Manic Street Preachers and Suede have announced details of a joint UK and Ireland tour for summer 2024. Check out full dates and ticket details below.
The two indie giants first toured Europe together back in 1993, before last year they recreated the line-up for a US jaunt – with upcoming joint dates to follow in Japan this winter.
Now, they’ve announced details of bringing the tour to the UK and Ireland next June and July, with each act playing for approximately 75 minutes of about 16 songs, and taking it in turns to play last each evening.
“We’ve both got a dedicated fanbase, but we do share a gene pool and a rabid denomination of fans,” Manics bassist and lyricist Nick Wire said on BBC Breakfast this morning. “It’s because we never belonged to anything apart from ourselves. We were never part of grunge, we never part of Britpop.”
He added: “And we just looked better than anyone back then anyway.”
Suede frontman Brett Anderson said: “It’s really inspiring to have a band that you love playing with you. It’s like a friendly competition.”
Both bands are survivors of the ’90s – as well as alumni of the NME Godlike Genius Award. Last year, Manics frontman James Dean Bradfield explained a greater “symmetry” between the Manics and Suede.
“A lot of bands were quite short on glamour at that point [in the early 90s],” he said. “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.”
The Manics and Suede were also lumped in with the Britpop movement of the ’90s. Suede had always vocally rejected their place in the genre, while Bradfield said they were able to “switch off to stuff like that”.
“We’d been around before most of those bands, except Blur,” he said. “We knew that ‘Motorcycle Emptiness’, ‘La Tristessa’, ‘Faster’, ‘Revol’, ‘Motown Junk’ and ‘You Love Us’ had existed way before Britpop had ever been a twinkle in anyone’s reproductive systems. We knew that we were apart from it, but when we got co-opted into it we weren’t bothered at all. It meant that we played to bigger audiences, sold more records and reached more people. Then all these people knew the lyrics to ‘Faster’ and ‘A Design For Life’.
“In politics you say you need to win the middle ground, you need to give up a part of your soul. Suddenly we were winning the middle ground and hadn’t given up any part of our soul.”
The full tour dates for the Manics and Suede joint UK and Ireland tour are below. Tickets are on sale from 9am BST on Friday October 13 and will be available here.
JUNE 2024
Friday 28 – Llangollen International Musical Eisteddfod*
JULY 2024
Tuesday 2 – Dublin Trinity College **
Friday 5 – Cardiff Castle *
Wednesday 10 – Edinburgh Castle *
Friday 12 – Manchester Castlefield Bowl *
Saturday 13 – Leeds Millenium Square **
Thursday 18 – London Alexandra Palace Park **
*Manic Street Preachers close the show
**Suede close the show
Manic Street Preachers have been touring in support of 2021’s ‘The Ultra Vivid Lament‘, while they are also back in the studio working on the follow-up, with Wire having recently released his second solo record ‘Intimism’.
Suede are currently promoting their acclaimed ninth album ‘Autofiction’, with a run of their own UK headline shows coming up this December.
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