Doing something that you’ve always wanted to do is incredibly scary. The chances of you being let down are worryingly high and when you’ve fantasised about something for so long, how can the reality ever even come close to it? Dreams do come true, actually.
Picture me, if you’d be so kind, sitting in my parents living room watching MTV2. I’m fourteen, which makes it 2002. I should imagine my hair is black, I’m wearing a Korn hoodie and fifty thousand cheap plastic bracelets. A video comes on I’ve not seen before. Who the chuffing heck is this? The lead singer is so beautiful! What a voice! What style! A month later, a poster the size of one wall is up in my bedroom, and I sleep in the gaze of dark eyes. Within two months I own the entire back catalogue of the band.
So yes, Suede. I’ve waited eleven long years to see them live. No pressure.
The evening passes in a blur of car, train, tube, bus and then after being thoroughly inspected by the very friendly ticket man I’m running and running across a wide hall to the strains of “Barriers”. That image will stay with me for a long time. If you saw a girl in a green dress and huge boots running like her arse was on fire that would have been me. Owing to some moves a contortionist would be proud of, I actually get quite near the front considering I didn’t get to London until the band had been due on stage for ten minutes. Impressive.
I love Suede. I really do. Easily in my top ten bands. Britpop and indie are my passion. Whilst Pulp are in the kitchen, holding the fort on drama over the kitchen sink with a cup of tea, Suede would saunter right past them with a bottle of whiskey and take the drama to the bedroom. They represent everything that London is and was, the cool people, the skinny limbs and drinking and smoking, a vast city drowning in dying hopes and forgotten dreams. They pull you in to a world of something dark and mysterious, somewhere where love and pain and joy and anger are written in song form for your consumption.
Here is the set list from the gig, thanks to setlist.fm for uploading this:-
- Barriers
- Snowblind
- It Starts and Ends With You
- Animal Nitrate
- Metal Mickey
- We Are The Pigs
- Sleeping Pills
- Sometimes I Feel I’ll Float Away
- Hit Me
- Filmstar
- Killing of a Flashboy
- The Wild Ones
- Pantomime Horse
- The Drowners
- Can’t Get Enough
- Everything Will Flow
- For the Strangers
- So Young
- Trash
- Beautiful Ones
Encore:
- Sabotage
- Saturday Night
- New Generation
What you’re looking at there is perfection, in case you didn’t know. That is a beautiful blend of old and new, the absolute hits and the ones that were never hits but everybody loves anyway. If you don’t own the new album “Bloodsports”, I can’t really recommend it enough, particularly after seeing it performed live.
The band is astonishingly good live. I mean, really, really good. AlexandraPalace did a slamming job on the sounds as well- each element was perfect, not too loud and not too quiet. The guitarist was dressed like a mod and seemed to be able to play nineteen cords simultaneously, didn’t seem to break a sweat once and casually sang along with Brett like he was making a sandwich or something else equally banal. The bassist was possibly the tallest person in the world, which is helpful if you’re not that tall like me, and seem to have stood behind some kind of man-giant. The drummer looked like a Disney octopus, his arms were moving so fast it was a blur.
Then there was Brett. AlexandraPalace is a massive venue. I was about eleven or twelve rows from the front. It was dark in there. And I could still see his cheekbones. He’s a skinny as he ever was in his younger days and was wearing a shirt half unbuttoned and slim trousers. This is a man from whom charisma drips like he just took a shower in it. He couldn’t work behind the till at Curry’s, it just couldn’t be. Like Bowie and Jagger and Iggy, he was born to be a star. He didn’t stand still once, jumping and dancing, he sang 23 songs with a break of all about 3 minutes, jumped into the crowd down the front, and stood on a speaker wiggling his tiny hips like he’s your Daddy. Beautiful man. I was biting my own hair in sheer frustration.
The two most defining moments for me were The Drowners and Animal Nitrate. The Drowners is my favourite Suede song and me and one of my friends who came were torturing ourselves reading back through old set lists where it didn’t seem to appear. The Drowners is loud and heavy, it’s a song with weight and has the slow, melodic Suede guitar sound that’s like swimming in treacle. It’s provocative and dirty, and rumour has it that it’s about anal sex. It’s Brett flashing a cheeky card at the audience, hinting at him and another man, but it’s a hint, not a blatant statement. Roxy Music has one of my favourite lines in “Love Is the Drug” with “I say go, she says yes, dim the lights, you can guess the rest”- which is a steaming triumph of a raised eyebrow in lyric form. The Drowners is like that. It’s like watching a girl in a low cut top bending over, or a man with a rippling back about to take his shirt off, and being stuck forever in your nearly-not-quite.
Being as everybody at any gig is generally both a fan and British, give us a pint and a pie and we’ll have a sing along anywhere. When people come to see you live, they want to sing along. You can trust that the audience know every word. Suede didn’t muck about with their songs- it was played and sung exactly as we know it, giving everybody with a voice the chance to chuck their head back and belt it out. I know it must be hard as a musician to play the same song over and over, but you have to give the crowd what they want. The timing and lyrics were precisely as we knew them, and singing along with thirty thousand other people makes me feel powerful enough to fly.
Animal Nitrate is perhaps Suede’s best known song amongst non-fans secondly only to “Beautiful Ones” (which even my Mum has- she has very fine taste in music indeed but we disagree on a lot of it). I was overjoyed they played it and in my opinion, it was the song that Brett seemed to enjoying singing the most. It’s an anthem and it’s addictive, like a bar of rich chocolate you will go back for more. The lyrics are harsh and unkind, disturbing and maddeningly real. It’s kind of evil and hulking, like running away from a monster.
Suede also had a large screen behind them, projecting images while they performed. The images were the single cover of each of their songs, or the album cover when appropriate. The Drowners is a man in a three piece suit and hat, holding a large cigar and a revolver. Animal Nitrate is a man in a sharp suit, wearing a pigs head which he is pulling up hard on the ears. It’s a pretty vile image, but it gives you so much more reason to sing until your lungs sting “Animal, he was animal. He’s just an animal.”
When you review something, you are supposed to critique it. The clue is in the title isn’t it, you’re being a critic about it. I’m afraid on this gig, I can’t. I can’t ask for anything else. Venue, perfect. Band, perfect. Performance and set list, perfect. Standing on tiptoes, waiting to fly, and you flew.
I’ve waited a long time for this. Thanks to money and me not bothering to check websites, too long. I danced around my room to song after song, stuck posters on the wall and dreamed and hoped. Remember that thing you always wanted for your birthday? Well, here it is, wrapped perfectly and lovingly and yes it’s all yours, and yes, you can keep it.
Memories are beautiful things. I have mine forever.
Thank you to Suede and Alexandra Palace, and to my wonderful friends for coming with me.
