28 October 2026 (gig)
49 min
Two of the class of 96 appear to be in the rudest of health three decades on.
It was fully 30 years ago that Manic Street Preachers achieved mass appeal with their sweeping fourth album Everything Must Go, within months of Suede releasing their first post-Bernard Butler opus in the shape of the knowing and spiky Coming Up.
The Welsh outfit were first on stage in Glasgow, opening with the anthemic Motorcycle Emptiness – a shrewd move that helped draw in the half of the audience who'd turned up to see the night's other esteemed headliners on this value-for-money package tour.
More recognisable fare swiftly followed in the shape of Ocean Spray, Faster, You Stole The Sun From My Heart and Everything Must Go as the Manics revisited their glory years in strikingly efficient fashion.
One of the band's later-career cuts Walk Me To The Bridge, form 2014's Futurology LP, brought briskness amid the frequent intensity, with frontman James Dean Bradfield delivering a brief solo take on recently deceased Welsh legend Bonnie Tyler's Total Eclipse Of The Heart by way of an intro to the devastatingly brilliant 96 behemoth No Surface All Feeling – still the proverbial hammer to the head.
The celebratory Autumnsong brought light, before the "one and only drinking song from Wales", as Bradfield put it, A Design For Life, ensured a predictable mid-set singalong.
An acoustic From Despair To Where, one of the long-missing Richey Edwards' more underrated missives, made a welcome appearance ahead of a slightly bizarre The Everlasting that saw Bradfield start solo before his bandmates stepped from the darkness to join in halfway through.
Have the Manics ever been "showbiz"? Not often, but there was a hint of that when the singer quipped, "Come on, boys" as the emerging collective backing struck up.
Immediately, however, such concerns were totally blitzed as the edgy metal barb Slash 'n' Burn kicked in.
Another uncompromising highlight was a darkly potent rendition of Richey masterpiece Die In The Summertime from MSP's coruscating third album The Holy Bible, while You Love Us was a reminder of the defiant exuberance that made the band so essential in the first place.
"We may be three tonight, but we will always be four," declared bassist Nicky Wire. In many ways that summed up the ongoing contradictions that keep a band who had pledged to split up in a blaze of glory after their debut album 34 years ago but who, thankfully, are still going strong.
Equally healthy are Suede, whose set was an impressive combination of classics and recent material, including songs from last year's Mercury Prize nominated Antidepressants.
The London band's effervescent frontman Brett Anderson worked the stage from start to finish, displaying the charisma that made him Britpop's poster boy among more discerning listeners in the mid-90s.
His bandmates Mat Osman, Simon Gilbert, Richard Oakes and Neil Codling provided majestically straightforward but awesome accompaniment, with vintage tracks Trash, Animal Nitrate, We Are The Pigs and Filmstar coming over as fresh and resonant as when they first entered the collective consciousness.
An acoustic take on The Wild Ones featuring just Anderson and Oakes was simply sublime, but perhaps the biggest impression was made by Disintegrate, Dancing With The Europeans, She Still Leads Me on and Trance State – all penned during the band's punk-fuelled renaissance of recent years.
The massive bonus was the world premiere of a stunning new song, My City. And with that it felt as if Suede had claimed Glasgow as their own.
