Gig review: Suede and Manic Street Preachers at First Direct Bank Arena, Leeds

If ever two bands felt destined to share a bill it’s Suede and the Manic Street Preachers. Both whip-smart observers of the human condition with a contrarian streak as well as a sharply defined aesthetic, they laid the ground for the resurgence of British guitar pop music in the ’90s after lull while American grunge groups conquered the world.

Brought together for a US tour in 2022, they subsequently reunited for a string of British dates – including Millennium Square in Leeds – in the summer of 2024. Now, two years later, they are back again for a co-headlining yomp around UK arenas with each band given 75 minutes to showcase their songwriting nous and strictly no encores.

Despite having to start their set early – at time normally reserved for support bands – the Manics appear unfazed, revving up with the likes of Motorcycle Emptiness and Faster before unleashing their anthems You Stole The Sun From My Heart and Everything Must Go. Walk Me To The Bridge, from arguably the best of their later-period albums, Futurology, is accompanied by aerial footage of crosstown traffic, and James Dean Bradfield dedicates a verse and chorus from Total Eclipse of the Heart to fellow gutsy Welsh singer Bonnie Tyler, who died in July.

They span their songbook with No Surface All Feeling, Autumnsong and A Design For Life – which bassist Nicky Wire dedicates to all the Welsh footballers from John Charles to Dan James who have played for Leeds United – and both Bradfield and Wire profusely thank the fans who have stayed with them from gigs at long-lost Leeds venues The Duchess and The Cockpit to the present day. It is, says Bradfield with an expletive, “always amazing” to perform in this city.

Bradfield – who Wire says “sings like a choir and plays guitar like Steve Jones” – delivers From Despair To Where alone before he’s rejoined by the band midway through The Everlasting, with Wire, who’d been uncharacterstically soberly dressed in the first half of the set, now sporting a white suit and feather boa. There’s a fresh injection of energy with Slash ’n’ Burn and Your Love Alone Is Not Enough.

Politics graduate and literary enthusiast Wire dedicates his rendition of Hiding In Plain Sight to the Leeds-born poet Tony Harrison, and they pay tribute to the band’s much-missed lyricist, guitarist and polemicist Richey Edwards by summoning up a suitably intense Die in the Summertime. “Tonight we are three but in reality we will always be four,” Wire says.

They go out in a blaze of glory with You Love Us and If You Tolerate This Then Your Children Will Be Next, which ends with Bradfield and Wire stood on sticksman Sean Moore’s drum riser, united to the last.

Suede, who’ve gained a creative second wind with their 2020s albums Autofiction and Antidepressants, need no warming up. Led by the irrepressible Brett Anderson – who James Dean Bradfield had accurately described as “on fire at the moment” – they launch into scorching versions of Disintegrate and Dancing With the Europeans.

It’s not long before Anderson’s white shirt is drenched with sweat and he’s stood on a monitor, swirling his mic cable like a whip or heading down from the stage to hug members of the audience.

He welcomes everyone to Suede World – where “all the fences are chain-link and all the wire is barbed” – and by the crunchy renditions of Trash and Animal Nitrate, it seems very much like a place worth visiting despite the attendant “litter on the streets”.

There’s little let up with We Are The Pigs and Antidepressants but the pace does finally slacken with The Two of Us, a sensitive ballad from Dog Man Star delivered by Anderson with Neil Codling on piano – a useful form of punctuation that they will repeat later on with The Wild Ones.

In amongst impassioned favourites such as Filmstar and She Still Leads Me On, there’s even time for a new song, My City, which continues the post-punk vein of Autofiction and Antidepressants and is well received.

They close in fiery style with So Young, Metal Mickey and Beautiful Ones, with the fans “shaking their bits to the hits” and the ever-engaging Anderson declaring Leeds to be “the world capital of clapping”.

Britain’s two greatest bands of the last 35 years remain in top form. See you again in another two years, then, gents?