"..this is something altogether more personal, more intimate.. and therefore, the perfect place to launch Brett Anderson’s solo career. "

The Bush Hall is a beautiful venue. This intimate, 350 capacity room, with ornate architecture, a simplistic design, and smaller than your average suburban garden, is one of London’s secret treasures. Not for here the plastic cup and £3 shove of warm smelly lager, the disagreeable cookie-cooker arena rock… this is something altogether more personal, more intimate.. and therefore, the perfect place to launch Brett Anderson’s solo career.

Tonight is just his second solo show in his life – the first was in Moscow a few weeks ago – and thus, expectations and interest is rather high. The venue in many ways perfectly matches the mood of his debut solo album, intimate, and strangely classic in stature. Whilst the bulk of the set (rightly) leans on his unfamiliar-to-most debut album, this works to Brett’s disadvantage. The songs are stately, luxurious, personal and raw in tone. The rather anthemic, sometimes removed lyrics of his previous work has been taken to one side in favour of the semi-confessional.

Of course, every artist creates a parody of the self, a self-image that is somewhat at a remove from reality, for human beings are rounded, multi-faceted characters of which any public persona is merely a fraction. With this, Brett has stepped out of one prison into a wider persona. Musically, his band are tight and appear well versed in the material – certainly a far better proposition than the rough-hewn, almost unready debut shows by The Tears of two years ago. His choice of guitarist, a bearded mystery called David who teases out teardrops and whalesong from his instrument before producing the kind of crunchy riffs last seen in Suede, bodes fabulously for the future : when this mans work appears on wax and vinyl it is very likely to ignite Anderson’s muse as some kind of holy cross between Richard Oakes and Bernard Butler.

Mat Osman, Brett’s former partner-in-crime in Suede, is on bass, which practically makes this a Suede reformation. As a result, and perhaps to compensate for the absence of any familiar material in the main bulk of the set, tonight sees five Suede songs resurrected. It certainly is a weird sight to see the previously tentative Anderson slip back into a more aggressive rock-beast stance with the older songs after a night of understated ballads. Aside from “By The Sea” and the relatively obscure “Back To You” (Brett’s guest vocal appearance with a band called Pleasure), the main set is entirely newer material. The crowd don’t so much lap it up, as appreciate the songs as if they were works of art.

One could say that Brett is lacking the confidence in his solo work to defer to type and draw on his back catalogue, but then again, who else can sing these songs? And everyone who is here has history and memory. We all know who Brett used to sing for. We all know these songs, so it makes sense to offer something familiar in a banquet of the unknown.

The final encore, of “The Wild Ones”, “Everything Will Flow”, “Film Star” and “Trash” (the very last song Suede ever performed, pop kids), reminds us – as if we had forgotten – why we fell in love with this man in the first place. It was a brilliant introduction to a Brett Anderson both familiar yet alien, a new, more personal style. Wonderful. 

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