<figure class="wp-block-image size-large is-resized"><figcaption class="wp-element-caption">Suede – Broken music for Broken people.</figcaption></figure>



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Suede for Friday Lunch – recorded on September 23, 2003 at ica, London.

In September 2003, Suede played five nights at the Institute of Contemporary Arts in London, dedicating each night to one of their five albums and performing an entire album per night in chronological order, with B-sides and rarities as encores. In October 2003, Suede released a second compilation album, Singles, along with the accompanying single “Attitude“, which charted at number 14 in the UK. The band had also begun work on a follow-up album to A New Morning, which was planned for release after the Singles compilation. Anderson stated, “Most of the new material is more aggressive and less song-based than A New Morning.” He added, “We’re spending a lot of time working on tracks that sound nothing like traditional Suede.”  The planned album was never released.

On 28 October 2003, Anderson made the decision to call it a day. The same day, Suede were booked to perform “Beautiful Ones” on V Graham Norton to promote the Singles compilation.  Jeremy Allen was the last person to interview the band just before the Norton appearance.  Allen would later see the band again some six weeks later at the aftershow party following their final gig at the London Astoria in December. At the aftershow, Osman revealed to Allen that they had decided to call it quits less than a minute after their last interview.  As they walked down the corridor to the studio set, Anderson whispered into Osman’s ear, “Let’s not do this anymore.”  Less than a week after the decision to call an end to Suede, the band’s biography, Love and Poison, was released on 3 November.  On 5 November, the band announced there would be no more projects under the Suede name for the foreseeable future—effectively announcing the end of the band, as stated on their website: “There will not be a new studio album until the band feel that the moment is artistically right to make one.”  Anderson also made a personal statement, saying, “There has been speculation about record sales and chart positions, but the bottom line is I need to do whatever it takes to get my demon back.”  Suede’s last concert at the London Astoria on 13 December 2003 was a two-and-a-half-hour marathon show, split into two parts plus encore. Anderson made an announcement, saying, “I just want you to know. There will be another Suede record. But not yet.”

Suede would get back together as of January 15, 2010 and continue on but with a new approach and priorities. A significant part of Suede’s legacy lies in their role in kickstarting the Britpop scene, which eventually overshadowed the band’s own achievements in the public mind. Alexis Petridis wrote in 2005, “These days, rock historians tend to depict Suede’s success as a kind of amuse bouche (appetizer) before the earth-shattering arrival of Britpop’s main course.”  In an article about the British music press’s “ferocious one-upmanship campaign” of the mid-1990s, Caroline Sullivan, writing for The Guardian in February 1996, noted Suede’s appearance on the cover of Melody Maker before the release of their first single as a pivotal moment in the history of Britpop:

Suede appeared on Melody Maker’s cover before they had a record out… The exposure got them a record deal, brought a bunch of like-minded acts to the public’s attention, and helped create Britpop. It was the best thing to happen to music in years, and it mightn’t have happened without that Suede cover.

The year following the Melody Maker cover saw Suede captivate the pop scene with a phenomenon of critical praise and hype.  Not since the dawn of the Smiths had a British band caused such excitement with the release of just a few singles.  A March 1993 article in The Independent stated, “Suede have had more hype than anybody since the Smiths, or possibly even the Sex Pistols. The reviews are florid, poetic, half-crazed; they express the almost lascivious delight of journalists hungry for something to pin their hopes on.”  Suede are regarded by many as the first British band to break into the mainstream from the new wave of alternative rock in the ’90s. With their glam rock style and musical references to urban Britain, Suede paved the way for acts such as Oasis, Blur, and Pulp to enter the British mainstream. They were influential in returning some of the creative impetus to English guitar music in a scene increasingly dominated by Madchester, grunge, and shoegaze. Even beyond their own shores, American heavy metal personality Eric Greif declared that Suede “reinvented and repackaged glam in a creative way, and how refreshing that was as a counterpoint to the drab grunge of the time.”

This afternoon it’s back to the last set of gigs Suede did before calling it a day in 2003 – this is one of those gigs, recorded at ica on September 23, 2003.

Crank it up and get ready for the weekend.

The post Suede – London – 2003 – Past Daily Lunchroom appeared first on Past Daily: A Sound Archive of News, History And Music.