Suede Takeover Revisited

With less than a week til the UK Antidepressants tour kicks off and in preparation for it, Mark Reed takes us back to Suede's Southbank Takeover.

SUEDE London Takeover Southbank August-September 2025

“We are Suede, and we are the anti-nostalgia band”. That's how it starts. Over 5 shows – 4 in 6 days, Suede take London by storm. In some ways, you can define Suede by what they are not as much as what they are. Always living in today, facing forward, making new memories, creating new landscapes.

Once contemporaries have become touring jukeboxes – reminding us of who they used to be, and making an enormous amount of money at the same time. Like many bands, Suede could have been bigger, could have been richer, could have taken the easy path. But then, they wouldn't be Suede.

But what happens two decades from now? The 50th anniversary? What new memories, what new feelings do we make now? Life is short, and there's a uniqueness to being here, now, and in this moment. This moment will never happen again.

If music changed you, saved you, showed you the way when you were lost, why would you want less of it? The music I need is the music that shows me today and the future, not yesterday and the past. Been there, done that.

Of course, you can't know how you got where you are today without looking back. But you need to keep an eye on the road rising up to meet you.

And that's why nostalgia isn't what is used to be. Suede are looking forward. Making new material because they want to, and because they have to. And, to be clear, no band has executed a second life with as much vitality, and as much integrity as Suede. Antidepressants is as vital, as alive and connected, as any album the band have made. Recognisably Suede, yet modern and mature. Mature can be used as an insult, but here, Suede are always in the act of growing into the now, exploring who they are now, and reporting back from the frontlines. There's not enough art about what it is to grow older, to explore mortality, and our changing place in history as we move from sons to fathers, daughters to mothers, inexperience to experience. Every song written now is a communication to others, a statement of solidarity and similarity, where we connect communally in shared emotions. You are not alone.

The first show, on the 26th August, is in the overlooked Clore Ballroom, with the band playing in the round surrounded on all sides, by about 700 fans, with a night promising the new album in full and “Post Punk Pick Me Ups”. In this show of two halves, we experience the live debut of the new album in full and in order – with live premieres for “Sweet Kid”, “The Sound And The Summer”, “Somewhere Between An Atom And A Star”, “Broken Music For Broken People”, “June Rain” and “Life Is A Moment”, sandwiched between songs many of us have devoured endlessly from the preceding radio sessions. The new songs, experienced live and feet in front of us, are made for the stage. The sound of five humans in a room, experiencing something together, and much of it sticks in the head with an instant familiarity – like the moment you meet someone new and you know, you know, you're going to know these friends for the rest of your life. At the end of it, a thrilling 40 minutes, Suede depart for a quick cup of herbal tea, and return, with a determined set of post-reunion material. A declaration of intent that they don't need the old songs as bait. “Snowblind” races past at high speed, “No Tomorrow” and “Tides” get their first airings in a couple of years, and there's every sense that this is a band playing a vibrant greatest hits set. We put our faith in the moment.

Clore Ballroom

Photo credit: Mark Reed

After some radio sessions and outstores, we return to the Royal Festival Hall on the Saturday Night for the first of the Antidepressants shows. The thrill of the first night of the tour is here – in the days before YouTube – no setlist knowledge, no photos of the show, no idea quite what to expect. Taking our seats, for the venue is officially all seated, the backdrop of two interlocking scrims on which competing projections are made, we're offered eight songs from the new album, 4 from Autofiction, and a pleasing, 65.2% of the set is made of recent material, alongside 3 b-sides in the shape of “Killing Of A Flashboy”, an elegant, beautiful piano arrangement of“This Time” - a song that cuts to the heart of things, about how love can be the eye of calm in the midst of the storm, a song that always reminds me of a great love now lost to time and circumstance – and unexpectedly, the live debut of “Crackhead.” A mere 26 years after it was released. It's a compelling, coiled snake of a song, that snowballs in momentum and menace, before exhausting itself. And experiencing it in the flesh, it stands up as as worthy of its place in the set as any other song. (And who else, of their once contemporaries, would dare to debut a B-side, 26 years after release?)

Because we are is built upon who we were once.

Royal Festival Hall 14th September

Photo credit: Mark Reed

Sunday night sees some changes – 8 songs swapped out, another live debut, this is time in the shape of “The Sadness In Me, The Sadness In You”, and another brittle but beautiful piano led version of “The Asphalt World”, where – like the night before – Brett abandons the mic and sings alone to the hall, his voice strong and human, the emotions of the song, that again remind me of a love lost to time and circumstance, that so many of us have had the same experience. Always different, always the same. A life we didn't live, but came close to having. All of us, sharing similar but different experiences, on a ball of living rock in a void.

