The two bands toured together across the United States last year and are preparing to do two shows together again in Japan, this upcoming winter. The bands are replicating a 1993 European Tour they both did together in a similar manner.

On the evidence of previous tours, when both Manic Street Preachers and Suede head towards the UK and Ireland in June and July of next year, each band will play around 75 minutes, alternating who plays last night by night. A breakdown on who is playing last can be found below.

Talking to BBC Breakfast about the tour earlier this morning (October 6^th), Manic Street Preachers bassist and lyricist Nicky Wire, said: “We’ve both got a dedicated fanbase, but we do share a gene pool and a rabid denomination of fans, it’s because we never belonged to anything apart from ourselves. We were never part of grunge, we never part of Britpop. And we just looked better than anyone back then anyway.”

Suede frontman, Brett Anderson added: “It’s really inspiring to have a band that you love playing with you. It’s like a friendly competition.”

The frontman for Manic Street Preachers, James Dean Bradfield spoke of the two bands before heading to tour the United States last year as he said: “A lot of bands were quite short on glamour at that point. They shared the same DNA with us of trading on an underground customised glamour. They had these dystopian, J.G. Ballard landscapes in a lot of the songs, so along those lines we definitely fitted. We were both quite visceral live bands too. Brett is one loud motherfucker on stage! They kind of share the same path as us. They’ve been through a few things and they’re still here.”

Suede are currently gearing up for a selection of UK headline shows in early December, to promote and support their album Autofiction, which came out last year.  Manic Street Preachers are currently recording a follow up to 2021’s The Ultra Vivid Lament, whilst bassist and lyricist Nick Wire has just released he’s second solo album, Intimism, earlier this year in July.

Tour dates:

28/06/2024 – Llangollen International Musical Eisteddfod – Llangollen, Wales*
02/07 – Trinity College Dublin – Dublin, Republic of Ireland**
05/07 – Cardiff Castle – Cardiff, Wales*
10/07 – Edinburgh Castle – Edinburgh, Scotland*
12/07 – Castlefield Bowl – Manchester, England*
13/07 – Millenium Square – Leeds, England**
18/07 – Alexandra Palace Park – London, England**

Manic Street Preachers closing the show – *
Suede closing the show – **

Suede in a live context, at the moment anyway, consists of long-term (arguably founding) members Brett Anderson, Mat Osman, and Simon Gilbert on vocals, bass, and drums respectively – with Richard Oakes and Neil Codling filling out the sound with guitars, backing vocals, and keys since well into the 2000’s. This has been the band’s line-up since their comeback album Bloodsports in 2013. If the critical and commercial reception of the band in this orientation is anything to go by, then Suede may be onto yet another success in an era that has almost forgotten about Britpop.

AUTOFICTION, the upcoming album from Suede featuring lead single ‘She Still Leads Me On’, is available to pre-order now from https://t.co/3DTE4GKm6z. pic.twitter.com/JmxeIZv2xl

— Suede HQ (@suedeHQ) May 23, 2022

While the ’90s in the UK were pretty much dominated by the cool new thing that was Britpop, the longevity of the genre was really to be desired. The guitar-driven attitude worked well for the 90’s but then the boisterous nature was seemingly dropped for something sleeker and more approachable in the 2000’s. Oasis forgot how to write good music in 1997 (I will stand by the fact that Be Here Now is an underrated gem), and Blur took the Britpop sound somewhere completely different after the whole Parklife debacle finished, you could argue that Jarvis Cocker kept the sound going for a while but anything he did outside of Pulp definitely went down a more spoken word route… not really Britpop is it. But Suede have survived. They may not have achieved the same great heights as some more common household names, but all of their output since 2013 has been solid. Respectable even, in a time when they could have been very easily forgotten.

When speaking of the new album in a press release, Anderson explained, “Autofiction is our punk record. No whistles and bells. Just the five of us in a room with all the glitches and fuck-ups revealed; the band themselves exposed in all their primal mess… Autofiction has a natural freshness, it’s where we want to be.”