The final bow (for now) (Filed: 16/12/2003) Lynsey Hanley reviews Suede at the London Astoria When it was announced on their website last month that Suede would be splitting up at the end of the year to work on solo projects, one cheeky cove replied: "Don't worry, David Bowie splits up with himself all the time." Remember Bowie's dramatic 1973 announcement that he was retiring from live performance? Thirty years later, he's still touring. With that in mind, the Britpop-inventing quintet's rather open-ended statement was bound to be taken with a large pinch of salt. The confusion felt by Suede's obsessive fan base was not helped by the fact that singer Brett Anderson used their thrilling farewell show at the Astoria to state: "There will be another Suede album. Just not yet." Apparently, this was the first his band knew of it. The decision suddenly seemed more like a loss of nerve than a statement of intent. This came after a two-and-a-half-hour, 27-song show of such power and intensity that, at times, it felt like being forcibly plugged into an orgasmatron. Eleven years of near-constant touring have ensured Suede are incapable of turning in a poor performance, with all five members managing to refresh every note of songs they have played hundreds of times. The mammoth set was divided into two parts - "A funeral and a celebration," quipped Anderson, who minutes earlier had seemed near tears as he sang the oddly prophetic The Next Life. First came a winning glut of album tracks and B-sides - often as good as their A-sides and, in the case of Killing of a Flashboy, better - that were a bitter reminder of how it wasn't so much bad songwriting as bad luck that saw Suede fail to make good their 1990s success in the Noughties. Any band that can guarantee tearful singalongs of songs that weren't even singles deserves a medal for consistency. The singles section attained a peak of hysteria rarely seen since the old days, when Brett would walk on stage in a shirt that would be torn off his back by rabid teens in the first 30 seconds. "Bounce! Bounce!" he instructed during The Beautiful Ones, nearly sending his own head through the ceiling. It was good enough to make you want to shout: "You've made a terrible mistake!" If Suede's "split" proves to be final, this performance proved without question that pop will have lost one of its most exciting and consistently underrated bands. http://www.telegraph.co.uk/arts/main.jhtml?xml=%2Farts%2F2003%2F12 %2F16%2Fbmsuede16.xml -- underrated.... sigh.... --

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