As we reported earlier this week, BBC 6 Music are hosting live sessions from their Maida Vale studios all this week, and Suede kicked Monday off with a set on Lauren Laverne’s show – watch them performing new single ‘It Starts And Ends With You’ above.
The band opened their set with new album Bloodsports‘ first track, ‘Barriers’. Drawing directly on the formula that always made Suede great – Anderson’s strident voice riding high in the mix, couched in acres of reverb, a heavily-processed, monumental guitar line and propulsive drums – it’s also gilded with their sparking, literate lyricism: the singer namechecks Carson McCullers’ The Heart Is A Lonely Hunter and makes it almost aphoristic, with the addition of "it’s trapped you once and it’ll trap you again".
Brett Anderson’s characters always suffered their lovelorn woe within typically frayed and fractured surroundings, the skyscrapers and nuclear sky of ‘Stay Together’, and the new material suggests that we’re still within those envions: in the opening verse of ‘It Starts And Ends With You’ there’s an allusion to life leaking like “a hairline crack in a radiator”.
But the set isn’t all wired three-minute guitar pop: the band unfurl a couple of longer cuts, with ‘For The Strangers’, a slow-burning, aerated song verging on the anthemic, that’s been aired live a few times, sounding particularly promising.
For all their nonchalant swagger, all of Anderson’s sweeping arm gestures and incrementally-unbuttoning shirt collar, the band back a ferocious punch, nowhere more so than on a run of old tracks, taking in ‘Filmstar’ and ‘Animal Nitrate’ and ushered in by the crash and bang of ‘Metal Mickey’s opening drums, delivered with complete precision.
Any good band’s live show should sound sharper, more potent and Suede go one further. It’s this almost paradoxical mix of the louche and the muscular that’s carved them a niche that no one else has really bettered, and which bodes well for Bloodsports.
Head over to 6 Music for more Live From Maida Vale sessions.
