Release Date: 22 January, 2016
Warner Music
1. When You Are Young/2. Outsiders/3. No Tomorrow/4.Pale Snow/5. I Don’t Know How To Reach You/6. What I’m trying to Tell You/7. Tightrope/8. Learning To Be/9. Like Kids/10. I Can’t Give Her What She Wants/11.When You Were Young/12. The Fur And The Feathers
Prior to this gig I had only seen Suede once at an intimate, yet, for me, perfect gig, at the release of their previous album entitled ‘Bloodsports’ at Rough Trade East. In that gig there was another, more approachable element in the performance of the songs as the venue is small but it was a rare opportunity to see a different side of the band.
Having seen in fan videos the show that Suede and Brett Anderson are offering in festivals, I was looking forward to the world premiere of ‘Night Thoughts’ at a big venue as the Roundhouse. Since I have started the somewhat unconventional tradition of attending the live releases of their latest albums, I wouldn’t miss the opportunity to be part of this, 2hr long set where ‘Night Thoughts’ was performed at its entirety against the backdrop of the movie!Approaching the venue I saw that a big queue had already formed and even though the doors had already opened at the announced time, only a handful of people had been allowed to enter, leaving the rest of us waiting outside in the cold. People became agitated and asked the security staff about this delay. Without providing an explanation for this, access was granted to all of us after 20’. We are not used to experiencing such delays in entering Roundhouse, especially since its crowd control policy is one of the best in London. My surprise continued as I entered the venue only to realize that a few people were already feeling unwell. Later I was joined by a doctor friend of mine who also confirmed seeing later a few other fellow members of the audience feeling unwell at the corridors where someone fell unconscious.
Night Thoughts
…or else a music story that nods to Crass and channels a specific attitude towards music, family and other relationships in the same way that an Ingmar Bergman film would do…
“…I guess it’s about these moments when you’re awake at 4 o’ clock in the morning and the world seems like a brutal place…” (Brett Anderson about ‘Night Thoughts’)
It was a conscious decision to delay writing this text after the world premiere of ‘Night Thoughts’ at Roundhouse. Not because I couldn’t process what I had experienced but because I wanted to take a distance from it, let it settle and also wait for the band to talk about this album in depth. Additionally I hadn’t listened to the album at all its detail before its release and I realised that its live presentation did not include all the elements of the music of ‘Night Thoughts’. The 13parts interview/presentation of this album by the band added valuable information about the intentions and the way the band worked for the creation of this album/project. Some details of the album could not be presented live for practical reasons (i.e. children’s voices between ‘Tightrope’ and ‘Learning To Be’ and at the end of ‘Learning To Be’ before ‘Like Kids’, at the end of ‘Like Kids’) but it was really interesting to learn that Roger Sargent, the director of the film, was working with the general aim to visually grasp the essence of the band.
“…’Tightrope’ feels like a Suede sleeve, there’s something about it that makes you almost want to look away and I think we knew that Roger was always going to get the visual sense of the band very right…“ (Mat Osman)
‘Night Thoughts’ is an album which has a different mood compared to ‘Bloodsports’. Even though the topics of the songs are similar, ‘Night Thoughts’ doesn’t have an inch of light in the melodies and the lyrics. The guitar (Richard Oakes) has a prominent role in the creation of an atmosphere in the album and enhances even further the strong emotions that Brett Anderson is expressing.Whenever ‘Bloodsports’ was making a stylistic reference to the band’s past, 
‘Night Thoughts’ is almost obscuring all of the mental images that Suede have offered us since their formation in 1993. This isn’t a pop album, it is a very personal almost self-referential, slow in rhythms, album. It is the music that would accompany your innermost thoughts, the ones you are scared of sharing with anyone. This is also the first time Suede produce a movie to accompany an album. Taking into consideration the emotional sensitivity that has always characterized the band’s music, nothing short of emotional strength was expected.
