2011
The Independent
Suede, Brixton Academy, London
(Rated 5/ 5 )
Reviewed by Chris Mugan
Many old shots of Brett Anderson posing coquettishly as a self-regarding dandy have been published in recent weeks, though none can prepare us for the sight of Suede's singer with arms heroically stretched out, encompassing his fans' adulation. And this is during "Breakdown", one of the less memorable tracks from their debut album, which now closes with a punishing coda to replace the original's yearning close.
It's a sign that his band have more on their minds than rehashing old glories as they embark on a residency to play their first three LPs, beginning with the explosive bundle from 1993 that lit the touch paper for Britpop. Anderson has since chafed at being portrayed as chief Union Jack-waver for that parochial genre, even if, on its final track, the Haywards Heath lad only gets as far as Worthing. Tonight, he makes the case that Suede were always more ambitious, at least in their early days.
The five-piece, still lacking the visionary, original guitarist Bernard Butler, play the Suede record in order. You know what to expect, then – yet the decision is justified by a brilliant performance, from the soaring, celebratory "So Young" to a delicate "Next Life", with Anderson accompanied only by electric piano. This is a pumped-up incarnation of the band, whose vocalist is especially fiery. He barely talks between songs, but every gesture is directed at fervent acolytes who scream when he swings his microphone.
His falsetto is less surefire nowadays, but added power from clean living and a mature, gravelly touch add heft to slower numbers, notably a smouldering "Pantomime Horse". Curiously, the band play the glam stomp of "The Drowners" at a more measured tempo, Anderson threatening to suck the life out of it further by carefully enunciating his camp lyrics, until he distracts us by leaping off stage. You fear he will lose a limb in the crowd, but comes away minus only a shirt button. Utterly lacking self-awareness, he cries "What are we?" during the album opener's chorus, causing a predominantly thirtysomething crowd to reply "So young..."
Anything after this would be a comedown, and energy levels do drop when the group return to play this era's B-sides. Yet "My Insatiable One" shows that such tracks were often better than anything many rivals could muster. And tonight Suede show they can really rock out as well.
http://www.independent.co.uk/arts-enter ... 88128.html
The Independent
Suede, Brixton Academy, London
(Rated 5/ 5 )
Reviewed by Chris Mugan
Many old shots of Brett Anderson posing coquettishly as a self-regarding dandy have been published in recent weeks, though none can prepare us for the sight of Suede's singer with arms heroically stretched out, encompassing his fans' adulation. And this is during "Breakdown", one of the less memorable tracks from their debut album, which now closes with a punishing coda to replace the original's yearning close.
It's a sign that his band have more on their minds than rehashing old glories as they embark on a residency to play their first three LPs, beginning with the explosive bundle from 1993 that lit the touch paper for Britpop. Anderson has since chafed at being portrayed as chief Union Jack-waver for that parochial genre, even if, on its final track, the Haywards Heath lad only gets as far as Worthing. Tonight, he makes the case that Suede were always more ambitious, at least in their early days.
The five-piece, still lacking the visionary, original guitarist Bernard Butler, play the Suede record in order. You know what to expect, then – yet the decision is justified by a brilliant performance, from the soaring, celebratory "So Young" to a delicate "Next Life", with Anderson accompanied only by electric piano. This is a pumped-up incarnation of the band, whose vocalist is especially fiery. He barely talks between songs, but every gesture is directed at fervent acolytes who scream when he swings his microphone.
His falsetto is less surefire nowadays, but added power from clean living and a mature, gravelly touch add heft to slower numbers, notably a smouldering "Pantomime Horse". Curiously, the band play the glam stomp of "The Drowners" at a more measured tempo, Anderson threatening to suck the life out of it further by carefully enunciating his camp lyrics, until he distracts us by leaping off stage. You fear he will lose a limb in the crowd, but comes away minus only a shirt button. Utterly lacking self-awareness, he cries "What are we?" during the album opener's chorus, causing a predominantly thirtysomething crowd to reply "So young..."
Anything after this would be a comedown, and energy levels do drop when the group return to play this era's B-sides. Yet "My Insatiable One" shows that such tracks were often better than anything many rivals could muster. And tonight Suede show they can really rock out as well.
http://www.independent.co.uk/arts-enter ... 88128.html
Re: 3 night reviews
thanks dear!!!...
Re: 3 night reviews
http://advicetothelovelorn.blogspot.com ... ay-19.html
Sunday, 22 May 2011
Review: Suede at Brixton Academy, May 19 and 20, 2011
Eleven years after the decade ended, eight years after they split for the first time, it seems Suede are finally being recognised as the ‘90s band. The one that really matters.
