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Manic Street Preachers / Suede review – co-headliners bring out the best in each other

More than merely a mutual love-in, this tour finds the two bands – and longterm friends – spurring each other on to be provocative and potent

The Blackwood-born-and-bred Manics may headline tonight on home turf (the bands are rotating the billing on this tour), but Brett Anderson bounces on to the stage at 7.25pm nevertheless, a Tiggerish gladiator determined that Suede win the crowd over. They do so audaciously, kicking off with the little known, darkly energetic 2022 album track Turn Off Your Brain and Yell, followed quickly by 1997 hit Trash (which Manics’ frontman James Dean Bradfield called his favourite Suede song in an interview last year). (He recalls first being here at the Llangollen eisteddfod with his school choir: “And we should’ve won.”) His guitar lines – like those played earlier by Suede’s Richard Oakes – snarl commandingly, especially on his great solo introduction to La Tristesse Durera and on early single You Love Us, which Wire movingly dedicates to Manics lyricist Richey Edwards, who went missing in 1995: “Still the fucking coolest kid I ever knew.”

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