One legendary indie behemoth alone is not enough? Then luckily alt-rock’s hottest double-header ticket of the year landed in the Alexandra Palace grounds last night like a précis of all the dream Glastonburys you missed in the Nineties.
Don’t call it a Britpop package tour. The Manic Street Preachers and Suede are arguably the two greatest and most influential acts that stood proudly above and apart from that scene, making them ideologically perfect touring partners.
Having alternated headline slots across North America in 2022, they hit London as the classiest Nineties rock co-headliners until Radiohead jump in a van with Spiritualized. And probably not even then.
Up first, shades on against the setting sun and with bassist Nicky Wire high-kicking around in a glam bingo callers’ jacket, the Manics clearly got the memo titled “crowd-pleasers only”.
Barely had an existential Anne Sexton quote flashed across the screens than Wales’ glory rock intellectuals were into a scorching You Love Us, a soaring Everything Must Go and a poignant Motorcycle Emptiness graced with archive footage of long-missing – and missed - guitarist Richey Edwards in his glam freak prime.
Every song was an encore-worthy blow-out, for all their weighty themes. The Anchoress appeared in a shocking pink suit for their anti-exploitation anthem Little Baby Nothing, while Wire declared Kevin Carter – about the photographer who died by suicide after taking a Pulitzer Prize winning photo of a starving Sudanese child – an example of lyricist Edwards’ “esoteric intelligence and forlorn beauty”.
Unfortunately, someone had hired the PA system of a small village fete, robbing tracks like You Stole the Sun From My Heart of their inherent punch and the occasion of the magnitude it deserved. Still, the dynamic glam Your Love Alone Is Not Enough had wallop built in, and A Design for Life, even stripped of bombastic volume, carried historic weight.
Luckily Suede, in the headline slot, could play through a digital kettle and still be the most visceral live act on the planet today. The band are still coasting on the critical plaudits for 2022’s back-to-basics Autofiction – “our best album,” singer Brett Anderson boldly claimed, panther prowling onstage to that record’s doom-pop howl Turn Off Your Brain and Yell.
But Anderson, grown ever-more rabid with age, was soon out in the crowd bawling The Drowners, shaking his snake hips to original indie sleaze tunes like Animal Nitrate, Metal Mickey and Filmstar and roaring the operatic ballad Still Life as if to reach his old Highgate drug den.
The crowd, unwilling to let such a momentous night whimper by, were in full-throated singalong come Saturday Night, Trash and Beautiful Ones, rescuing a potential damp squib for the history books. Now might we dare dream of Blur versus Oasis: The Knebworth Knockout?