There were plenty of us doggedly sticking to the belief that their self-titled 1993 record (at the time, the fastest-selling British debut album bar none) and 1994 follow-up Dog Man Star were as good as anything ever released by anybody. But it took a sell-out reunion at the Royal Albert Hall last March to wake up the broadsheet critics and magazine journalists and kickstart a critical re-appraisal.
Then, a couple of months back, the band announced that their five studio records would all be getting a cleaned-up, bumped-up re-release and – more importantly – that they’d be playing the first three live, in their entirety, across three nights at Brixton Academy. Now call me a misguided, pauper-y old misery guts, but I’m not overly enamoured with Coming Up, the unashamedly poppy 1996 album that has as much filler as killer – and only a couple of really special songs. But the first two nights? I could barely dip into my overdraft quickly enough. Just a quick call to my dad to check he was up for it. After all, he first played me The Drowners – taped off a John Peel show – in ’92. He took the 12-year-old me to see Suede at the Manchester Apollo in ‘96. He still listens to Dog Man Star with admirable regularity. And, well, he’s my dad.
***
Suede play the classic album Suede
Brixton Academy – Friday, May 19, 2011
"Last night at Brixton was one of the best crowds I can remember EVER! There was so much love in the room, how could it not have been amazing?" - Brett Anderson
Energy. Pure pulsating, raw energy. I’ve never been to a gig with more of the stuff, the tone set by frontman Brett Anderson’s invigorating performance. He paces, leaps, pines with an expression of pained longing and gets down on his knees. He pants, sweats, shimmies and frequently ventures into the arms of the crowd. By the end his white shirt is transparent, held together by a solitary button, his torso exposed and glistening with sweat as the audience passes into rapture.
As a statement of intent, the opening shrieks of So Young take some beating: “She can! ... start... to walk out!... when she wants...” And setting the rock-out numbers – dealing invariably with youth, sex and death – against the heightened balladry of Pantomime Horse et al works just as well as on record. Perhaps even better, since the heavy numbers are heavier and the troubled ones more desolate and plaintive.
The highlights of the main set (and this is a relative term, since it's all so damn good) are as you’d expect. A flamboyant Animal Nitrate, a raucous Metal Mickey, escapist closer The Next Life (with its glorious, child-like pay-off: “We’ll flog ice-cream/Till the company’s on its knees”) and the peerless four-song suite that forms the centrepiece of the record. Has there ever been an album with a run of four songs like it? Pantomime Horse/The Drowners/Sleeping Pills/Breakdown. It takes the breath away. Brett’s on his knees for a devastating Pantomime Horse and in the audience for The Drowners (“You owe me a button,” he tells a woman in the crowd), before combining with Richard Oakes – a phenomenally gifted guitarist and the unsung hero of these gigs – for a sensitive, mesmeric Sleeping Pills.
But it’s Breakdown that’s the standout. One of my favourite two Suede songs (The Power, since you ask), I’d noted in the review of the Royal Albert Hall show that while they hadn’t played it that night, you couldn’t have everything. This prompted blogger and intimidatingly knowledgeable Suede fan Planet Me to observe that I was being a bit unrealistic as they’d only played Breakdown live “once, EVER”. Well, they did it again on Friday and it was extraordinary. An eloquent evocation of mental disintegration, class A intertia and sexual anguish dominated by a refrain of “You can only go so far... in your mind”, the song is a wonderful marriage of incredibly rich imagery (“Back where the dogs bark/Where still life bleeds the concrete white”) and the saddest tune this side of Mighty Lak' a Rose, before it blasts out in a weighty din, Brett wailing the obscure, Suedehead-esque question: “Does your love only come in a Volvo?” The live version, with its tremulous vocal wracked with fear and regret, and music building from a whisper to a cacophony, was one of the most wonderful things I’ve heard in my time on this earth. If that sounds like hyperbole, then you weren’t there.
After The Next Life brings our primary reason for being here to a close, the group stride off, wait about a minute, then stride back on again, launching into High Rising, a B-side to So Young. As has been observed time and again, Suede’s B-sides are unprecedentedly strong: better than most bands’ A-sides; hell: better than some of their A-sides. After that gentle, sweeping number, we get a heap of these secret gems: the dirgy He’s Dead, My Insatiable One (a special one for Oakes, as he played this on his audition tape in ’94) – which like so much of the night’s show turns into a huge sing-along – an epic To the Birds and the explosive Killing of a Flashboy, which sends the mosh-pit into a meltdown from which my feet are only just beginning to recover. They close with Can’t Get Enough from fourth album Head Music and a couple of hit singles off Coming Up: Trash and Beautiful Ones.
It was a wonderful show: a pivotal, unimpeachable record given the treatment it deserved – sounding utterly familiar and yet somehow fresh, of-the-moment, even new. A great venue, a fantastic crowd and even a smattering of relative rarities given the timeless treatment. The best thing of all? It's Dog Man flipping Star tomorrow.
