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).
Since their 2010 reunion – spurred by a Teenage Cancer Trust gig following their turn-of-the-century decline – Suede’s music-making has crackled with urgency, as have their live performances. Tonight, new song Antidepressants puts a firecracker under the fizzing post-punk of Siouxsie and the Banshees. There’s a pressing tenderness in Anderson’s acoustic-guitar rendition of Life Is Golden (which he wrote for his son) as well as in She Still Leads Me On, an incredibly moving full-band rocker about Anderson’s enduring love for his late mother.
“They’re such lovely lads,” Anderson says of the next band, halfway through his set, dry humour in full flow. “We don’t have many friends in this industry – we’re miserable bastards – so we can count on the fingers of one hand who they are, and most of them are in Manic Street Preachers.” The Manics repay his kindness by opening their set with Motorcycle Emptiness (which Anderson called his favourite Manics’ track). You sense support and sweetness in these gestures, but also two bands pushing themselves to keep being provocative, potent and good.
If Suede’s set is a manic, full cardio workout, the Manics’ is a gentler slow burn. Bradfield’s voice is still impressively bold, floating sweetly on the high notes. (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.”
Welsh artist the Anchoress joins the band in fabulous voice (and flared magenta sequinned suit) for romps through 1992’s Little Baby Nothing and 2007’s Your Love Alone Is Not Enough, helping to propel these hits from the past into the present. Even if old songs do “leave long shadows”, as Bradfield sings on Walk Me to the Bridge, both bands’ 17-song sets feel snappy, sharp and sparkling.
• At the Eden Project, Cornwall, 29 June. Then touring to 19 July
