12/10/18 Hammersmith Apollo

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sunshine
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12/10/18 Hammersmith Apollo

Post by sunshine »

They played an amazin show in London: As One, Wastelands (Gauze Out), Outsiders, Pigs, So Young, Heroine, Drowners, He's Dead (Gauze in), Tides, RoadKill (Gauze Out), Sabotage, Dolly, Starts and Ends, Filmstar, Mickey, Trash, Nitrate, Pantomime Horse (acoustic ), 2 Of Us, Invisibles, Flytipping
Encores: Beautiful Ones, Life is Golden.
sunshine
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Re: 12/10/18 Hammersmith Apollo

Post by sunshine »

Suede review – more stellar than ever in a tremendous primal celebration
5 out of 5 stars.
Eventim Apollo, London
Brooding menace and quasi-paganism replace urban sleaze as a feral Brett Anderson gives it his all in a staggering performance
Ian Gittins
Sun 14 Oct 2018
Suede were never a group who looked designed for longevity. From the slashed chords of their 1992 debut single, The Drowners, onwards, this wham-bam-thank-you-glam band’s natural pitch has always been one of overwrought melodrama. The smart money was on a showy early-career implosion.
There was, indeed, a seven-year hiatus from 2003 to 2010, but this most louche and hyperventilating of bands are now eight years and three albums into their second life. Remarkably, in spite of their advancing years, they are today a more stellar and formidable live concern than ever.
Their recent, eighth album, The Blue Hour – completing a supposed triptych since their reunion – is a vast and vivid affair, described by reliably earnest frontman Brett Anderson as a “very complicated record”. It’s a shadowy concept piece, strongly influenced by the singer’s move from London to Somerset just before he wrote it.
Anderson has homed in on the dark, seamy downside of country life as relentlessly as Suede had previously always dealt in urban sleaze. Tonight’s opening track, As One, is so heavy with brooding menace and quasi-pagan lyrical symbolism that you half expect to glimpse Edward Woodward roasting in a giant wicker effigy behind the band.
Wastelands is similarly portentous and powered by the kind of hefty, girder-like riffs that guitarist Richard Oakes has ladled all over the album. Thrillingly, it also boasts the kind of soaring chorus that Suede used to toss off in their sleep, with Anderson’s voice simultaneously as shrill and resonant as ever.
The singer appears to have struck an illicit Dorian Gray-style deal at some point down the line. Still a preposterously snake-hipped, slick mover at 51, he Jagger-struts and pouts, swinging his mic lead like Chaplin’s cane, leaping from monitors with supple grace. He’s a teasing, antsy conduit for the music’s restless drive.
There is something of the night about Suede’s albums, but their gigs have always been a primal celebration. The deviant rallying call We Are the Pigs remains a great wantonly transgressive glam-rock anthem, while the band being now in middle age gives 1993 single So Young a fresh defiance. Somehow, absurdly, they carry it off.
In a clever visual device, they play the unfamiliar material from The Blue Hour behind a transparent curtain, which drops when they fire into the oldies. Of the former, the atmospheric Tides is a meditation upon euphorically drowning, quintessential Suede subject matter; on the spoken-word Roadkill, they appear to be channelling Roald Dahl.
As the night goes on, the wild-eyed Anderson gets ever more intense and feral. Short of Iggy Pop-style chest-gouging, it’s hard to imagine a more committed performance. He snarls the curdled Trash as if on the verge of ecstatic spontaneous combustion. When he suddenly looms up 10 feet from me in the front of the crowd, he is so sweat-soaked he seems to be melting.
For the lewd, venal Animal Nitrate, Suede’s 1993 Top 10 hit about the selfish thrill of using poppers during sex, the singer crawls on all fours to convey the blood-rush of that cheapest of kicks. His decision to play the similarly debauched Pantomime Horse alone, as an acoustic ballad, is both audacious and successful.
“If you don’t know the words to this, I don’t know why you’re here!” smirks Anderson, before encoring with band manifesto Beautiful Ones. Then the closing, new track, Life Is Golden, seemingly written for his young son, radiates a quality Suede have never embraced: sheer, unfettered positivity. It’s a tremendous end to a frequently staggering night.