Setlist:
So Young
Animal Nitrate
She's Not Dead
Moving
Pantomime Horse
The Drowners
Sleeping Pills
Breakdown
Metal Mickey
Animal Lover
The Next Life
Encore:
High Rising
He's Dead
My Insatiable One
To the Birds
Killing of a Flash Boy
Can't Get Enough
Trash
Beautiful Ones
***
Suede play the classic album Dog Man Star
Brixton Academy – Saturday, May 20, 2011
So how do you follow that? Well, we went on the London Eye. Yeah, really good. You can see everything. Then we went to see Suede again, joined by my old friend Phil (whom regular readers will remember from the Thea Gilmore review).
For me, Dog Man Star is the greatest record of all time: breathtakingly ambitious and completely original, with a worldview and an atmosphere of stifling misery and fantastical escape that’s all its own. Lyrically it’s one of the most coherent and articulate albums around – not many writers could kick off a song with a William Blake line, then maintain that level of artistry – and Bernard Butler’s soaring soundscapes are so far ahead of anything attempted by his contemporaries that you’re almost embarrassed for them. Sling in vocal performances of unmatched emotional intensity, a tight but expressive and exciting band, and a photo of a naked guy on a bed and you can understand the fervour it inspires. So what’ll it be like live? Rather good, it turns out.
It mightn’t surprise you to know that I’d been imagining the start of this gig quite a bit. I was pretty excited. And what a set-opener Introducing the Band is, with its methodical rhythm and Ballardian lyrics, the delivery potent and forceful as the band kicks the lid off the atmosphere of bottled-up excitement. A couple of live regulars – We Are the Pigs and Heroine – are as polished and as reliably superb as you’d expect, before an unforgettable rendering of The Wild Ones, an Anderson anthem that saw him dive into ‘50s American culture once more (James Dean and Marilyn also get a name-check on the record), nabbing the title of a macho Brando biker flick for this fey imagining of a flight from suburbia. As the chorus approaches, Brett casts his microphone in our direction, imploring us to join in. We would, Brett, but it’s a bit high.
I'd read that by 2003, Daddy's Speeding had been turned, Dylan-style, into something more brooding and intriguing than the slightly muted album version. No kidding. The verses are pared down, but with the vocal torment cranked up to breaking point, lending greater resonance to the slightly clichéd subject matter. The chorus is a chugging racket, the climax remarkable in its ferocity and unhappiness. My girlfriend couldn’t make the gig, so I rang her halfway through and held my phone in the air. She could make out enough of it to know what it was. Brilliant. That’s what it was.
I’ve always held a special place in my heart for The Power. I don’t know another Suede fan who regards it as their greatest song, but it’s just got a special something I’ve never come across anywhere else. It's an update of '60s 'kitchen sink' realism, recalling A Taste of Honey (“Or enslaved in a pebble-dash grave/With a kid on the way”) and tracing the John Osborne idea that the loss of Empire meant imperial derring-do ("If you're far over Africa, on the wings of youth") had been replaced by joblessness and stultifying tedium ("Or if you're down in some satellite town and there's nothing you can do"). It's also extremely cinematic and contains perhaps my favourite couplet in all of music; one which perfectly captures the album’s melding of Hollywood romance and British malaise: “You might live in a screen kiss/It’s a glamorous dream/Or belong to a world that’s gone/It’s the English disease.” They never play it live, but this week they did. It was like the album version, only more so, and - singing it with passion and conviction - two thousand voices (and pointing hands) imploring him to give them the power, it seemed Brett was discovering again what a glorious song he’d created.
New Generation is exuberant and This Hollywood Life (the weak link, though it's a relative term) sleazily appealing, before we reach the only four-song stretch that can give Suede's debut a run for its money. A quartet of ballads - The 2 of Us, Black or Blue, The Asphalt World and Still Life - each with a stunning climax, whether string-led and grandiose (Still Life) or tortured beyond belief (The Asphalt World). The first two are transfixing; the others simply jaw-dropping. The Asphalt World, which begins like a kids’ story (“I know a girl/She walks the Asphalt World”) before being torpedoed by heartache, sexual jealousy and thin consolation, shakes with unleashed unhappiness. The band takes centre-stage near the close, as Richard Oakes unleashes a blistering guitar solo, before Brett rejoins them for the final, hurt-wracked chorus. I’ve seen them do Still Life a couple of times before, but it still gets me anew each time: a simple but epic heroin confessional, with a painfully self-aware Anderson trapped behind glass, crawling the walls, but clinging onto the idea that for all that he’s still alive. As this once-in-a-lifetime version draws to a close and the (recorded) strings swell, the crowd lifts its arms as one, for a two-minute ovation. A thank you, for the greatest record ever made.
