51. Suede
Royal Albert Hall
30 March 2014
There we were, sat in a box at the Royal Albert Hall, rattling our jewellery in true Lennon-disdained fashion, watching Suede perform a charity gig for the Teenage Cancer Trust. The billing promised the full, unfiltered Dog Man Star, start to finish, and the moment the sleazy, smouldering guitar slide of Introducing the Band oozed through the speakers, you knew this wasn’t just a concert. This was going to be an event.
Enter Brett Anderson: part androgynous peacock, part indie snake-charmer, slithering and strutting about with a gangly elegance that could make a flamingo blush. Decked out in spray-on black skinny trousers and wielding floppy hair like a weapon, he commanded the stage with a foot-on-monitor pose so iconic it should be printed on currency. When he launched into “We Are the Pigs” and “The Wild Ones”, the music hit us with a wave of nostalgia, it’s been ages since you dusted off Dog Man Star, hasn’t it? And wow, what an album.
This wasn’t just the record that fractured Suede, it was the molten core of the entire genre they accidentally gave birth to while attempting to make something far more bizarre and baroque. Where Blur were chirpy and Oasis were shouty and Stone Roses were still looking for their second album, Dog Man Star stood alone, brooding in the corner like a misunderstood genius in a velvet smoking jacket.
You can hear the loathing between Anderson and Bernard Butler in every note. At this point in 1994, they were reportedly communicating exclusively via cassette tapes, each one presumably dipped in passive-aggression. Butler would send over sprawling instrumental epics that screamed, “Try putting lyrics to this, you glam-obsessed show pony.” Anderson, never one to blink, would fire back with lyrics soaked in torch-song melodrama, as if to say, “Game on, Bernard.” The creative friction was nuclear, and it birthed an album that still feels like it came from a more glamorous, slightly weirder parallel universe.
And here’s the kicker: live, thirty years on, it sounds even better. Somehow richer, grander, more alive. Where so many Britpop albums now feel like relics of a particularly shouty pub argument happening in the Nineties, Dog Man Star remains weightless, untouched by time, impervious to fashion, moody as hell.
The second half of the show was less séance, more riot. Suede ditched the dramatics and hit the crowd with an avalanche of bangers: “Animal Nitrate”, “Metal Mickey”, “Trash”, “Beautiful Ones”. The Royal Albert Hall transformed into a swirling mass of middle-aged euphoria, like a very stylish school reunion where everyone remembered all the lyrics and forgot their dodgy ankles.
By the encore, Brett Anderson was windmilling around the stage, whip cracking us back to the mid-Nineties. And you know what? It worked. All of it. This wasn’t just nostalgia; it was a reassertion. Suede didn’t just survive Britpop. They outlived it, outclassed it, and tonight, they outshone quite a lot that came after it.
Still strutting. Still wiggling. Trousers still defying structural integrity. Suede, ladies and gentlemen: the immortal, glitter-drenched phoenix of British music.