Ticket
Academy 1 (Manchester Academy)
8th December 2003

Story by Abigail:

Back in 2003 I saw Suede at Academy 1. I hadn’t intended to. My passion for the band had receded by that point and I didn’t think there’d be much to discover, but the enthusiasm of a younger colleague at Vinyl Exchange - the record shop I worked in then – rubbed off on me throughout that day. By closing time I’d vowed to chance my arm with a tout. The band had, after all, announced that they were splitting, and this would be the farewell tour.

I don’t buy from touts very often, but the dance I did that night with one was textbook: check the prices, look uninterested, wander off for another pint at Kro.

I made it in for a fiver about 10 minutes before they came on and wove my way into a good spot stage right. My expectations were low. I was tired and I didn’t have the energy to locate my friend in the mass of bodies.

And then it started: A recording of the hymn ‘Jerusalem’, followed by ‘Pantomime Horse’. My breath was snatched away by a Proustian rush. That feeling all good pop melodies should evoke: euphoric sadness. Saudade. I was glad to be alone; I didn’t want to dilute it.

I was pushed back into the emotions of that time, 1993. The debut. 'I was carved from the wreckage one day/this is what I get for being that way'. I loved Bernard Butler’s guitar solo on the record: tuned down, menacing , circular, with Brett repeatedly enquiring: 'have you ever tried it that way?' Tried what? I enjoyed turning this over in my teenaged mind. So much more exciting, so much more sexual than other bands of that era: the bumsucked dog-end of grunge and baggy.

Many people took the piss out of Brett for describing himself back then as ‘a bisexual that had never had a homosexual experience’, but that comment made sense to me. The controversy it caused at the time was a sad case of bi-phobia from both the gay and straight press.

I was fifteen the first time around. Suede at Birmingham Hummingbird, 1993. Frighteningly packed venue. Edge of hysteria in the air. I lost my sister (she would have been just thirteen) in the crush. I was anxious. On that occasion they opened with ‘The Big Life’ – another slowie. I thought it was a practical move as people were in danger of getting crushed, but I’ve seen the band several times since and they’ve often employed this tactic: start off all brooding and distant before smashing into ‘Animal Nitrate’. Been knocked around a few times to that one over the years. And so it was at Academy 1, aged a ripe, but still romantic twenty-six, I got the air shoved out of my lungs in the moshpit.

The set list was made for me - heavy on their debut and Dog Man Star. I was particularly transported by The Asphalt World – a 10-minute-long audacious re-write of Pink Floyd’s ‘Echoes Part 1’, with a very glamorous, un-Pink Floyd like lyric about Ecstasy, taxis and lesbian sex. With this lyric Brett created an entire universe in my young mind– a place I had not visited for many years and was glad to discover again at the Academy.

The sleeve of Dog Man Star was like a still from a well-worn film I could play in my mind, taking it wherever I wanted. Urban isolation, a fugitive anxiety, squalid sex as a temporary sanctuary.

I left the gig grinning and weaved down Oxford Road as though I were in an unfamiliar city, awash with possibilities.

Setlist: Intro (Jersualem) : Pantomime Horse : Animal Nitrate : Film Star : Can’t Get Enough : Metal Mickey : Everything Will Flow : By The Sea : Living Dead : Lost In TV : She’s In Fashion :Attitude : So Young : New Generation : Trash : Beautiful Ones : Music Like Sex : The 2 Of Us : The Asphalt World : Still Life