Review: A Manics Tuesday

Ben Wildsmith

A Suede/Manics double-header is the Gen X version of those ‘Silver Sixties’ package shows our parents used to go to when half of our weekly budgets were spent on eyeliner and the other half on snakebite and black.

I don’t know if Freddie & the Dreamers used to alternate the headlining slot with The Troggs at those shows but it’s a neat way of preventing resentment amongst both fans and musicians. We went for the Manics’ night at the top of the bill in it would be perverse not to.

At 53, I’m often amongst the youngest at concerts I attend. Favouring rootsy Americana legends, I tend to find myself amongst grizzled oldsters who saw Emmylou Harris in 1975, or Bob Dylan go electric. So, to be in a large crowd of my exact contemporaries is novel.

It gives you a chance to compare how you’ve come through the decades against people who also remember Tiswas but only know decimal currency.

As at school, I’m solidly in the middle tier: not absolutely bost in a That Petrol Emotion T-shirt from 1987, but also not glowing with affluence and wearing Andy Burnham-style designer specs.

I’ve resolved to try and like Suede. When they first came out, the NME ordered everyone to adore them. I remember ploughing through yards of breathless prose banging on about how they had brought back grimy glamour to the UK scene, and hymning Brett Anderson’s cheekbones as the eighth wonder of the world.

Fifteen years previously, the NME had failed to ‘get’ punk, dismissing the Sex Pistols as a fad. The ugly sister of the three music weeklies, Sounds, had been the only one to notice the most important pop-cultural shift since The Beatles.

Consequently, NME journalists – many of whom went on to infest the lifestyle sections of broadsheets for decades to come – were terrified of missing the next big thing. Suede, they assured us, were absolutely that.

Nobody had the Manics down as the next best thing. Where Suede’s ironic artfulness made sense to baby journos who had grown up listening to their older siblings’ Bowie albums, the Manics’ 1000% commitment and Valleys eccentricity were just baffling and sometimes frightening.

When Richey Edwards got so frustrated with one of them that he carved ‘4 REAL’ into his arm in a desperate bid to prove that not everything in the world was a media strategy, it was bracing and, well, real at a time when we were just beginning to suspect that life in a hall of mirrors was on the way.

The actual next big thing, of course, was the sludgy, lowest-common-denominator Dad Rock of Oasis.

Bold

Those journos had forgotten that Slade, not Bowie, ruled the early ’70s. So, whatever tribal differences separated tonight’s two bands back in the day seem so nuanced as to be ridiculous now. Both were always clever, crafty and bold before all that got steamrollered by the corporate entity.

So, I’m going to enjoy Suede whether I like it or not, and I do! Brett is predictably well preserved; still one for the lepping about and crouching down to sing.

He absolutely loves what he does, joyously urging communion in the audience and exclaiming ‘I love it!’ when we respond. There’s an innocence about him that’s at odds with his knowing attitude in interviews.

As he swings a microphone around on its cable, like Tigger swinging his tail, you just know he got told off for damaging the ceiling in his childhood bedroom.

When the tempo drops for ‘Saturday Night’ from 1996, though, he offers a depth to his performance that is genuinely moving. All the ‘heads, shoulders, knees, and toes’ audience participation is in service of interesting songs performed with passion and a killer voice.

He might be a bit cabaret, but it’s the Liza Minnelli variant of that which is always smuggling in real emotion alongside the hoofing.

Half-time, and the lights come up, illuminating all our crow’s feet and prompting us to go for a little wander to walk off stiffness from all that standing up and putting our hands in the air.

The ‘Silver Sixties’ shows used to happen in theatres with comfy, velvet seats: something else the Boomers had easier than us.

Confident

The Manics are more static on stage, economical in their movement and less bothered whether we join in or not. They are on home soil, I suppose, so can be more confident with this crowd.

Their melodies do the dancing for them, angular in the verses and surging for the refrains. It’s far more of a team effort. Suede’s show depends on Brett’s stagecraft so utterly that you rarely look at the others going about their business.

James Dean Bradfield, meanwhile, is grafting just as hard, with his own golden voice buttressed by serious guitar chops. He can get on with what he does, though, safe in the knowledge that Nicky Wire is over to the left being Nicky Wire.

The singularity of the Manics’ bassist is such that he hardly needs to perform at all. Some people just inhabit rooms of any size as if they are the host, drawing the eye and setting the atmosphere.

The affection between the band members is hearteningly explicit. Wire calls Bradfield ‘my guitar hero’, recalling that they met at infants’ school half a century ago. ‘We’ve been lucky enough to live to see it demolished,’ Bradfield observes later.

For a solo number, he smiles: ‘They’ve all gone now, it’s just me…’ He gestures at the neck of his guitar: ‘and my art!’ There is the beauty of this band. Their enormous tunes are harnessed for big, urgent lyrical themes but they retain a shrugging, Blackwood twinkle that inoculates them against any accusation of pretension.

‘You Love Us’ articulated the haunting that the Manics have been forced to transcend. With photographs of Richey Edwards flashing behind him, Wire reaffirmed that ‘We are three tonight, but we will always be four.’

That is a specific sadness for them, but also a melancholic anchor for the art this band has created as they, and we, have lost the world from which it emerged.