Then things get really silly. You know Stay Together, the sensational stand-alone single that Suede never perform, because they’re apparently ashamed of it? Well, they play that. An amazing version of that. Preceded by its legendary B-sides: the heartbreaking The Living Dead and fan favourite My Dark Star. That prompts an “Oh, what?” moment from the fella next to me, as his dream setlist materialises before his very ears. Then they roll out four of the biggest successes from the night before: Killing of a Flashboy (which I had been singing all day), So Young, Metal Mickey and Animal Nitrate, as the venue threatens to erupt with delight. And then they stroll off, exiting to deafening applause and hoarse-throated shouts.
We tumble out, sweat-drenched and grinning, exclaiming the same thing: one of the best gigs I’ve ever seen, one of the best nights I’ve ever had. Better than last night? Ooh, hard to say.
Setlist:
Introducing the Band
We Are The Pigs
Heroine
The Wild Ones
Daddy's Speeding
The Power
New Generation
This Hollywood Life
The 2 of Us
Black or Blue
The Asphalt World
Still Life
Encore:
The Living Dead
My Dark Star
Stay Together
Killing of a Flash Boy
So Young
Metal Mickey
Animal Nitrate
Sunday, 22 May 2011
Review: Suede at Brixton Academy, May 19 and 20, 2011
Eleven years after the decade ended, eight years after they split for the first time, it seems Suede are finally being recognised as the ‘90s band. The one that really matters.
There were plenty of us doggedly sticking to the belief that their self-titled 1993 record (at the time, the fastest-selling British debut album bar none) and 1994 follow-up Dog Man Star were as good as anything ever released by anybody. But it took a sell-out reunion at the Royal Albert Hall last March to wake up the broadsheet critics and magazine journalists and kickstart a critical re-appraisal.
Then, a couple of months back, the band announced that their five studio records would all be getting a cleaned-up, bumped-up re-release and – more importantly – that they’d be playing the first three live, in their entirety, across three nights at Brixton Academy. Now call me a misguided, pauper-y old misery guts, but I’m not overly enamoured with Coming Up, the unashamedly poppy 1996 album that has as much filler as killer – and only a couple of really special songs. But the first two nights? I could barely dip into my overdraft quickly enough. Just a quick call to my dad to check he was up for it. After all, he first played me The Drowners – taped off a John Peel show – in ’92. He took the 12-year-old me to see Suede at the Manchester Apollo in ‘96. He still listens to Dog Man Star with admirable regularity. And, well, he’s my dad.
***
Suede play the classic album Suede
Brixton Academy – Friday, May 19, 2011
"Last night at Brixton was one of the best crowds I can remember EVER! There was so much love in the room, how could it not have been amazing?" - Brett Anderson
Energy. Pure pulsating, raw energy. I’ve never been to a gig with more of the stuff, the tone set by frontman Brett Anderson’s invigorating performance. He paces, leaps, pines with an expression of pained longing and gets down on his knees. He pants, sweats, shimmies and frequently ventures into the arms of the crowd. By the end his white shirt is transparent, held together by a solitary button, his torso exposed and glistening with sweat as the audience passes into rapture.
As a statement of intent, the opening shrieks of So Young take some beating: “She can! ... start... to walk out!... when she wants...” And setting the rock-out numbers – dealing invariably with youth, sex and death – against the heightened balladry of Pantomime Horse et al works just as well as on record. Perhaps even better, since the heavy numbers are heavier and the troubled ones more desolate and plaintive.
The highlights of the main set (and this is a relative term, since it's all so damn good) are as you’d expect. A flamboyant Animal Nitrate, a raucous Metal Mickey, escapist closer The Next Life (with its glorious, child-like pay-off: “We’ll flog ice-cream/Till the company’s on its knees”) and the peerless four-song suite that forms the centrepiece of the record. Has there ever been an album with a run of four songs like it? Pantomime Horse/The Drowners/Sleeping Pills/Breakdown. It takes the breath away. Brett’s on his knees for a devastating Pantomime Horse and in the audience for The Drowners (“You owe me a button,” he tells a woman in the crowd), before combining with Richard Oakes – a phenomenally gifted guitarist and the unsung hero of these gigs – for a sensitive, mesmeric Sleeping Pills.
But it’s Breakdown that’s the standout. One of my favourite two Suede songs (The Power, since you ask), I’d noted in the review of the Royal Albert Hall show that while they hadn’t played it that night, you couldn’t have everything. This prompted blogger and intimidatingly knowledgeable Suede fan Planet Me to observe that I was being a bit unrealistic as they’d only played Breakdown live “once, EVER”. Well, they did it again on Friday and it was extraordinary. An eloquent evocation of mental disintegration, class A intertia and sexual anguish dominated by a refrain of “You can only go so far... in your mind”, the song is a wonderful marriage of incredibly rich imagery (“Back where the dogs bark/Where still life bleeds the concrete white”) and the saddest tune this side of Mighty Lak' a Rose, before it blasts out in a weighty din, Brett wailing the obscure, Suedehead-esque question: “Does your love only come in a Volvo?” The live version, with its tremulous vocal wracked with fear and regret, and music building from a whisper to a cacophony, was one of the most wonderful things I’ve heard in my time on this earth. If that sounds like hyperbole, then you weren’t there.
