Suede, Electric Ballroom, Camden
Wham, glam, thank you, fans
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Your support makes all the difference.This year must be challenging for Suede. It's been 10 years since they crashed triumphantly on to the melodrama-free music scene of the early Nineties. But the kids just don't have gender anxieties any more. Yet here we are on an unseasonably hot night in Camden Town's Electric Ballroom for one of the invite-only fan club shows that have been a regular feature of the band's history. The cavernous venue is jammed with young and old fans, exchanging notes on shows they have seen in an atmosphere that's part product launch, part old-school reunion.
Brett Anderson, once the black-clad poster boy for the sexually ambiguous, takes the stage looking shockingly tanned and athletic, in blue jeans and a gym-tight white top. The band fall into line behind him ably beating out the new album A New Morning, a sincere if slightly hook-free collection of songs about, well, being in Suede and being a bit older.
It's an hour in, when launching into past glories "Metal Mickey", "My Insatiable One", and "So Young", that Anderson reverts to the sinewy rock reptile, baring the Gerald Scarfian sneer that so electrified audiences in 1992. The Suede musical formula, potent Seventies glam riffing with singalong choruses, starts to sound ever more exotic simply because no one writes like this any more. It's the pretentious art-rock of the Seventies, Pink Floyd and Yes, that bands copy these days, not Marc Bolan.
This being a fan-club show, there is a decidedly "un-Suede" moment when a Wheel of Fortune-style song selector appears baring the titles of favoured hits and b-sides. A suitably trashy blonde is plucked from the audience to administer spinning duties and the audience goes potty. The game-show aesthetic of the Seventies briefly appears to vie for space with the guitar pop of that decade.
Despite this, Anderson cuts a very Nineties figure. In his mid-thirties, he proudly displays an obvious gym fixation where, one suspects, his Seventies influences would have been, now long gone into their long, dark, narcotic night of the soul. Certain more "diverse" musicians may have hit their world-music phase by now, but the sheer uniformity of Anderson's output has perhaps preserved him as a bigger star. A big voice singing about a small world.
It's not the last the song of the night, but "Everything Will Flow" from Head Music seems to gather up the mood of Suede-world in 2002. "The cars parked in the hypermarket know/ everything will flow". The battle for who you are is over for now, so you better get on with life with all the positivity you can manage. The fans all smile and then it's home at half 10.
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