Night thoughts- The gig
The whole of the stage was covered with a semi transparent screen that took up its whole height. I found my place in the second row in front of the stage and was feeling honestly really excited to be able to experience the presentation of this album in this setting, live! The band respected fully the announced stage times and when we listened to the first note of ‘When You Are Young’, the screen filled with the image of a vast beach where a young man was heading towards the horizon through the sea, indifferent to the deepening of the sea bed. The camera focused on his face so that we could be sure that the only reason for his agony was his longing for reaching the horizon and for 
getting away from something…It felt as if the movie had placed us immediately at the heart of the emotional turmoil of its protagonist. Being at the front rows too close to the screen, didn’t allow me to see the movie from a comfortable distance. This meant that for the duration of this movie, I felt as if I was part of it and the feeling was overwhelming and sometimes uneasy.
“…I didn’t want it to be slavishly connected to the lyrics in the album…sometimes it drifts completely away from that and I really like that…“ (Brett Anderson about the film).
Once the song finished and without the slightest delay ‘Outsiders’ started with a scene that took all of us back to 1993 and to the cover of the homonymous Suede album…only this time the kissing characters were underwater. This was the only song that had been released at the time of this gig and the one on which the audience somehow responded. The scene was progressing on the screen in a rhythm that had a stillness in it thus having a completely different character compared to the rhythm of the song. This image from the cover of ‘Suede’ album, together with some other visual 
references to the band’s past (i.e. the scene of the cover of ‘Dog Man Star’ at the video of the song entitled ‘Like Kids’) got me thinking that these past ‘chapters’ of the life of the band had left some deep traces in the psyches of Suede. Bringing them to the foreground again, as part of this new work, is a way for Suede to somehow uproot them from their previous setting and put them in another context where they can be interpreted by the audience in a different way.
“From my point of view it’s not like I was trying to ignore anything visually that had come in the past but they gave me such a blank canvas that I just wanted to see where it went…“ (Robert Sargent about the film ‘Night Thoughts’)
I liked how the band was still visible through the screen but did not dominate the stage. This ‘distance’ from the audience could give the band a much appreciated space in which they could perform this new album somehow detached from the energy of the audience but without negating its presence. Naturally the characters of the movie were much larger in scale but this created the impression that our attention should have been drawn towards them and towards the lyrics and not so much towards the band. I have experienced some similar presentations of film with music but none absorbed me so much in the atmosphere of both the music and the movie as this gig did. ‘No Tomorrow’ was presented via a disturbing video where a man is committing suicide through pills and he is found by his daughter by accident, while ‘Pale Snow’ shows us a couple watching with emotional nostalgia a video showing their child at a young age. The man in this video is the character that we saw at the beginning of the first song.
“ ’No Tomorrow’ is specifically about my father and his relationship with depression more than anything and lots of the songs on the record were kind of written about my relationship with my dad and my mum and then conversely my relationship with my kids…how I saw myself as a son and how that reflects on how I saw myself as a father…“ (Brett Anderson about ‘No Tomorrow’).
At this point of the show I started finding it difficult to concentrate on both the videos and the lyrics as they were communicating different meanings in different ways. For example the song ‘I Don’t Know How to Reach You’ describes in the lyrics the loss of communication between two people, yet the video showed people traversing the screen showing signs of disorientation or even hypnotism and seeming kind of lost in a way that brought to my mind someone who has is terminally ill.
‘And I don’t know how to reach you
I don’t know where to look
I turn away from my mistakes…‘(lyrics from ‘I Don’t Know How To Reach You’)
Until the song ‘Like Kids’, the videos had a similar feel, alternating scenes of sad, almost desperate situations. In line with what the song’s title 
suggests, the video that accompanies this song has a more optimistic approach as it shows a casual scene in a room where two people are dancing and one laying on the bed in the same posture as ‘Dog Man Star’ sleeve but with his butt censored and covered with little rectangles. Everybody was laughing about the ‘political correctness’ of this choice, not to show the naked butt of a person in a movie. The next song in the album ‘I Can’t Give Her What She Wants’, made me cry not only as a result of the 
heart breaking way in which Anderson delivers the chorus, but also as a result of the strong scene of the video that accompanied it.