Perhaps obviously, whilst the set builds on a vibrant reality of now, there's also the knowledge that “So Young”, “Metal Mickey”, “The Beautiful Ones” are as much part of Suede now as they were then. The venue itself, whilst artfully seated, is now alive, and like the rest of the night, an important outpouring of love from the band and to the band, of likeminded people connecting. Both main nights end with “The Only Way I Can Love You”, Brett inside the crowd, sharing with us that this goes both ways. For some bands, a gig is another day at the office. Not this one.

Night#4 is perhaps the most exquisite. At a capacity of 292, The Purcell Rooms is the smallest public ticketed gig Suede have played – apart from possibly Glasgow's Garage – in at least 32 years. Off-Mic and Acoustic, it's a night of Suede without amplification, without a show, just five men, 20 or so songs, chairs and a nice sexy lamp. It's also the song most likely to see a unique, unrepeatable setlist. There are some Suede songs that are Great White Whales. The songs we never thought we'd see.

And, from the first note, the first song is “Since You Went Away”. Only performed live once before, for Israeli radio in January 2000, it's – in my mind – one of those songs. A song that I listened to endlessly on release, how could a song as good as this be shuffled to B-side status? But as we know, Suede don't write B-sides, they just write songs. Some fit the album, and some don't. “God's Gift” (according to Mat, written in 1985), “Simon”, “Tightrope”, “Wastelands”, and “Leaving” get their first live performances this decade. In some ways it feels like a set made out of solely the songs the band only play once a year. Given the intimacy of the room, and the gentle, unamplified sound from the band, it's a room that shows the appropriate dignity – largely respecting the bands request for a camera and phone free show – and no talking during the songs. Well, apart from a repressed laugh when Brett sings about Volvos. Brett walks into the crowd during “The Only Way I Can Love You”, ascending the venue stairs next to the sounddesk, and singing from there to us, mere feet from us, addressing all of us – and the band on stage. It is a very, very special evening. I wish the band played shows like this more often, as it shows a lesser seen, more delicate side of the music. And some of us are getting tired and old, and like a good sit down from time to time.

Simon wins star of the night for his dramatic entrances and exits, adding a layer of good natured humour to the experience. Though really, each show highlights an aspect of the band, from the roaring post-punk of the full band shows, to the dramatic, tearjerking final night.

Off Mic. Purcell Rooms

Photo credits: Izumi Kumazawa

Night #5 is Suede's first full orchestral show. They've played minisets with strings / horns before, most notably the 2002 Meltdown show and 2014's Dog Man Star show at the Royal Albert Hall, but not a full show. The Paraorchestra, with whom Brett played before for the “Death Songbook”, are familiar, and adept, realising the inherent drama in the songs, and bringing out submerged depths to the songs. In the middle of tension is the place much great art sits, and here, the tension of the songs is brought out into the sun – or the moon – light. Again, songs rarely played are brought out - “Dawn Chorus”, “Sleeping Pills” and two of my very favourite Suede songs : “Sometimes I Feel I'll Float Away”, that reminds me, always reminds me, of falling in love. And “Flytipping”, a justifiably epic visit through The Blue Hour that talks openly of the meaninglessness of objects in the face of mortality. This is Suede now – travelling through time, grappling with the worries of time and history and the nature of our identity – who are we? Is it what we do, or what we say? Is it in everything we do? As Tom Waits once said, How You Do Anything Is How You Do Everything.

I get the sense that Suede are Suede fans. It would be easy, and lazy, to play 15 hits from the nineties, some well known staples, and a token two or three new songs, whilst dishing out the old stuff with the tired passion of musical Cornflakes.

Suede & Paraorchestra

Photo credits: Mark Reed

Over these 5 nights, Suede play 69 different songs, with only three songs - “June Rain”, “The Only Way I Can Love You”, and “Trash” - at every show. Suede are an anti-nostalgia band, living in the here and now, making new memories, exploring new landscape, not content to cash the cheque and drag out the old songs as a stadium jukebox until they become so diluted they're almost meaningless. There are old songs, in new frames, with new meanings, and more important than that, there are new songs that stand toe-to-toe with anything the band have ever done. Growing older isn't a choice. But growing staid, growing irrelevant, and becoming a touring museum to your own, long-past greatness is a choice. Suede chose wisely, and are giving us new and fresh ground to explore with each new era.