After The Next Life brings our primary reason for being here to a close, the group stride off, wait about a minute, then stride back on again, launching into High Rising, a B-side to So Young. As has been observed time and again, Suede’s B-sides are unprecedentedly strong: better than most bands’ A-sides; hell: better than some of their A-sides. After that gentle, sweeping number, we get a heap of these secret gems: the dirgy He’s Dead, My Insatiable One (a special one for Oakes, as he played this on his audition tape in ’94) – which like so much of the night’s show turns into a huge sing-along – an epic To the Birds and the explosive Killing of a Flashboy, which sends the mosh-pit into a meltdown from which my feet are only just beginning to recover. They close with Can’t Get Enough from fourth album Head Music and a couple of hit singles off Coming Up: Trash and Beautiful Ones.
It was a wonderful show: a pivotal, unimpeachable record given the treatment it deserved – sounding utterly familiar and yet somehow fresh, of-the-moment, even new. A great venue, a fantastic crowd and even a smattering of relative rarities given the timeless treatment. The best thing of all? It's Dog Man flipping Star tomorrow.
Setlist:
So Young
Animal Nitrate
She's Not Dead
Moving
Pantomime Horse
The Drowners
Sleeping Pills
Breakdown
Metal Mickey
Animal Lover
The Next Life
Encore:
High Rising
He's Dead
My Insatiable One
To the Birds
Killing of a Flash Boy
Can't Get Enough
Trash
Beautiful Ones
***
Suede play the classic album Dog Man Star
Brixton Academy – Saturday, May 20, 2011
So how do you follow that? Well, we went on the London Eye. Yeah, really good. You can see everything. Then we went to see Suede again, joined by my old friend Phil (whom regular readers will remember from the Thea Gilmore review).
For me, Dog Man Star is the greatest record of all time: breathtakingly ambitious and completely original, with a worldview and an atmosphere of stifling misery and fantastical escape that’s all its own. Lyrically it’s one of the most coherent and articulate albums around – not many writers could kick off a song with a William Blake line, then maintain that level of artistry – and Bernard Butler’s soaring soundscapes are so far ahead of anything attempted by his contemporaries that you’re almost embarrassed for them. Sling in vocal performances of unmatched emotional intensity, a tight but expressive and exciting band, and a photo of a naked guy on a bed and you can understand the fervour it inspires. So what’ll it be like live? Rather good, it turns out.
It mightn’t surprise you to know that I’d been imagining the start of this gig quite a bit. I was pretty excited. And what a set-opener Introducing the Band is, with its methodical rhythm and Ballardian lyrics, the delivery potent and forceful as the band kicks the lid off the atmosphere of bottled-up excitement. A couple of live regulars – We Are the Pigs and Heroine – are as polished and as reliably superb as you’d expect, before an unforgettable rendering of The Wild Ones, an Anderson anthem that saw him dive into ‘50s American culture once more (James Dean and Marilyn also get a name-check on the record), nabbing the title of a macho Brando biker flick for this fey imagining of a flight from suburbia. As the chorus approaches, Brett casts his microphone in our direction, imploring us to join in. We would, Brett, but it’s a bit high.
I'd read that by 2003, Daddy's Speeding had been turned, Dylan-style, into something more brooding and intriguing than the slightly muted album version. No kidding. The verses are pared down, but with the vocal torment cranked up to breaking point, lending greater resonance to the slightly clichéd subject matter. The chorus is a chugging racket, the climax remarkable in its ferocity and unhappiness. My girlfriend couldn’t make the gig, so I rang her halfway through and held my phone in the air. She could make out enough of it to know what it was. Brilliant. That’s what it was.
I’ve always held a special place in my heart for The Power. I don’t know another Suede fan who regards it as their greatest song, but it’s just got a special something I’ve never come across anywhere else. It's an update of '60s 'kitchen sink' realism, recalling A Taste of Honey (“Or enslaved in a pebble-dash grave/With a kid on the way”) and tracing the John Osborne idea that the loss of Empire meant imperial derring-do ("If you're far over Africa, on the wings of youth") had been replaced by joblessness and stultifying tedium ("Or if you're down in some satellite town and there's nothing you can do"). It's also extremely cinematic and contains perhaps my favourite couplet in all of music; one which perfectly captures the album’s melding of Hollywood romance and British malaise: “You might live in a screen kiss/It’s a glamorous dream/Or belong to a world that’s gone/It’s the English disease.” They never play it live, but this week they did. It was like the album version, only more so, and - singing it with passion and conviction - two thousand voices (and pointing hands) imploring him to give them the power, it seemed Brett was discovering again what a glorious song he’d created.
