#listen i'm the judgy fan because nobody else fuckin is these days

[jesuisgourde]

Thoughts, both positive and bitchy, on the Manics/Suede show in Chicago tonight.

I knew the Manics (and Suede) weren’t very well known in the US but I was definitely expecting the Chicago venue to be more full than it was. But it was so empty! I’m cheap so I bought a mezzanine/dress circle ticket since it was only $80 compared to the $150 or whatever for the pit area. There were only 6 people including me in the entire row I was sat in. It definitely seemed like most people were at this gig for Suede rather than for the Manics; the crowd was far more responsive for Suede.

The decision they’ve been making recently to start the set with You Stole The Sun From My Heart is a weird, interesting one. It sort of makes sense, the song is bouncy and energetic, and lyrically/sound-wise it sort of sits right smack in the middle of all the different sounds and styles they’ve had. But it’s still an odd song to start off with because it’s not one of their more popular ones. When I last saw them in 2018 they opened both shows (London and Cardiff) with International Blue. It definitely took them a second to get into the groove, You Stole The Sun and Everything Must Go were their first two songs and they seemed like they were trying to suss out their energy. But they played La Tristessa Durera next and I really started moving to that one because I loooove GATS. Two of the Suede fans sat in front of me kinda laughed when I suddenly started dancing more than I was before. La Tristessa Durera is one of my favorite Manics songs (at least in part because of this video where you can really hear just how much of a fucking metronome of badassery Sean Moore is.)

I’m not really a fan of Wayne Murray’s backing vocals, to be honest. His voice and JDB’s don’t really mesh and a lot of times his vocals are a little off and it makes it very distracting. It was less noticeable in 2018, but here in this tiny gig I definitely noticed it. I’d rather just listen to JDB with no backing tbh.

They had a fog machine which was very cool and much more effective in this little venue than when I saw them at Wembley and Cardiff. There were points when James was engulfed in or aura’ed by colored fog right at the right time during a song which I thought was just great as a visual.

Ocean Spray was just so beautiful. I like that song on the album but as a live song it’s absolutely gorgeous and I loved it. The album version just ends on the normal tempo into a held chord, but live they slowed to that held chord in this really grim but beautiful way and knowing what the song is about just made the decision to end it that way such a good one, even if it is really sad.

Motorcycle Emptiness was dedicated to Nicky’s brother Patrick who is apparently laid up because he “fucked his leg,” and who lived in Chicago in the 90s. JDB did this awesome ascending “Yeah!” vocal riff after “All we want from you are the kicks you’ve given us.” Also he activated his twirly guitar spins for Motorcycle Emptiness.

I had this moment while they were playing and I was staring up at the green lights reflected on the ceiling where I was thinking about the lyrics to Motorcycle Emptiness and how relevant they are now, even more than they were in the 90s when it was written. Computers didn’t yet exist in the pocket-sized ubiquitous state as we know them now, Amazon didn’t exist yet, all the different ways for corporations and institutions to use the internet in order to mess with people’s self esteems or body image or political opinions or sense of right and wrong or ability to think critically or whatever, none of that existed yet. Yes, it existed as a concept but not put to such immediate effect as it is online. I said it before, in a different post a while ago, but I’m glad Richey didn’t live to see the internet era. I think it would have been awful for him both in terms of his mental health and in terms of his disgust or frustration with humanity’s ability for independent critical thinking.

They played Suicide Is Painless and Slash N Burn which were both good but nothing amazing. I did notice that JDB now tends to go down vocally when the original music goes up, or to sort of sing-speak the tune rather than do all the high parts. I’m not sure if that’s a permanent new thing (fair, it starts getting harder to go higher as you get older) or if his vocal chords needed a rest tonight.

Tolerate was really good; Nicky had his bass balanced on his head at the end for some reason? International Blue is just a great live song. It really fills up the room. They played The Everlasting, which has always just sort of been a meh song for me, but it sounded better live than it does on the album, so maybe it’s one of those songs that needs to have open space rather than headphones to really do well. I feel the same about YLAINE. I’m very aware that I’ve got Unpopular Manics Opinions and my dislike of YLAINE makes me a blasphemer as a ‘manixfan’ but I just don’t care about YLAINE. However, it’s very fun live (even with Wayne singing Nina Persson’s parts).

Nicky dedicated From Despair To Where to “the severe beauty and intellect of Richey Edwards.” He also told a Fun Fact about how the music video for Roses In The Hospital was filmed in Chicago in 1993, and they had to get James up at 5 in the morning so they could catch the morning sun while filming, and he was not happy about it. I love like every song from GATS because apparently I am determined to be contrarian to everything most Manics fans like (except not really because THB is my actual favorite) so I was really happy to hear it and it sounded great.

They’ve been covering She Sells Sanctuary by The Cult on this tour but they didn’t tonight and that was so disappointing because I absolutely adore that song and I have it as one of my alarm clock songs. They didn’t do any covers tonight, and looking at setlists from the rest of this tour it looks like they did Despair To Where instead of a cover. Walk Me To The Bridge sounded great and is another one of those songs that showcases how much of a metronome Sean is. JDB’s twirls returned during Walk Me To The Bridge too.