https://www.theguardian.com/music/2018/ ... t-anderson
sunshine
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Re: 12/10/18 Hammersmith Apollo

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Some pictures:
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sunshine
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Posts: 7937
Joined: 14 Feb 2002, 01:00

Re: 12/10/18 Hammersmith Apollo

Post by sunshine »

15 October 2018
Suede are still febrile, furious and frenetic, live at the Eventim Apollo
By Tom Hocknell
Years and years before contemporary tastes for androgyny, before Christine & the Queens and, well, Years & Years, there was Moloko and Pete Burns, and Bowie, of course.
And then there were press-darlings Suede, strutting amongst the booze, football and fags of Brit Pop like a diamond in the coalface. Brett Anderson folded himself around Bernard Butler, their virtuoso guitarist at the time, like drying washing, while flirting with the press: ‘I’m a bisexual man who never had a homosexual experience.’ He knew exactly where his band lay; in the jet trail of Bowie’s art rock, in the limits of city neon in empty back streets, Morrissey’s fluidity and Bryan Ferry’s rakish Roxy Music.
Suede wisely called it a day after diminishing returns in 2002, but over the course of three albums since 2013, they have made a startling return to form, finding an older, more reflective voice. They were always the vintage shop to Pulp’s charity shop and Anderson, for a man who likes to strip his shirt to his belt, is svelte as ever. Although it’s hard to imagine him in anything but drainpipes there’s the suspicion that - in rather un-Suede-like fashion - he’s been to the gym.
For sold out gigs supporting new album The Blue Hour, Suede initially appear as large shadows behind a curtain until, amongst their uniform black, Anderson appears in a navy blue shirt, clutching the microphone in his familiar garrote-like grip. "As One", the ice cold dramatic opener, is quickly followed by the similarly new "Wastelands" and 2016’s "Outsiders". They’re both vintage Suede, all effortless searing guitar and anthemic lyrics while Anderson leaps about the stage like it’s his personal trampoline. Meanwhile guitarist Richard Oakes, recruited at 17 after Butler’s early departure, has long-since buried his predecessor’s ghost.
Suede have changed line-ups, yet remain true to band party policy. Stalwarts Simon Gilbert and Matt Osman remain the bedrock, while songwriting foil, guitarist and keyboardist Neil Coding has not only grown his hair, but become the backbone of the band,. The new album is influenced by Anderson’s move to the country, but anyone worried they have traded urban decadence for bucolic bliss can rest easy: it’s all rusting barbed wire, dead badgers and fly-tipping. And they’re playing out of their skins, like Dad’s escaping Peppa Pig reruns and taking no prisoners. Anderson finds himself in the adoring crowd more than on stage for the victorious triple whammy of "We are the Pigs", "So Young" and the "Drowners", as Oakes’ guitar squalls like a Home Counties ZZ Top.
Sweat drenched from the Rolling Stones-esque "Film Star" and the heart-shattering night ride home of "Metal Mickey", Anderson takes a breather from catapulting himself off speaker stacks for a solo spot on "Pantomime Horse", but it’s thankfully short-lived. The rest of the band soon return.
As a live act they lose all pretention. It’s tight, visceral rock - at least until there’s a poem - and more songs from The Blue Hour that ruin the momentum a little. They play seven, which is a few too many, but it keeps the band happy. Thankfully it’s saved by the encore of "The Beautiful Ones": a Suede mega mix of crowd-led la-las, gasoline, drag acts, drug acts, and suicides. It’s riotous. That it is Friday night perhaps explains the criminal absence of "Saturday Night" - instead, they close with the drifting embrace of "Life is Golden". Otherwise, there are few complaints. Suede are the Smiths that never went away.
https://www.thelineofbestfit.com/review ... iews/suede
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