New Generation is exuberant and This Hollywood Life (the weak link, though it's a relative term) sleazily appealing, before we reach the only four-song stretch that can give Suede's debut a run for its money. A quartet of ballads - The 2 of Us, Black or Blue, The Asphalt World and Still Life - each with a stunning climax, whether string-led and grandiose (Still Life) or tortured beyond belief (The Asphalt World). The first two are transfixing; the others simply jaw-dropping. The Asphalt World, which begins like a kids’ story (“I know a girl/She walks the Asphalt World”) before being torpedoed by heartache, sexual jealousy and thin consolation, shakes with unleashed unhappiness. The band takes centre-stage near the close, as Richard Oakes unleashes a blistering guitar solo, before Brett rejoins them for the final, hurt-wracked chorus. I’ve seen them do Still Life a couple of times before, but it still gets me anew each time: a simple but epic heroin confessional, with a painfully self-aware Anderson trapped behind glass, crawling the walls, but clinging onto the idea that for all that he’s still alive. As this once-in-a-lifetime version draws to a close and the (recorded) strings swell, the crowd lifts its arms as one, for a two-minute ovation. A thank you, for the greatest record ever made.
Then things get really silly. You know Stay Together, the sensational stand-alone single that Suede never perform, because they’re apparently ashamed of it? Well, they play that. An amazing version of that. Preceded by its legendary B-sides: the heartbreaking The Living Dead and fan favourite My Dark Star. That prompts an “Oh, what?” moment from the fella next to me, as his dream setlist materialises before his very ears. Then they roll out four of the biggest successes from the night before: Killing of a Flashboy (which I had been singing all day), So Young, Metal Mickey and Animal Nitrate, as the venue threatens to erupt with delight. And then they stroll off, exiting to deafening applause and hoarse-throated shouts.
We tumble out, sweat-drenched and grinning, exclaiming the same thing: one of the best gigs I’ve ever seen, one of the best nights I’ve ever had. Better than last night? Ooh, hard to say.
Setlist:
Introducing the Band
We Are The Pigs
Heroine
The Wild Ones
Daddy's Speeding
The Power
New Generation
This Hollywood Life
The 2 of Us
Black or Blue
The Asphalt World
Still Life
Encore:
The Living Dead
My Dark Star
Stay Together
Killing of a Flash Boy
So Young
Metal Mickey
Animal Nitrate
Re: 3 night reviews
http://www.musicomh.com/music/gigs/suede_0511.htm
Suede
@ Brixton Academy, London, 21 May 2011
4/5 by Jenni Cole
As Suede finish a three-night residence at Brixton Academy, playing each of their first three albums in full (plus extras) on subsequent evenings, a little history lesson is needed to put the proceedings into proper perspective. This exercise has, after all, been largely about glorifying the past and finding themselves in the process.
Back in 1996, few but the most optimistic Suede fans would have predicted tonight's performance. Two years after the departure of lead guitarist and co-songwriter Bernard Butler, breaking up the most seminal partnership in music since Morrissey and Marr, things looked bleak, not least because the band had chosen to replace the surely irreplaceable Butler with Richard Oakes, a 17-year-old Suede fan who had seen his chance when the original guitarist departed and sent a demo tape to the band's fan club in what must have seemed like fairytale hope.
The music press balked. Even the most committed Suede fans were cautious. Little did any of them guess that rather than mark the beginning of the end for the band, Oakes signaled the opposite: the chance to return to the raw energy and glam stomp of their first album, unburdened by the overblown pomp and orchestral strivings of Dog Man Star. Oakes pulled his heroes back down from their own backsides, slapped some sense into them and catapulted them into the second phase of a career that would - certainly commercially - far eclipse the first. Suede's third album, Coming Up, produced five top 10 singles (Trash, Filmstar, Lazy, Beautiful Ones and Saturday Night) and reached number one in the UK album charts, going platinum in the process.
Tonight, undoubtedly, belongs to Oakes and he should feel damn proud of himself. Nearly 20 years after Butler's departure, rather than being a footnote in Britpop history - the more glamorous but less sustainable poor relations of Blur, Oasis and Pulp - Suede can end a three-night nostalgia trip at Brixton Academy on the up-note of an album that has not only stood the test of time but more than holds its own against the eponymous debut and Dog Man Star, performed over the previous two nights.
Coming Up, unlike perhaps either of its predecessors, is an album full of songs designed for, and at their best when, belted out with intense energy to a decent-sized venue full of adoring fans. They are the type of songs bands should make - great fun to play, great fun to listen to, not over-encumbered with trying to show how clever they are, not overly self-indulgent. They are simply great songs.
