WHILE the likes of Oasis can do Knebworth in front of a quarter of a million people, Suede have chosen to make their re entry into the pop fray by playing to 500 selected guests at Dublin's Tivoli. This intimate show was being filmed by MTV for transmission on October 22nd, and among the music biz and media guests at the gig, was U2 manager Paul McGuinness.
Down in the moshpit, however, the ordinary fans waited eagerly for the re emergence of Brett Anderson, the Ziggy Stardust of Britpop, and as the orchestral strains of She wafted from the speakers the crowd near the stage began to swell.
First onstage was Richard Oakes, the young guitar gun who was drafted in at lightning speed to replace Bernard Butler. Oakes kicked straight into the Butler esque opening riff of The Beautiful Ones, bassist Mat Osman and drummer Simon Gilbert dropping in neatly behind. New keyboard player Neil Codling (Simon's cousin) sat nonchalantly at stage left, looking like Stephen Dorff in Backbeat. All eyes, however, were on Anderson, as he leaned forward into the audience and sang his songs of darkness and dismay. Trash was a communal experience, a shared sense of sin, and as Anderson sang "We're the litter on the breeze / we're the lovers on the street" we felt part of a lost, discarded brotherhood.
The bulk of Suede's set consisted of tracks from their new album, Coming Up, but the band tossed in some older tunes just to give, the fans a bit of a reference point.
Animal Nitrate reminded us of when Suede's chemistry was spot on and The Wild Ones told the tale of a band caged by conflicting aspirations and dreams. The new songs told a different story altogether that of a band who have shed a lot of unnecessary baggage (and I don't mean Bernard), unscrambled their heads and learnt to play it straight from the hip. She, Starcrazy and Lazy are streamlined, perfectly formed anthems for a new glam generation, and even if we might have heard many of the lines before (sometime in 74, perhaps) we've never seen them quite so sleek and elegant.
