Suede’s renaissance years

Watching a father sing a song to his child is not typical at a full-throttle gig, but Suede are not your typical band. Towards the end of a set showcasing their 10th album Antidepressants – a record driven by their love of industrial, gothy post-punk – frontman Brett Anderson stops jumping and whirling around like a featherweight boxer, and tells us his son is here tonight.

They look a bit alike. “But he’s a better-looking version,” Dad adds. “He takes after his mum. Don’t embarrass him.” Accompanied only by bandmate Neil Codling on piano – another youthful Suede member in his 50s who must have a portrait in his attic – Anderson sings the band’s 2018 single, Life Is Golden, which he wrote for his son when he was little (he’s an adolescent now). He lowers his microphone for the last chorus and sings unamplified into the 2,000-capacity Bristol Beacon, his voice strong but with an affecting frail edge.

It’s a moving moment – and Anderson is smiling throughout. It is further proof that Suede, in their second incarnation, reforming in 2010 after seven years away, are clearly having a blast.

Suede have always done things in their own uncompromising way. After igniting Britpop in 1992 with their twisted tales of dishevelled English lives, and their Mercury prize-winning eponymous debut album selling 100,000 in a week, they swerved into realms of flamboyant romanticism with their 1994 album, Dog Man Star. That same year, they recruited a 17-year-old prodigy, Richard Oakes, after their original guitarist Bernard Butler quit.

Breaking up in the early 2000s, the band only reformed in 2010, after a sensational charity gig, which throbbed with the energy of four men who hadn’t yet done enough. They’ve released five albums since: 13 of the 21 songs played tonight date from after their reunion. The gig shifts between old classics (Trash, Metal Mickey) and new tracks, performed with an electrifying, committed consistency. Last summer’s single, Dancing With the Europeans, blazes from the stage: inspired by a rousing Spanish gig when Anderson was having a tough time offstage, it plays like an alternative EU anthem: “We want to be strong, and we want to belong / To belong to the road and the rails / To belong to the rhythm”.

Ghosts of Bauhaus, Siouxsie and the Banshees and Joy Division haunt Suede’s recent rhythms and riffs, while a new song, Tribe – debuted two nights earlier – growls with a ferocity that recalls the Cult. The lyrics to this song, and others such as June Rain and Shadow Self, revolve around characters who sit outside the mainstream, a place where Anderson clearly finds comfort. “We’ll help you in through the chain-link fence,” he adds, waspishly, referring to a lyric on 2018 album, The Blue Hour.

The band’s six-night takeover of London’s Southbank Centre last September, for which they rehearsed more than 70 songs, has given them a command of their material. Drummer Simon Gilbert’s glam-polished stomps are fierce and thrilling, including on Killing of a Flash Boy, a 1994 B-side beloved by fans, and She, from 1996, where Richard Oakes’s descending guitar melody dazzles like a Bond theme. Mat Osman’s slyly elegant bass provides a supple spine to 1993’s Pantomime Horse, and a slinky energy to 2023’s Personality Disorder, set against Anderson’s half-spoken, half-sung, sprechgesang delivery.

Alongside Life Is Golden, a pacier song about an Anderson family member is another highlight tonight. She Still Leads Me On is about Anderson’s late mother Sandra who raised him in a working-class, culture-loving family in West Sussex. Sandra died of cancer in 1989, the year Suede was formed. “In many, many ways, I’m still a young boy / Waiting patiently for 4pm,” Anderson sings, a moving admission of longing and vulnerability. A band wearing their bleeding heart on their sleeve as they get older, Suede’s stamina and tenderness still impress.

Photograph by Karen Robinson for The Observer