When the energy is turned down a notch or two, for the staggeringly beautiful By The Sea, for instance - their knowing tales of lives that didn't turn out quite the way we hoped while our dreams slowly seeped away cut all the deeper for the fact that the audience have now lived through such stories of their own.
Most importantly, the band - and Brett Anderson in particular - have rarely looked as if they're enjoying themselves so much. Only by living through Suede and Dog Man Star again has Anderson remembered why it didn't work with Butler first time round. Oakes is not the rebound revenge but the comfortable home where the band belongs; Bulter who was the over-demanding too-intense first love with whom a long-term relationship would never work. Just as in the mid '90s, if Suede has a future, it lies here.
If there is to be a criticism of the evening, it is perhaps that during the encore/second half of the set, four b-sides from the period is at least one too many, but this pales next to the final half hour of the performance: a run through of Can't Get Enough, from subsequent album Head Music, then the first three singles - The Drowners, Metal Mickey and Animal Nitrate, just to give a direct comparison with Coming Up that shows how far the album had come and simultaneously how closely it had returned Suede to what they were best at: infectious punk/glam chemically-fuelled energy from the slightly darker side of the tracks. It was a return to form then, and these series of concerts mark the same now.
It would be a terrible shame if this three-evening nostalgia fest, and the forthcoming festival appearances, proved to be the last chapter in the Suede story. For now, they make no promises of new material or a future beyond live performances. Yet if the concerts remind them how much fun this can be - as seems to be the case tonight - surely there must be more to come?
Suede
@ Brixton Academy, London, 21 May 2011
4/5 by Jenni Cole
As Suede finish a three-night residence at Brixton Academy, playing each of their first three albums in full (plus extras) on subsequent evenings, a little history lesson is needed to put the proceedings into proper perspective. This exercise has, after all, been largely about glorifying the past and finding themselves in the process.
Back in 1996, few but the most optimistic Suede fans would have predicted tonight's performance. Two years after the departure of lead guitarist and co-songwriter Bernard Butler, breaking up the most seminal partnership in music since Morrissey and Marr, things looked bleak, not least because the band had chosen to replace the surely irreplaceable Butler with Richard Oakes, a 17-year-old Suede fan who had seen his chance when the original guitarist departed and sent a demo tape to the band's fan club in what must have seemed like fairytale hope.
The music press balked. Even the most committed Suede fans were cautious. Little did any of them guess that rather than mark the beginning of the end for the band, Oakes signaled the opposite: the chance to return to the raw energy and glam stomp of their first album, unburdened by the overblown pomp and orchestral strivings of Dog Man Star. Oakes pulled his heroes back down from their own backsides, slapped some sense into them and catapulted them into the second phase of a career that would - certainly commercially - far eclipse the first. Suede's third album, Coming Up, produced five top 10 singles (Trash, Filmstar, Lazy, Beautiful Ones and Saturday Night) and reached number one in the UK album charts, going platinum in the process.
Tonight, undoubtedly, belongs to Oakes and he should feel damn proud of himself. Nearly 20 years after Butler's departure, rather than being a footnote in Britpop history - the more glamorous but less sustainable poor relations of Blur, Oasis and Pulp - Suede can end a three-night nostalgia trip at Brixton Academy on the up-note of an album that has not only stood the test of time but more than holds its own against the eponymous debut and Dog Man Star, performed over the previous two nights.
Coming Up, unlike perhaps either of its predecessors, is an album full of songs designed for, and at their best when, belted out with intense energy to a decent-sized venue full of adoring fans. They are the type of songs bands should make - great fun to play, great fun to listen to, not over-encumbered with trying to show how clever they are, not overly self-indulgent. They are simply great songs.
When the energy is turned down a notch or two, for the staggeringly beautiful By The Sea, for instance - their knowing tales of lives that didn't turn out quite the way we hoped while our dreams slowly seeped away cut all the deeper for the fact that the audience have now lived through such stories of their own.
Most importantly, the band - and Brett Anderson in particular - have rarely looked as if they're enjoying themselves so much. Only by living through Suede and Dog Man Star again has Anderson remembered why it didn't work with Butler first time round. Oakes is not the rebound revenge but the comfortable home where the band belongs; Bulter who was the over-demanding too-intense first love with whom a long-term relationship would never work. Just as in the mid '90s, if Suede has a future, it lies here.
If there is to be a criticism of the evening, it is perhaps that during the encore/second half of the set, four b-sides from the period is at least one too many, but this pales next to the final half hour of the performance: a run through of Can't Get Enough, from subsequent album Head Music, then the first three singles - The Drowners, Metal Mickey and Animal Nitrate, just to give a direct comparison with Coming Up that shows how far the album had come and simultaneously how closely it had returned Suede to what they were best at: infectious punk/glam chemically-fuelled energy from the slightly darker side of the tracks. It was a return to form then, and these series of concerts mark the same now.
