Gig review: Manic Street Preachers and Suede at Millennium Square, Leeds

Back in 1992 when British guitar pop music was largely being drowned out by the sound of American grunge rock, it took two young bands – one from South Wales, the other from West Sussex – to restore a dash of glamour, artiness and refreshing outspokenness to the UK charts.

Thirty-two years later the Manic Street Preachers and Suede are still proudly fighting their corner with a fierce intelligence and zest, producing records that are comparable with ones they made in their youth but now filtered with a poignancy imbued by age and greater life experience.

Following a co-headlining tour of the United States last year, they’re back sharing a stage for a series of summer shows, including this sold-out date as part of Millennium Square’s Sounds of the City series.

It falls to the Manic Street Preachers to open tonight’s proceedings with a triple salvo of crowd-pleasers – You Love Us, Everything Must Go and Motorcycle Emptiness – that instantly induce mass sing-alongs and nods of approval for singer James Dean Bradfield’s fiery lead guitar playing.

Acknowledging a key Manics trope of finding beauty in despair, he jokingly introduces The Theme From M*A*S*H as “one of the most miserable cover versions of all time, but somehow we get joy from all this”.

To mark the 20th anniversary of their underrated seventh album Lifeblood, they give “bona fide album track” To Repel Ghosts a rare live airing and bring on regular collaborator Catherine Anne Davies, aka The Anchoress, to duet with Bradfield in impassioned style during Little Baby Nothing and Your Love Alone Is Not Enough.

Perhaps the highlight of their set is a towering Elvis Impersonator: Blackpool Pier, which Bradfield dedicates to the late Richey Edwards, their former rhythm guitarist and agent provocateur, noting that its lyric is “one of the most pertinent (and) esoteric, just like the boy he was”. After the skies open in the middle of A Design For Life, Bradfield proffers a cover of Raindrops Keep Falling On My Head.

Following a solid run of songs that includes Kevin Carter and From Despair to Where, they close with If You Tolerate This Then Your Children Will Be Next, surely the only song about Welsh volunteers joining leftist fighters against facism in the Spanish civil war to reach number one. Therein very much lies the band’s incongruous beauty.

If the Manics’ performance tonight is relatively unshowy, it falls to Suede frontman Brett Anderson to bring a palpable sense of drama.

Strutting onstage to the strains of Turn Off Your Brain and Yell, it’s quickly apparent he has quite a spring in his step. By Trash, he’s already dancing around, twirling his microphone lead above his head and leaping off monitors.

Animal Nitrate has a real bite to it, as does their debut The Drowners. It Starts And Ends With You, from their 2013 comeback album Bloodsports, is delivered with gusto and by He Is Dead, Anderson’s black shirt is drenched with sweat and rain. “Passion, energy, rowdiness – come on, we love it,” he bellows.

New song Antidepressants hints that their forthcoming tenth album is likely to continue the adrenalized post-punk vein of Autofiction, meanwhile Anderson dedicates a winning rendition of Saturday Night to a couple he met while on the lookout for a veggie burger earlier on in Leeds city centre.

The singer’s energy seems indefatigable during She Still Leads Me On, So Young and Metal Mickey; indeed he only seems to draw breath during a touching acoustic version of The Wild Ones.

Suede end with a flourish, with the crowd “shaking their bits” to Beautiful Ones. Bidding farewell, Anderson proclaims: “Leeds. You. Have. Been. Beautiful.” Frankly tonight, Brett, so have you.