“…in the phase that I’m in in my life I’m always looking for friction to document…it’s about finding those moments of misunderstanding…” (Brett Anderson about ‘I Can’t Give Her What She Wants’)
‘When You Were Young’ establishes a connection and a contradiction with the first song of the album. Both songs are about “…the arrogance of youth…a reflective song about regret and loss” (Brett Anderson). It’s a song that has an orchestral feel mainly due to the presence of strings in the introduction. The comparison of the chorus between ‘When You Are Young’ and ‘When You Were Young’ adds to the impression that this song marks the ending of a sonic/emotional journey for the band. In the first song the chorus says ‘When you are young there is nothing right and nothing wrong’ and in ‘When You Were Young’ this phrase is sang in the past tense. This creates the impression that the singer is also an observer, a person that experiences the emotional turmoil and the facets that this turmoil acquires in life’s different phases. This song only lasts 2.19 minutes as it makes an almost transparent transition to the last one ‘The Fur and Feathers’. This is a captivating song with powerful lyrics and a very subtle melody that did not leave my mind even after the song finished so I kept replaying it. I loved the transitions between the songs which are almost seamless and very well worked throughout the album.This was not easy to observe during the gig but after catefully listening to the album later.This is what gives this album the quality of a book where each chapter is another piece of the story. Each song of ‘Night Thoughts’ is linked with the next in different ways so that conceptual coherence is achieved in an excellent way(notice for example the introduction and the ending of ‘What I’m Trying To Tell You’ , the transition from ‘Tightrope’ to ‘Learning To Be’ for 26″ and the change of atmosphere after this point, the transition from ‘I Can’t Give Her What She Wants’ to ‘When You Were Young’ and from there to ‘The Fur And The Feathers’)
“…I was listening to the ‘Song of Siren’ by Tim Buckley when I was trying to make the music work in a similar way…” (Brett Anderson about ‘The Fur and The Feathers’)
This is actually a brilliant way to end an album while also showing that this album is a standalone piece of music that is self referential with a distinct, almost restricted openness towards the audience. This is an album that fits very well within the body of music that Suede have offered us throughout the years, the lyrics of the songs touch very sensitive, private chords in every single one of us but the videos that accompany this album fail to transmit this feeling of suspension or indecisiveness about things that seem hard to tackle in a moment where everything is possible. This is the reason why I found that the cover of this album is perfect as it conveys instantly and with no doubt the idea of emotional suspension! All that the lyrics convey throughout this album, is a registration of difficult situations and phases in one’s life as an impasse, as a situation that would make the world end. Conceptually even the bitter lyrics of the songs ‘I Don’t Know How to Reach You’ and ‘I Can’t Give Her What She Wants’ do not create the feeling of despair. On the contrary, I have found that the videos that accompany the songs convey almost obsessively, the idea of a dead end, of a very sad almost unsurpassable 
loneliness in every aspect. I wouldn’t like to think that Suede aim to glorify the idea of an impasse in a numbing, non-creative way.If anything, the band has always documented the world around them in a unique way. Overall the movie turned out to be different videos stitched together and presented continuously but without any conceptual link between them.
“…a little section just before ‘Learning to Be’ is actually my stepson reading from the Bible, my inspiration point was a Crass record ‘Reality is Silent’ where there is a child reading from the Bible…” (Brett Anderson about ‘Learning to Be’)
At the end of the first part of this show everyone around me was discussing the videos. Three friends that were standing next to me, had seen Suede perform many times before. I joined their discussion about the video that accompanied the song ‘I Can’t Give Her What She Wants’ where we see a girl that is drowning. This song for me is the natural follow up to the song ‘Faultlines’ in Bloodsports and like ‘Faultlines’ has become my favourite song from the album. We tried to find a conceptual link between this image and the lyrics that take our minds to something completely different and we tried to think that maybe this video was sarcastic at its entirety or just an aesthetically fascinating image whose visual effect was considered to somehow match the rhythm of the song… we all concluded that ultimately the scene was quite incomprehensible and couldn’t be placed in the context of the song. A few people in front of me were also discussing the videos of this album and seemed to agree that the videos did not have common themes and they could not be interpreted as parts of a whole. I will possibly not watch the videos for ‘Night Thoughts’ again, but this album will accompany me for many years ahead!
Blaue Rosen 