13 February 2016
Britpop band Suede go hell for leather on the opening night of their short UK tour
By Graeme Thomson for The Mail on Sunday
GIG OF THE WEEK Suede Royal Concert Hall, Glasgow
Rating: 4/5
The hype around Suede’s emergence in 1992 – anointed ‘Best New Band in Britain’ by Melody Maker before they had released a single – suggested a group built for a sprint rather than a marathon.Yet here they are, almost 25 years later, outrunning Oasis, Pulp and the rest of their loosely affiliated Britpop peers. Since reuniting in 2010, Suede have enhanced their legacy with two fine albums: 2013’s Bloodsports and Night Thoughts, released last month.
There have always been two sides to Suede. Their trashy guitar aesthetic harks back to the playful, provocative days of glam rock, but they’re equally beholden to a suffocating – and very English – sense of urban despair. They embraced both obsessions on the opening night of a short UK tour that ends at the O2 Academy, Leeds, tonight – a two-hour Jekyll-and-Hyde affair as challenging as it is powerful As the title suggests, Night Thoughts is more J G Ballard than Marc Bolan. Such is their confidence in it that during the first half of the show Suede play the entire album in sequence, accompanied by Roger Sargent’s bespoke 50-minute film.
It’s a typically grandiose and risky conceit. The film opens with a figure walking into the sea and then plays out a series of scenes from the life of a drowning man whose family has undergone a devastating tragedy. Zoolander 2 it is not. As the band perform behind the movie screen, shadowed and uncommunicative, music, movement and images synch impressively.
It’s powerful and beautifully realised, but boy is it bleak. No Tomorrow, Like Kids and What I’m Trying To Tell You sparkle like classic Suede, but Night Thoughts is otherwise heavy on ballads. After almost an hour of melancholia with a side-order of relentlessly unsettling visual cues, Glasgow is ready for catharsis.
When they tried to break America, the band ran into a trademark dispute with successful New York cabaret singer Suede. Hence, in the US, they go under the name 'The London Suede'. Thankfully, where part one was cerebral and immersive, part two is a kinetic joy, the audience rewarded for its forbearance with a set bursting with hits and oldies.
Brett Anderson steps into the spotlight to sing the swaggering This Hollywood Life, looking and sounding indecently well preserved for a man who came close to a drug-induced demise in the Nineties. The mood goes from contemporary arts centre to heaving club. ‘Ya sexy b******!’ yells one woman approvingly. In crisp shirt and black trousers, Anderson is more peak-period Dirk Bogarde than Britpop wastrel these days, but he remains a magnificent frontman, buzzing with charisma and vitality. By Trash he’s throwing himself into the crowd – twice!! Suede’s youthful provocations, Animal Nitrate, Metal Mickey, So Young, crackle with frenzied energy and still sound remarkably cool and contemporary. Following singalong acoustic renditions of This Time and Everything Will Flow, a closing New Generation, from 1994’s brooding Dog Man Star, captures the blend of nostalgia and futurism that always defined Suede – and which, remarkably, appears to be more effective than ever.
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