And already we're so near the end. Twenty two hours from now Suede will be no more.

And it seems so soon. So fast. Too soon. It seems as if only yesterday Suede were four desperately scruffy poor oiks, straight outta the subrubs, driven by ambition, bad coats and a bucketload of great songs. Tearing up small rooms and late night TV programme nobody watched, desperately seeking something more than small streets and closed minds.

And here we are. The penultimate show. For once in my life I decide, instead of piling down the front with the flashboys, the astrogirls, the young men, the lonely girls, and the asian babes, that I will actually watch Suede and see them one last time. I'll see the sights, the sounds, those pretty colours that make an exploding noise in my head and exactly what 4,000 people punching their fists in the air during "Film Star" looks like exactly.

And my god, what a show. A final, last grab-bag of everything you wanted them to play and plenty you thought you were never going to hear again. The swooping, throbbing "Introducing The Band", the spunky, punky spite of "Can't Get Enough", the impossible, doomed romance of "The Wild Ones" all sound like The Most Important Songs In The World at the precise moment you're hearing them. Suede do that to us.

They were one of the greatest singles band there ever was. An endless stream of 21, 22 classic songs. Each one a perfectly formed four minute slice of a life you either lived and wanted to leave, or a life you could never live. Suede songs aren't just songs : they're slices of history. The first summer day you heard the gorgeous slink of "She's In Fashion" or the sordid, Burrougsian sprawl of "Beautiful Ones" on an autumn night.

And even though its over an hour and a half, and they leave out more classics than most bands ever hope to write, it still feels too quick. Too soon. (*witness, the lack of "the drowners", "stay together", "we are the pigs", "saturday night", "lazy", "electricity", "positivity, "obsessions", "attitude" - and that's just the singles they don't play, let alone the album songs and b-sides)

Eleven years ago, a lifetime ago, I sat in a grotty, unheated flat in Leicester listening to this bands entire recorded output (some six songs, and twenty four minutes of genius), catching them taking the world - or at least Britain - by storm. Now, some five albums, two compilations, hundreds of gigs and 131 songs later, this is it. The end. The final showdown.

In that time we've all changed, I've married, divorced, lived all over the world, worked numerous jobs, lived, loved, left and been left behind. And everywhere I went, somehow, a little part of Suede went with me.

I'll miss them. As the last chords of "Still Life" fade, as we go into the night, into the night, it becomes clear. This life, it's all I ever do. And it's still life. See you in the next one.

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