Suede have a kind of holy grail clasped between their long, artistic fingers – figuratively speaking. The ultimate prize for any enduring band is acclaim for their latest music as well as their foundational hits. Thirty years on from their self-titled debut album, recently rereleased, they are selling out tours, twice in one year, and have lined up hefty shows for 2024 alongside Manic Street Preachers. The rising 90s revival tide has lifted many of the era’s other best bands: Pulp had a feted reunion this summer; Blur played mammoth gigs and released one of the best albums of their career. Oasis aren’t really part of this calculus, but Liam Gallagher’s Definitely Maybe anniversary stadium shows next year should be noted.
Suede are no mere nostalgia act. Fifteen months since their last album, Autofiction, dropped – it’s just out again in deluxe form – the audience is baying the words to its songs back at singer Brett Anderson with spit-flecked commitment. It seems like “the litter on the breeze” – as Suede’s totemic 1996 song Trash had it – has become a kind of white plastic bag dancing on unseen thermals, as in the film American Beauty.
Since The Drowners, their 1992 debut single, captured a complicated sexual encounter with ambivalent pronouns, Suede at their best have combined a kind of outsider effeteness with a hungry, high-strung sound and real skin-on-skin concerns. Sweat is a very Suede substance. Bodies on mattresses in varying states of disarray adorn many of their record sleeves for a reason.
The lineup that made seven of their nine records remains reassuringly intact in 2023. And Anderson – cheetah-lithe, exuberant, shirt ruched to his back with sweat – pulls out his very best Anderson moves from atop a monitor tonight, whirling his microphone around on a long leash, skilfully not clouting anyone in the front rows. He becomes very friendly with the crowd, going walkabout to sing The Drowners and The Beautiful Ones.
If, as tradition has it, the audience headed to the bar every time a well-loved band played a new song, this gig would resemble a sped-up mass wildebeest migration, back and forth, all night. They don’t, remaining lustily on board for 2022 tracks such as Personality Disorder. Anderson rewards them by dropping to his knees. Roughly half tonight’s tunes come from Autofiction, which Anderson repeatedly refers to as his band’s “best album”. He smiles. “I’ve got graphs to prove it.”
Suede originally split up in 2003 after a trio of great records (Suede, 1994’s Dog Man Star and parts of 1996’s Coming Up), one so-so LP (Head Music, 1999) and one dud (A New Morning, 2002). They reunited live in 2010. Beginning in 2013, a hat-trick of well-received comeback albums reintroduced the band as a more mature concern, with Anderson addressing all sorts of adult themes – and unsexy ones at that – with more seasoned romanticism and literate self-reflection.
Billed as a more direct record – a “punk” album, no less – that sought to capture the band’s live sound, Autofiction has become the cherry on the cake that Suede were having, and eating. Set-opener Turn Off Your Brain and Yell exemplifies this amped, back-to-basics energy. Even more aggro is Black Ice, a near-death wish of a song – about how love should feel risky – that’s nigh on thuggish in its execution. By contrast, one of Autofiction’s biggest surprises is She Still Leads Me On, a song not about some wan, troubled sexual partner on a bare mattress, but about Anderson’s late mother, who died right before Suede became famous.
By and large, though, the band are highly charged tonight. The drawback is that somewhere along the line, they traded in impeccable art school sources – the Smiths, Roxy Music and David Bowie – for more formulaic indie rock with occasional glam guitars. Suede’s best music always sounded consumptive and wired, not oversaturated and foursquare. As the set goes on, you yearn for some more space between the instruments, some bpm variation.
Anderson’s Bowie fixation (specifically, Rock’n’Roll Suicide) remains rewarding on a pair of solo tracks on guitar – Another No One, originally the moving B-side to Trash, and an acoustic version of The Wild Ones. But there are many other interesting paths to travel with a Bowie hangup. No one is clamouring for a Kid A-style reinvention, or a James Murphy-style genetic splicing of Bowie into club-pop titans LCD Soundsystem, but it’s remarkable how sonically conservative Suede have remained.
The problem has been compounded on this “punk” album – it’s really a post-punk album that has ended up faintly gothic. Personality Disorder’s guitar line recalls the Cult. 15 Again suffers from a similar dry-ice overload. Shadow Self instead tilts at the Sisters of Mercy.
It would be ridiculous to deny Suede, beloved standard-bearers for anti-machoism in the face of Britpop laddishness, their continuing success. But you long for a flash of silveriness in their songs, a lightness of touch; an element of risk.
