At first glance, the pairing of the Manic Street Preachers and Suede at the concert I attended at Singapore’s Star Theatre on November 22nd seemed the musical equivalent of Neil Simon’s play The Odd Couple (1965). Famous for their left-wing politics, the Manics got together as a band while they were at a comprehensive school in south Wales and they’ve forged a sound described by their Wikipedia page as variously ‘alternative’, ‘hard’, ‘punk’ and ‘glam’ rock. The founders of Suede, on the other hand, put their band together while they were at University College London. They were influenced by David Bowie and Roxy Music and their Wikipedia page describes their music with, among other things, the dreaded term ‘arthouse rock’.
Yes, as a former London university-student, Brett Anderson, Suede’s singer, lyricist and general lynchpin, seemed to me far removed from James Dean Bradfield and the other working-class Welsh lads in the Manic Street Preachers. Which is unfair of me, as Anderson is actually the son of a taxi-driver. (Maybe the name ‘Brett’ makes me biased. The only other Brett I can think of is Lord Brett Sinclair, the posh playboy aristocrat played by Roger Moore in that dreadful / brilliant old TV show from 1972, The Persuaders.)
Still, in certain ways, the two bands are similar. Both achieved success in the early 1990s, shortly before the advent of the Britpop movement that briefly set the world – or, at least, set those excitable hacks in the English media – on fire. And instead of worshipping 1960s outfits like the Beatles and the Kinks, like the Britpop musicians did, the Manics and Suede were inspired by other things, such as the aforementioned punk rock and David Bowie.
Anyway, having experienced the Manics on the evening of the 22nd, I then sat through an hour-and-a-half of Suede. And I was surprised. I’d never seen the band before and I’d assumed that Brett Anderson was a cerebral, aesthetic type, not given to extroversion. At least, that was the impression I’d got from interviews with him I’d read. (I also seem to remember reading an interview that he’d conducted once, with one of his heroes, Brian Eno.) So, I didn’t expect him to be the showman that he was tonight. He strutted around, dropped dramatically onto his knees, perched himself on top of the front stage lights, and a couple of times descended into the stalls, where he prowled between the stage and the barrier holding back the audience. He even went behind the barrier and into the audience. He was a pretty belligerent in his showmanship too, constantly getting the crowd going, goading them to sing along and clap their hands. This was Freddie Mercury with attitude.
The set-list was weighted with songs from their eponymous first album, released in 1993, and their most recent album, 2022’s Autofiction, which between them accounted for more than half the numbers played. Autofiction has been described as a ‘back-to-basics triumph’ and its songs slotted in seamlessly with the jagged, urgent sound of early 1990s classics like Animal Nitrate, Metal Mickey and So Young. Since Anderson is now in his fifties, with So Young he must be starting to feel like the Who’s Roger Daltrey every time he sings the ‘Hope I die before I get old’ line from 1965’s My Generation.
I was slightly disappointed that almost nothing was featured from 1994’s Dog Man Star, Suede’s second album, which is my favourite thing among their output. Mind you, the one item from Dog Man Star that was played, The Wild Ones, was certainly memorable. Anderson performed it by himself, on acoustic guitar, and made it even more memorable by preceding it with a rant at certain members of the audience who were filming the show on their phones. He pleaded: “It’s so much better if you could possibly put your phones down… Put your f**king phones down. If you want to film, go to the back. Don’t take up space out here. These people want to have fun. If you want to stare at you f**king phone, go to the f**king back. Am I right…? It just kills the gig.”
Being at the rear end, and at the very top, of the auditorium – from where the theatre’s lower level had looked so densely flecked with dots of phone-light that I sometimes felt I was flying over a city at night-time – I hadn’t been able to see precisely what Anderson was doing during his forays into the stalls. However, according to the following day’s report in the Straits Times newspaper, he’d “tussled with a front-row male audience member, demanding that he put down his device” and “leapt over the barricade… confronted those in the front section of the venue who were busy filming him… started pushing fans’ hands down, grabbing phones off them, and putting them on the floor.”
Well, good on Brett Anderson, I say. These days at concerts there seems to exist a great divide. On one side of it are folk who simply want to experience and lose themselves in the live-music performance. On the other side are numpties with one arm permanently hoicked up in the air, with a hand clutching the latest slab of technology from Motorola, Sony, Apple or Nokia, with eyes fastened on a tiny screen where tinier figures move around on a stage, with a mind focused only on getting the clips despatched to social-media platforms as swiftly as possible to show off to their ‘followers’. I know which side of that gulf I’m on. The other side can just f**k off into the sea.
Anyway, that piece of drama merely added to the emotionality and intensity of the Suede experience. The band produced a glorious clangour of noise that, thanks to the Star Theatre’s excellent acoustics, reached me and rattled me even at the very back of the venue. I still had ghostly reverberations from Animal Nitrate in my ears while I travelled home on the Singapore MRT.
This being my first-ever Suede concert, and not having heard their music for many years, I hadn’t known what to expect during the second leg of tonight’s show. But yes, I ended up per-Suede-ed.
