Friday, 11 July 2008
Going gracefully and cheaply into the night? Who would’ve ever thought that this would happen? Sixteen years after he first came to the public eye as the thin rake of androgyny in Suede, Brett Anderson, has evolved. Transformed. From peddling the bedsit glam rock epics of drug-infested oppression in a post-grunge Tory Britain, he has, delicately and swiftly reinvented himself. All great artists progress, evolve, change over time, and Anderson is perhaps more than most. Whilst clearly and obviously indebted to his past as singer in Suede - with well over half the evening being a beautiful skeletal reprise of Suede’s best (but not best known) songs - this evening, originally intended to premiere his new album “Wilderness”, became less of the event and more of an act of homage and communion.
Brett Anderson is now a dapper suited, thin, elegant modern day amalgam of Bowie, Scott Walker, and - dare I say it - Leonard Cohen. With just a piano, a guitar, and a cello for accompaniment, the stage carries a duo with great weight, as the material that was previously smothered in a relentless guitar stylings is mercilessly stripped back and reduced to a bare essence. Songs such as “Trash” and “Saturday Night” - which were bluster over substance - become almost affecting. Not that “Trash” wasn’t good, of course, but it was always a song made for jumping up and down to instead of sitting and listening carefully to.
With the first portion of the set featuring the entire of his new record played in order, Anderson will never be a nostalgia act. Even though, in the live context, his new record is at best, not as familiar as most of his work, and, at first listen, bears all the hallmarks of his previous work, it also is a little underwhelming. The lyrical palette is almost predictable, the melodic path he takes familiar, and at least one song follows a vocal melody just like an old Suede b-side (“Sadie”, if you must know), and the songs start to become a homogenous, one dimensional set bordering on and nearing self-parody. Thankfully, the lyrics have moved beyond the old school drugs-and-gasoline-heroin-chic to something a little less limiting, a little less navel-gazing. There is little more boring that being the only person not on Coke in a room full of drug heads. Or being the only cokehead in a room full of middle aged miserable middle class employees.
Nonetheless, the first portion of the set is a scant 35 minutes of exclusively new material (Anderson has done this a few times before, when premiering the songs from “Coming Up” and “A New Morning”), which inevitably suffer because nobody has heard the vast majority of these songs before. The only really familiar number is the ruined “Back To You” (with a French guest vocalist), which sits on a chorus of broken hopes and impossible dreams. Unfortunately, the intonations by Emmanuelle Seigner are, at best, a pale imitation of a chantuese, and at worst, recited Nico-like, flatly with the passion of a washing machine and pronounced phonetically without feeling as if they were taken from a poorly dubbed film. Later on, the trio reconvene to cover her “Simple Words” with equal, unexceptional results.
The second set, which spans an astonishing 20 songs and 2 hours, saw Anderson revisit his back catalogue with a passion and aplomb that shows that, at the heart of each of these songs, lay a hidden gem. Drawing almost solely from the first three big-selling Suede albums (and a clutch of b-sides), Anderson also plays four songs from his debut solo record : the wonderful, instant-classic of “Love Is Dead”, as well as “Song For My Father” and “To The Winter”, and the lesser known “Ebony”. The rest of the material is an assortment of Suede songs ; sadly overlooking The Tears contribution, which was, and is, sadly overlooked by the vagueries of trends a sadly inescapable air of slight desperation. In this context of a man, and a guitar, and a cello, I cannot help but wonder how even the slightest of songs may glitter and shine : as if the band arrangements in Suede obscured the songs true potential : “The Asphalt World” has never sounded better except as a singular voice and a pounding piano, a torch song hidden inside a ten minute squall of guitars.
Another factor, and one that is cynically easily noticeable, is that since the demise of Suede and The Tears, Bretts commercial stock has sadly fallen and it’s easier and cheaper to run a smaller set of musicians than a proper band. There’s no doubt that Anderson is still of considerable talent and integrity, but the law of diminishing returns strikes and may one day yield a harsh financial reality that Anderson may have to reform the band to keep the wolves from the door. For now though, Anderson is ageing gracefully, with passion and conviction and artistic merit, always trying new styles and creating new worlds for his songs to live in.Only registered users can write comments.
Please login or register. Powered by AkoComment 1.0 beta 2! |
