Because we're young

My last trip out for the year to a new venue to see a band I've never seen live.

Suede burst on to the music scene in '92 with massive amounts of hype, at least some of which was deserved - their debut eponymous album delivered enough strong tunes to keep a lot of people happy.  Their follow-up Dog Man Star didn't deliver quite what most people were looking for, but I think it's actually their best work - well, that I'm aware of anyway, because I kinda lost track of their output this century.  Until I stumbled across Autofiction in '22 and it's a strong piece of work, so when I saw they were touring I booked to see them in the Brixton Academy in March of this year - tragic circumstances saw that show initially postponed and then cancelled, but anyone with tickets had priority for the replacement shows at Brixton Electric, which is a smaller venue so I certainly wasn't going to pass up that opportunity...

And so, on a surprisingly balmy Friday evening in December, I headed in to a pleasantly lively Brixton to have a wander around the neighbourhood and I was ASTONISHED to see people queuing outside the venue at 5:00 for 6:30 doors open.  Why would you do that?!?  I can very much assure you I did not do that - I retired to the delightful (if somewhat rudimentary) Brixton Brewery tap room in the railway arches and returned at 7:30 to see the diehard fans were happy having claimed their place at the front of the stage, but I decided against joining them and headed up to the balcony - for a most unique experience indeed!

The main balcony was nothing unusual with a bar, toliets, cloakroom and a general standing area - all the usual stuff that you'd expect to see.  And then there were some steps downstairs, which lead to the lower balcony area, which spanned the entire width of the venue, was approximately two people deep and was fronted by an elbow-height - well, I guess "podium" is as good as a word as any.  A said podium was extremely solid, padded and comfortable to lean on, afforded an excellent view and there was no danger of anyone nipping in front of me - I nabbed my spot and I can assure you nothing would have moved me!

And there I stayed for quite some time with absolutely nothing happening - there was no support band and no clue as to when anything might happen.  I was fine leaning against my comfy podium, but I can imagine there must have been some people who were getting a little bit antsy.  But, of course, everything was forgiven and forgotten when the band appeared at 8:30...

And the main headline is that it was a very fine show indeed.  I really should have listened to Autofiction again beforehand because they played a lot (all?) of the tracks from it - this is in no way a complaint aimed at the band because it's the tour to promote the album (no matter how long ago the rest of the shows were).  It's fair to say they didn't really need to promote the album - it's obvious the audience have very much taken it to their hearts because there was a lot of singing along going on.  It certainly helps that it's a fine album so there was no need for the normal audience groan that greets "we're going to play some new material" for some bands.

However, for me, being an old git, my favourite tracks were mostly the older ones - "Animal Nitrate", "Metal Mickey" (which went down VERY well) and "So Young" from the debut album, "Daddy's Speeding" (I really liked this) and "Still Life" (an impressive solo number from Brett) from Dog Man Star and "Beautiful Ones" from Coming Up, their third album.  The exception to my "the old ones are the best" rule was "She Still Leads Me On" from Autofiction - it's a fine track indeed.

The band are very tight - Simon on drums and Mat (Richard Osman's brother, don't you know?!?) on bass perform competently but unflashily (that's a word, right?), Neil on keyboards and guitars has a very low-key approach (hiding behind his long hair which makes him look MUCH younger than the rest of the band) and Richard is extremely impressive on lead guitar, even if the spotlight operator doesn't seem massively keen on highlighting his efforts.  Interestingly, the guitars sounded surprisingly BigCountryesque on some tracks which wasn't something I was expecting at all.

But, let's face it - it's Brett's show to own and he very much steps up to the mark.  He's all over the stage (and very sweaty in no time) and his voice sounds very much the same live as it does recorded - stronger than I expected, particularly on the slower numbers he does.  He also loves jumping on the monitors - I suspect there has been some serious engineering work going on to ensure they are strong enough.  He does, however, also often look unfortunately like Bez with some of his dance moves.  It was also somewhat strange to see him using a wired microphone - my suspicion was this was merely to allow him to swing it around but the stage crew seemed somewhat annoyed at all the faffing that was required whenever he took a trip into the audience.  Which I'm pleased to say he did quite often and they were VERY pleased to see him.

All in all, this was a great gig by a band in fine form playing a good mix of old and new material in front of an extremely enthusiastic audience in a great smaller venue - what's not to love?