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 was textbook: check the prices, look uninterested, wander off for another pint at Kro. I made it in for a fiver about ten 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. Their 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, May '93. 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 all over again.
The set list was made for me - heavy on their debut and
Dog Man Star. I was particularly transported by '
The Asphalt World', a ten-minute-long 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 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 used to play inside my head, taking it wherever I wanted. Urban isolation, a fugitive anxiety, squalid sex as a temporary sanctuary.
Oddly enough, four years after that LP came out I saw Jean-Pierre Melville’s
Le Samourai alone in Cinema 3 at Cornerhouse. It was creepily familiar –the same greenish hue as Dog Man Star – and since then, film and album have fused in my mind.
With the somewhat overblown 'The Still Life' still ringing in my ears, I left the gig grinning and weaved down Oxford Road as though I were in an unfamiliar city, awash with possibilities. The Suede effect.
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.
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