Whatever else you can say about a tour like this, you can’t knock the value for money. Two bands playing headline sets, rotating who goes on last, and getting on with doing what they do. It’s an incredible proposition, really, and perhaps there’s something here for other bands to think about.
Tonight, Suede open proceedings, with Manic Street Preachers taking the closing headline slot. “Turn Off Your Brain And Yell” is a reasonable instruction for the next hour or so. “Disintegrate” follows with some dazzling guitar from Richard Oakes, before one of their great anthems sends Brett Anderson off for a wander.
“Trash” is exactly as anthemic as you’d want it to be, but it needs saying early on that Anderson is a tremendous frontman. By “Animal Nitrate”, he’s throwing the microphone and seems utterly in the moment. We go from animals to pigs with “We Are The Pigs”, before the big screen gives us the “I love it, I love it” of “Antidepressants”.
There’s something about Suede that means even their gentler moments could belong to nobody else. “Saturday Night” is idiosyncratic and tender, before “Can’t Get Enough” comes charging out of that glam-punk world Anderson seems to inhabit. “Filmstar”, meanwhile, is a reminder that, for all the attention rightly paid to the singer, this has always been a band with some tremendous riffs.
“Trance State” offers another side to things, and “Everything Will Flow” sounds enormous. Indeed, everything about Suede tonight seems to fill the room. The songs, the guitar, the frontman: there’s nothing small about any of it.
“June Rain” follows Anderson’s reading of Christina Rossetti’s poem “Song”, while “She Still Leads Me On” is dedicated to mothers and the love that never dies. In other hands, that might become maudlin. Here, it is a tender moment that carries real weight.
“Shadow Self” brings swirls of rock ’n’ roll, before an emotional speech about the way music brings people together introduces a seldom-played “Stay Together”. Its piano-led treatment makes the contrast with “Metal Mickey” all the clearer.
Then there’s “Beautiful Ones”, and Anderson is off to meet his people again. Another stroll into the crowd, another connection made. It’s clear how much this audience loves these songs, but it’s equally clear how much Suede still put into playing them.
Then it’s the turn of tonight’s closing headliners, Manic Street Preachers. Just before they arrive, the words “under neon loneliness” appear on the screen. There’s your clue about what comes next.
You might as well start with a banger, and “Motorcycle Emptiness” most certainly qualifies. “Everything Must Go” follows, full of strings and slogans, before “Little Baby Nothing” prompts the slightly alarming realisation that it is 34 years old. Thirty-four years, for goodness’ sake!
“Kevin Carter” keeps us in the 1990s and brings Gavin Fitzjohn’s trumpet into play for the first time. James Dean Bradfield suggests that this material is where we all feel safe and warm. Maybe there’s a bit of that needed right now.
“You Stole The Sun From My Heart” becomes a singalong, but “Decline & Fall”, from last year’s “Critical Thinking”, brings things up to the present day. Like Suede before them, the Manics have songs that sound utterly anthemic in this setting, and “Your Love Alone Is Not Enough” is one of the clearest examples.
A snippet of Echo & The Bunnymen’s “Bring On The Dancing Horses” ushers in “Hiding In Plain Sight”, with Nicky Wire taking the lead vocal and giving it his best Johnny Thunders. There’s still something of the punk about Wire, even now.
“No Surface All Feeling” gets a little “Total Eclipse Of The Heart” before it begins, and then “A Design For Life” takes me straight back to how I spent Millennium Eve: in Cardiff’s Millennium Stadium, watching this band play. Music does that, doesn’t it? One song and suddenly you’re back there, with all the years in between seeming to disappear.
There’s a different sort of reflection in “Ocean Spray”. With just Bradfield and Fitzjohn, it is dedicated to anyone missing their parents at Christmas. “The Everlasting” begins with Bradfield alone before the band joins him, and another singalong develops.
Then a simple “give me some cowbell”. “Slash ’n’ Burn” arrives, Wire has the feather boa on, and it might as well be the early 1990s all over again. “Autumnsong” is all about that guitar line, while a cover of Blondie’s “Union City Blue” is dedicated to Clem Burke.
The most poignant moment comes around “Die In The Summertime”, one of Richey Edwards’ songs from “The Holy Bible”. Wire makes the point that, however many of them are onstage, “we will always be four”. Richey’s microphone is there, too, a place still kept for him as always.
It’s a moment that belongs entirely to this band and the people who have followed them through everything.
“You Love Us” is as big, bold and brash as ever, before a huge “If You Tolerate This Your Children Will Be Next” brings the night to its conclusion.
Quite how both of these bands became classic rockers, with decades and decades of experience behind them, is something I’m still trying to work out. Perhaps we’re all getting old. If that’s the case, though, there are worse ways of doing it than in a room full of people who have been connecting with these songs for years.
There’s enough nostalgia here to take us back to those times, but enough promise for the future to suggest both bands still have plenty to offer. Two headline sets, two bands with something left to say, and a crowd that wants to hear it.
Maybe this really is the way forward.
