In the early-1990s, Suede and the Manic Street Preachers shared an audience of glammed-up kids, with eyeliner (for the boys and the girls), a bit of bisexuality, and feather boas aplenty. So their double-headliner tour is a natural double bill.
The Dreamland date on the tour doesn't get off to a great start. As the Manic Street Preachers open with early anthem You Love Us, thousands of people are still in two huge queues outside. It takes more than 30 minutes to get from the car park next door to the entrance. Once you get there, security carry out random bag checks (some bags are sent away, some are never searched), nobody is patted-down, and the gate staff struggle with a ticketing app that glitches for lots of people.
Once inside, while the bands are great, Dreamland’s pitch as a destination venue looks a bit overdone. Dreamland's gig infrastructure was rebuilt under the ownership of hedge fund Arrowgrass in 2016-17, and it's now looking a bit jaded - the iconic proscenium arch has lots of flaking paint and its sparkling lights have an erratic life of their own. And Arrowgrass's ten thousand capacity venue now holds twenty, so toilets and places to sit are in short supply. Dreamland added a ‘Restoration Levy’ to the price of every ticket earlier this year - it’ll be good to see it spent. Dreamland are getting away with it, but it doesn't feel like they care about the customer's experience very much.
The Manic Street Preachers once promised to record one perfect album, then split up. Fourteen albums into their career, they haven't given up aiming for that perfect album yet. They pull on all of that for tonight's set, which is perfectly good. They're a great band, can play competently, and have songs the audience want to hear - but something is missing. There's little of the energy and excitement they once had.
It's not all their fault. Take 1996's Design For Life, which gets a good outing tonight. It's a song about the complexity of Working Class identity, inspired by the way that working people once clubbed together to build libraries and institutions of learning. The crowd scream the 'We only wanna get drunk' line, sloshing expensive lager from cheap plastic cups held high, and you do wonder if the band's message has got lost along the way.
To be fair, if the Manics were the only band on tonight this would be a different review. But this tour is a double-headline with Suede.
And if the Manics Street Preachers were just cruising through their set tonight, Suede are still fighting like they're snotty young suburban punks with everything to prove. They have as much energy as when I first saw them in 1993 - if not more. Singer Brett Anderson is a manic and mesmeric frontman, still wiggling his hips and pulling poses like he did in his 20s. He has become even better though, climbing on the monitors to lead the crowd in communal singing and mass hand-clapping like the old showbiz pro he was always going to become.
Tonight's seventeen song set includes all the hits from their debut album - Animal Nitrate, The Drowners, So Young, and Metal Mickey - and guitarist Richard Oakes plays them with scrappy delight. Suede are hard, rocking, and hungry.
They throw in a bunch of indie anthems - Trash, Filmstar, New Generation (from the often-overlooked Dog Man Star), Electricity - that remind you just how great they are at writing pop songs.
At one point Anderson taunts the audience for their enthusiasm for the old hits, "do you want another new one, you don't really, do ya?". But the newest song that does get an airing, Antidepressants from their unreleased new album, goes down well. It's a sleazy thing, with the motoring rhythm of a Psychedelic Furs song.
Suede have always been a bit dirty, honestly interested in the shabbiness of life. On their debut album, they sung about running away to the seaside, down to Worthing to sell ice creams. For a band that have made a career out of England's faded glamour, perhaps, after all, amidst the peeling paint and the flickering seafront lights of Dreamland is the perfect place to see Suede.
Photo: Frank Leppard www.instagram.com/frankie_leppard