July 2, 2002

Suede : London Royal Festival Hall

...passionate, powerful and exhilarating enough to qualify as a genuine event...

For Suede
’s first public outing in over two years, Brett Anderson arrives with a streaky blond barnet and a sunny batch of fresh tunes. Swept along by a
nine-piece string section, forthcoming album tracks ‘Positivity’, ‘Lost In TV’ and ‘When The Rain Falls’ sound dangerously wholesome. Even tougher new songs like ‘Beautiful Losers’ and ‘Obsessions’ feel polished and gym-toned.

Pleasant enough, but whatever happened to Brett’s basement-dwelling, gender-buggering, laudanum-snorting, sex-Nazi glam-stomp urban-voodoo
anthems?

Ah, here they are - a ragingly euphoric ‘Trash’, an intoxicated ‘She’s In Fashion’, a raw-knuckled ‘Can’t Get Enough’. Cocksure and energised, Brett berates the audience for not buying ‘Head Music’, then encores with an epic re-shuffle of ‘My Insatiable One’.

Even after a decade in the game, a Suede show still feels passionate, powerful and exhilarating enough to qualify as a genuine event. Their new direction may sound alarmingly cheery but fortunately, as with Brett’s
revamped hairdo, their dark roots still show through.

Stephen Dalton