You Love Us was the second to last song and it was so funny to hear just how much faster and more punk it was than anything else they played tonight. Even Slash N Burn was slower, I think. And Motorcycle Emptiness has a complicated solo but it’s not actually fast. The audience was definitely more of a Suede audience because You Love Us tends to get quite a bit more reaction than it did tonight.

The last song was, as usual, A Design For Life. It sounded great, and at one point after the first “to show the scars / from where I came” line, both James and Nicky twirled toward each other, James spinning clockwise and Nicky spinning anticlockwise, which might have been planned but didn’t look it, but it did look very cool. During the middle eight Nicky said “From snowy Chicago to [something I didn’t catch] Wales, do not gently into that good night, do not go gently into that good night.”

It was an odd show for me. I had the good fortune that my first ever two live Manics shows were for the 2018 tour at Wembley Arena and their final homecoming show at Cardiff Motorpoint, which means that it was populated by a really enthusiastic audience, and I was on the barrier, and Nicky Wire wore a skirt for both gigs and sang a Sex Pistols song at Cardiff. So it was like the two very opposite ends of the spectrum in terms of gigs. London and Cardiff were massively enthusiastic (minus one small setback in Cardiff that affected only me and the people I was with in which some drunk motherfucker pissed on my friend because he didn’t want to leave the barrier and I was fully ready to fight him) and had loads of energy and there was like a feeling of “we are all extremely passionate about this one thing.” This Chicago show was much more subdued. Part of that is probably because it was seated (which is just bizarre to me, I can’t understand seated rock music gigs) but also probably because there were more Suede fans, and maybe some people there to see any show who didn’t really know either band.

I’m glad they didn’t play any songs from the new album because I hated the new album, but I do wish there was some more non-greatest hits. All the songs I’d kill to see live (Anorexic Rodin, Red Rubber, Intravenous Agnostic, To Repel Ghosts, Judge Yr’self) they’ll never ever do live, but I do wish they’d do a few underplayed songs just for the hardcore fans, because they must know that you have to be pretty dedicated to be an American Manics fan.

The woman sitting next to me had never seen either band and had been waiting like 20 years to see them, so she was super excited, which was very cool to see! She and I were talking about how we bought up tickets really fast because we both assumed they’d sell out from US fans who had been waiting for ages to see them, and then we were surprised when it was so empty. It makes me wish they’d chosen a slightly smaller venue, which would have been more intimate and maybe also drummed up more energy.

I don’t know Suede’s music very well. Dog Man Star is the only album I know all the songs off of, and I know a lot of their self-titled album and then some other random songs. But they’re absolutely fantastic live even without knowing their complete discography. Brett Anderson is dramatic as hell. They were having minor technical problems from the start, some feedback that got fixed and then some other something that I couldn’t identify because I didn’t know the songs well enough to know what they were or weren’t supposed to sound like.

But Brett put on a hell of a show, strutting and prowling around the stage and walking through the audience and variously getting down on his knees to hold his mic up all dramatically. It’s hilarious to watch a man in his mid-fifties stalking sharply round the stage on all fours but also I loved it and I think I’m a Suede fan now. He did The Wild Ones (my favorite out of the few songs I know) acoustically, and I’m not sure if this was just him being dramatic in a way that’s Normal for him, or if something was up, but he played like the first verse and half the chorus with the guitar, and then stopped and put his head down, and then dramatically did most of the rest of the song a capella, before playing the last few lines with the guitar again, repeating the “running with the dogs today” line a few extra times. I genuinely felt like I was watching a Hamlet soliloquy, it was great. I think maybe I watched a Shakespeare play as a rock concert.

It did make me think about the Manics vs Suede in terms of audience engagement. Somebody I was talking to on twitter said they don’t think the Manics know what to do with American audiences when those audiences are in this middle range of size, because when it comes to American Manics fans the majority are hardcore fans who would rather hear some of the less well known but very beloved by the dedicated fans songs rather than get drunk and hear the greatest hits. I think if they’d played venues the size of the ones they played when they were here in 2014, or just a little bigger rather than ones the size of this show (like 1k capacity rather than 3k capacity venue) it would have been so much better. And they haven’t really been a “be dramatic and dynamic and engage with the fans onstage” sort of band since about 1998, which means that if the majority of the audience don’t know their work very well, they’ve got nothing much to react to visually or “interpersonally” and therefore aren’t going to be super enthusiastically responsive. Playing and trusting there will be engagement based on merit and fan culture only is certainly successful in the UK and probably Europe, but it’s definitely different here. It seemed like a lot of the audience didn’t know the songs well enough to respond to them and since the Manics don’t do things like get in the audience or crawl around on the floor or go into over the top monitor-stomping, there’s not a lot to grab onto visually that will hook a non-fan at a live show. Meanwhile I’m casually familiar with the Dog Man Star album and vaguely know a few other Suede hits off their other early albums, but I could only name 3 of the songs I heard tonight (The Wild Ones, The Drowners, We Are The Pigs) and yet I was having so much fun watching Brett just be chaotic and theatrical, swaggering all over the stage and dropping dramatically to his knees and such. It’s definitely just style differences in general, and I’m sure they don’t expect to gain much from this tour, but I did find it an interesting observation in the moment.