And so, one by one, they fall. Silently gathered in ranks, victims of the fickle finger of fate and fashion, they fall away with time and years. And now Suede are the latest to go. The world does not change, it’s still the same grotty concrete conurbations and the same dull streets – we change. We age, we evolve, we grow out of things, into others.

My girlfriend, years past, used to annoy me immensely with that quote about when I was no longer a child, I put away childish things, as if somehow this pop music thing was a childish thing. But it isn’t. Music is so much more than that : music is why I’m here. If it wasn’t for these songs, I might never have been saved.

Isn’t it odd that lives can be changed by something as simple as a song?

There is a reason I’m no longer going out with that girl : music isn’t some fad, some passing fancy. I need this. I need songs like this in my life.

And as we age, we change. Our heroes betray us : they shook some hands and quit the band, wiped the makeup clean off, start again. But wasn’t punk all about having No More Heroes anymore? But in the time when our heroes, dripfed through the weekly oracles of the NME and the Melody Maker, were the vaccous and the junkies, we needed something more than the inarticulate stoned ramblings of Ryder and the fractured rage of Kurt Cobain. We wanted people who knew about our world : about cold mornings, about the dreams of youth, about cheap drugs and cheaper sex and the stolen moments of bliss that comes only through sleeping pills.

This was the world Suede inhabited. And, to a lesser extent, their equally fallen contemporaries, Pulp, also sucked away in a vacuum of sidelined press notices and battling on against apathy. One can only fight a losing battle for so long, no matter how much one believes.

Not that tonight Suede are anything but vibrantly, vividly alive. From the opening, resurrected “Pantomime Horse”, a song that walks the dangerous tightrope of our hidden sexuality, reborn as a eager, slinky, biting thing thanks to the never-better two guitar attack of terminally underrated Richard Oakes and the ever-versatile Alex Lee, to the final, closing heartbreak of “Still Life”, Suede are a band that, in their death throes, still give us their all. There’s nothing else to give.

Long lost songs from past lives are greeted like old friends at Heathrow Arrivals Gate : “By The Sea”, “The Living Dead” and “The Asphalt World” unfurl with the final, funeral air of a farewell. But what a farewell. Others, the vicious sex-and-glue-high of “Animal Nitrate”, the more-choruses-than-Kylie “New Generation”, the urgent smack paranoia of “Can’t Get Enough” are dispatched by a band still hungry, starving. Furious, in fact, sometimes, at the seemingly-inevitable fate they suffer. As if even Suede don’t want to go, but know that no time is a good time for farewells, and now is as good a time as ever.

Remember them this way. Remember not what they could be : they could be an ever-shrinking, increasingly irrelevant curiousity, plugging away endlessly to dwindling crowds, devaluing their currency by not knowing when it is time to go. Even though, of the many bands that should pull their plug on their terminal decline, Suede are not one of them. Remember them this way : they never made a bad album (though some might say they did do the odd clunker of a song, as anyone whose heard ‘Money’ can testify), they never played a show that was anything less than, at best, exciting and compelling, they never sold out, never did anything but stay true to themselves.

As it comes to an end, as the final, dirty funk of already-legendary lost song “Music Like Sex” tingles our spines, and the keen, longing “Still Life” fades from our ears, for one of the last times, Suede smile happily, glad in some ways to see us one last time and show us, not only how good it always was, and how good they’ve been to us, but how good we have been to them. Richard Oakes beams and swigs a beer. Brett thanks us all : there’s no hint that this is the end, the final showdown. This is just a full stop. The end of a paragraph. The story will go on, we will continue to survive. Life will be different, but we will still find a way to make it beautiful. Life is not about what we take, but about what we make it to be. Be not sad that they are going. Be glad that they were here. And the end is not the end, but the start of something new.

See you, in the next life.

SETLIST :
Intro (Jersualem) : Pantomime Horse : Animal Nitrate : Film Star : Can’t Get Enough : Metal Mickey : Everything Will Flow : By The Sea : Living Dead : Lost In TV : She’s In Fashion :Attitude : So Young : New Generation : Trash : Beautiful Ones : Music Like Sex : The 2 Of Us : The Asphalt World : Still Life

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