It would be a terrible shame if this three-evening nostalgia fest, and the forthcoming festival appearances, proved to be the last chapter in the Suede story. For now, they make no promises of new material or a future beyond live performances. Yet if the concerts remind them how much fun this can be - as seems to be the case tonight - surely there must be more to come?
Re: 3 night reviews
cool!!! 
Re: 3 night reviews
Suede
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O2 Academy Brixton SW9
Suede relive their youth through golden songs
Sorely missed: Suede played their albums in full over three gigs
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By John Aizlewood
23 May 2011
Few things are exchanged quite so smoothly as money and old rope. Hence the trend of bands whom the present is bypassing to play favourite albums in full.
It makes for a stress-free evening: the audience know what they're going to hear (and in what order) and the band know the kind of reception they'll get.
Tellingly, though, of Suede's three Brixton nights featuring their first three albums, only the one featuring their second and best, 1994's Dog Man Star, sold out. In exhuming it, the problem remains that inspirational guitarist Bernard Butler departed between its completion and release. Despite a lukewarm 2004 reunion with Suede leader Brett Anderson as The Tears, you suspect that all the wild horses on Dartmoor wouldn't drag Butler (now a successful producer) into a Suede rematch.
As if bowing to the elephant who wasn't in the room, Anderson kept shtum during an evening comprised of Dog Man Star, plus assorted B-sides and non-album singles of the era.
Surprisingly, though, Suede were more engaged than you might imagine and while Anderson may not have spoken, the loose-limbed ham bounced his way through almost every song and between them milked the audience with the strut of a pop king and a grin as wide as the rift with Butler.
It all made for a special atmosphere: the crowd relived its youth and Anderson relived his fame.
Helpfully, Dog Man Star has aged rather well and, lest we forget, Richard Oakes was always an excellent replacement for Butler. The Wild Ones soared as both a great Britpop moment and arguably Suede's best, but the less heralded New Generation and the luxurious The Asphalt World were revelatory. For all Suede's brittleness of sound and voice, these golden songs from a bygone age were unmistakeably moving.
The lengthy, breakneck-paced encore corralled the missing links. Both Anderson's solo showcase, The Living Dead, a ghoulish, unflinching depiction of a love affair with heroin and the rip-roaring Killing Of A Flash Boy still seemed too strong to have missed the Dog Man Star cut.
So it looks as if we've missed Suede far more than we'd ever imagined.
http://www.thisislondon.co.uk/music/rev ... n-songs.do
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O2 Academy Brixton SW9
Suede relive their youth through golden songs
Sorely missed: Suede played their albums in full over three gigs
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By John Aizlewood
23 May 2011
Few things are exchanged quite so smoothly as money and old rope. Hence the trend of bands whom the present is bypassing to play favourite albums in full.
It makes for a stress-free evening: the audience know what they're going to hear (and in what order) and the band know the kind of reception they'll get.
Tellingly, though, of Suede's three Brixton nights featuring their first three albums, only the one featuring their second and best, 1994's Dog Man Star, sold out. In exhuming it, the problem remains that inspirational guitarist Bernard Butler departed between its completion and release. Despite a lukewarm 2004 reunion with Suede leader Brett Anderson as The Tears, you suspect that all the wild horses on Dartmoor wouldn't drag Butler (now a successful producer) into a Suede rematch.
As if bowing to the elephant who wasn't in the room, Anderson kept shtum during an evening comprised of Dog Man Star, plus assorted B-sides and non-album singles of the era.
Surprisingly, though, Suede were more engaged than you might imagine and while Anderson may not have spoken, the loose-limbed ham bounced his way through almost every song and between them milked the audience with the strut of a pop king and a grin as wide as the rift with Butler.
It all made for a special atmosphere: the crowd relived its youth and Anderson relived his fame.
Helpfully, Dog Man Star has aged rather well and, lest we forget, Richard Oakes was always an excellent replacement for Butler. The Wild Ones soared as both a great Britpop moment and arguably Suede's best, but the less heralded New Generation and the luxurious The Asphalt World were revelatory. For all Suede's brittleness of sound and voice, these golden songs from a bygone age were unmistakeably moving.
The lengthy, breakneck-paced encore corralled the missing links. Both Anderson's solo showcase, The Living Dead, a ghoulish, unflinching depiction of a love affair with heroin and the rip-roaring Killing Of A Flash Boy still seemed too strong to have missed the Dog Man Star cut.
So it looks as if we've missed Suede far more than we'd ever imagined.
http://www.thisislondon.co.uk/music/rev ... n-songs.do