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.
