“Lincoln, you have not been a Monday night crowd, they can be a bit funny,“ says Suede frontman Brett Anderson just before then band exit the stage for the final time. “You’re more than just watchers, you got involved.”
It’s doubly true. For multiple obvious reasons, Monday can be an underwhelming gig experience for both bands and audiences (I’ve come to almost resent it when bands I like hit town that day). But within this giant, red brick, converted 19th century steam engine shed, the capacity 1500 crowd respond fervently from the very start.
It says something about Suede’s partial rejection of heritage act status that they can successfully begin the night with the three songs that open their latest album, Antidepressants. Anderson, a lean lithe figure, clad in a black open necked shirt and tight trousers, runs on, already live-wired, the screen behind displaying chorus surtitles, so the crowd can (and do) sing along to “Disintegrate”, “Dancing With the Europeans” and the album’s title track.
Suede’s creative renaissance partly replaces their Nineties Britpop fop persona with something flintier, a tint of long-ago and dark-clad new wave; Bauhaus, Magazine, John McGeoch et al. And unlike many bands of this vintage, the crowd is not all chrome-domed BBC 6Music grandads. The age range is wide and there are lots of women.
Anderson has developed a shouty voice for snarlier material. “I look in my house, it’s a luxury design/But there's shit on the walls that I'm hiding behind,” he barks, afterwards offering to help us “through the chain link fence to the miserable field of Suedeworld”.
This is a rock performance, no theatrical bells and whistles. The band is in black and tight, guitarists Richard Oakes and Neil Codling playing off each other in dissonant attack mode, 6’4” bassist Mat Osman jigging around to his own rhythms. The screen behind mostly offers black’n’white broken video cassette specks, lines and distortion, albeit amoeba-ish blobs appear alongside mauve and green stage lighting for 1999 slowie “Indian Strings”.
The set includes six songs from Antidepressants and three more from their last album, the gnarly resurgence of Autofiction, one of them the bullishly charged “Shadow Self”. But they are equally happy to go off-piste with deep cuts for fans, such as psychedelic 1992 B-side “To the Birds” (featuring some well-practiced hand-to-hand mic-swinging), a pindrop performance of 2018 single “Flytipping” accompanied only by Neil Codling on piano, and even an as-yet-unrecorded new one, the punky “Tribe” (“No-one ever gave a fuck about me”!).
And, of course, there are the hits, “Trash” and “Animal Nitrate” early on, then a closing triple-header of “So Young”, “Metal Mickey” and “Beautiful Ones”. They are not thrown away, as some legacy bands do with songs they’ve played a billion times, but delivered with passion and panache, especially “Beautiful Ones” which they've turned into an extended, enjoyable, ritualistic “la la la” sing-along, before returning for one encore number, Autofiction’s “The Only Way I Can Love You”.
I confess I had no time for Suede in the 1990s. They struck me as pastiche rock stars, supported by inky music mag writers desperate for retrogressive guitar music in an age when rave and electronica were the real deal, the riveting vanguard explosion. But now, as Brett Anderson sticks his tongue out like Gene Simmons of KISS and whirls his mic round his head, his commitment and the band’s staunch musical chops are welcome. Even on a Monday night, they’re a compelling live turn. In an age when most guitar-centric male performers are whiny, leisurewear-clad, social media people-pleasers, Suede’s snarky poseur energy is a breath of fresh air.
Below: watch Suede perform "Disintegrate" live on Later... with Jools Holland
