Thirty years after they toured together as young men across Europe, cementing a lifelong friendship, Manic Street Preachers and Suede’s UK co-headline tour kicks off in rather more refined surroundings: a white pavilion on the edges of the pretty market town of Llangollen, launching the town’s 77-year-old international festival of music and literature.
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).
