Suede performed at the Cirque Royal Brussels their last show from the Coming Up tour, a 25th anniversary celebration of Suede’s 1996 classic, an album that produced five top ten singles, brought them worldwide success and sold over a million copies. Postponed once for pandemic reasons, the show was almost sold-out to a big enthusiastic crowd, many of them in official Suede merchandise, filling up the venue rapidly with excitement and eagerness, ready for the energetic show that was about to start.
The audience loudly cheered the band members’ appearance on stage but went completely wild at the first chords of ‘Trash’ and Anderson’s opening statement ‘It doesn’t matter how many times they grind us down!’
The first part of the show was dedicate to playing the Coming Up album entirely. ‘Trash’ was followed by ‘Filmstar’ and ‘Lazy’, which only raised up the room energy levels.
Brett Anderson is in his best shape ever. I guess it was not easy to take his picture as he was in continuous movement, dancing, running, jumping mode, literally everywhere on stage and even beyond. He sang seated next to fans, standing on stage loudspeakers or from the crowd. Twice.
‘She’ followed by the ‘Beautiful Ones’ was a well-conceived moment. Already on ‘She’ the whole venue was on Anderson’s side by rhythmically clapping and singing along. When the song ended, the clapping was extended with the famous la la la-ing followed by the ‘Beautiful Ones’ guitar riffs. The performance of the album continued in the same style, song after song, ending with ‘Saturday Night’ enhanced by glimpses of the official music video on the screen behind.
For the second part, Suede played a further set of greatest hits, launched however by ‘She Still Leads Me On‘, the leading single from the upcoming album Autofiction due in autumn, which sounded extremely promising as announced by Anderson on stage: ‘We’ve have been writing new music for 4 years. Wait until you listen to Black Ice, Personality Disorder, Turn off Your Brain and Yell.’ The greatest hits part had everything a Suede fan would wanted, from ‘It Starts and Ends With You’ to ‘Tides’ to ‘Metal Mickey’. Anderson offered an additional special moment, alone on stage with an acoustic guitar, performing ‘The Wild One’ dedicated to his wife on the day of their 13th wedding anniversary. For the encore, ‘Life is Golden’.
Suede’s performance in Brussels was a wonderful trip down memory lane and a great landmark for the ones to come.
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