POP REVIEW / Keep your kit off

Ryan Gilbey finds a dapper Brett Anderson and Suede braving nuclear win ter in Wolverhampton

Brett Anderson has every right to be uppity. Judging by the lyrics on Suede's Dog Man Star album, he's at the glum junction where Michael Moorcock meets When the Wind Blows. Not a jolly place to be, you might think, and you'd be right. He's ``enslaved in a pebble dash grave'', canopied by nuclear skies, chilled by nuclear winds (what symbol will Michael Fish use for those on the weather forecast?). In ``We Are the Pigs'', he even wakes up with a gun in his mouth which, as an alarm call, sure beats The Big Breakfast. He should thank his lucky stars that he's a celebrity. It could be all that's between him and the bed of the Thames.

For someone in such a precarious state, he's bounding about the Wolverhampton stage like a young gazelle. ``We're Suede'', he sneers by way of introduction. He's being sarcastic. Even after a considerable line-up blip, you still couldn't mistake them for anyone else. Minor changes are revealed when the fog pumped from an over-active smoke machine dissolves. There's Brett's new Bryan Ferry look for a start - curled lip, freshly-hacked fringe, sharp suit. He is impatient, newly virile, lithe even, in a disgraced British athlete sort of way.

At his side is Richard Oakes, the puppy-faced 18-year-old roped in to replace guitar hero and stroppy so-and-so Bernard Butler. Oakes copes impressively with the surreal Jim'll-Fix-It situation. A Les Paul is grappled with manfully. He even wanders centre-stage. He plays over there for a bit, then strolls back to the side. He tightrope-walks Butler's slippery riffs with considerable aplomb, and he doesn't bump into the furniture.

At least he has the support of the crowd, many of whom have just re-commenced sixth form, as he was about to do. Their adoration is spiked with envy. A great chunk of them, dismissing such trivialities as talent, luck and providence, will have told themselves: ``That could have been me''.

If it's strange that Suede open with the slight ``This Hollywood Life'', it's downright perverse that they magnify, rather than muzzle, its similarities to ``Cracked Actor''. Brett is a patchwork quilt of -isms - Jaggerisms, Morrisseyisms, the Bonnie Langfordisms of his foot-stamping flamenco - but the ghost of Bowie comes closest to nudging him into the pit.

He survives because he's an impetuous young blade who is most resilient when wrestling with the sort of pressure Suede currently face. And he has the heart of a fan: he's a mirror to every hour we've spent strutting around the bedroom baring a shoulder, wailing into a hairbrush. They play the punchy B sides ``Killing of a Flash Boy'' and ``My Insatiable One'', treats in a year when few bands even bother to write B sides, let alone air them. They know what it means to be a fan poring over such trifles.

The set is largely pruned of flashbacks, though ``Metal Mickey'' and ``So Young'' chime as urgently as ever. And a fiery ``Animal Nitrate'' retains its mantle as the best song ever written about gay sado-masochistic sex in a council house. Of the new numbers, ``The Asphalt World'', with its Rush-tinged solo bruised by the kind of grizzly feedback which 2112 would never have sanctioned, is an especially heartening rebirth.

But they could shed the grainy films flickering behind them. Brett's overblown lyrics can survive without the obtrusive, Athena postcard-style annotations which clutter a tender reading of ``The 2 of Us''. Only a handful of the images linger - a mob of penguin-suited nippers loot and burn a lemon Escort during ``We are the Pigs'', for instance. Why? Oh, something nuclear in the water no doubt.

When the soaring ``Still Life'' finally arrives in frugal acoustic form, it's accompanied by much air-punching and eye-dabbing, though Wolverhampton is mercifully low on lighter-fuel. The song dips into its whispered lull, and the audience erupts in premature approbation. They think it's all over! But Brett wags a prefect's finger as though warning: ``Don't put your clothes on, I'm not through yet.''

Once he's gone, ribbons of a shredded shirt surrendered to greedy hands, there's a tide of relief. Even the most loyal fans had come armed with questions, the most pressing of which was not whether Brett would still chide his jutted behind with the mike (he didn't).

If you've never ached or hurt over pop music, or hoarded a week's dinner money to save for an album, or hated your parents for ridiculing a cherished idol, then all this must be baffling. ``LOUDER!'', Brett demands as the applause escalates. Suede encourage such hysterical devotion. They've worked for it. And now, after a rift which should have obliterated them, they've finally come to deserve it.

(Photograph omitted)