Oliver Evans gets an overdue taste of glam-pop, 9os-style!

A colleague in his early 20s who counts Oasis as his favourite group gave me a quizzical look when I said I was to see Suede.

It seems, he had never heard of the glam/Britpop stars, active from 1992 to 2003 before splitting and reforming in 2010, with a new album, Bloodsports, released last year.

You can understand why — Suede were very much a product of their time when flamboyant, gothically romantic indie was a British stock in trade in the wake of The Smiths.

Wiry, provocative frontman Brett Anderson — who infamously said he was “a bisexual man who never had a homosexual experience” — generated the kind of buzz now accustomed to international pop stars like Lady Gaga, unthinkable now for a British “indie” act. It’s a good job the svelte 46-year-old then hasn’t let himself go as he bounds on to stage to showcase his tried-and-tested repertoire of indie hero moves — standing on the monitors, pawing the front row, outstretching the mic, slinking into the audience — that send the die-hards into delirium.

Like The Smiths and contemporaries The Manic Street Preachers, Suede had and retain a hardcore of devoted fans but scored enough hit singles to attract a wider audience. This might explain the stark difference between pandemonium at the front and the chattering, mobile-phone-watching bulk of Friday night’s audience further back who really just want to hear 1996 top 10 hit Beautiful Ones.

They’ll have to wait, it comes last, but only after a thrilling romp through second album Dog Man Star as a warm-up for the same performance last Sunday at the Royal Albert Hall for The Teenage Cancer Trust. This was Suede in all their doomed pomp, released just as Oasis rewrote the chart rules and paved the way for Britpop in all its belligerent glory (Suede’s poppy follow-up, 1996’s Coming Up, saw them surrender to the mid-nineties orthodoxy and was their biggest seller). Lyrics like “Rafaella or Della the silent dream/My Marilyn come to my slum for an hour” might not have cut it in an era of Adidas but have a special place in the hearts of tonight’s audience, lifted by Anderson’s phenomenally powerful, unique tones.

Then ’90s B-sides Killing of a Flashboy and Together reward the faithful before we get the greatest hits — Trash, Animal Nitrate, So Young, Metal Mickey and Beautiful Ones, joyous, charged glam rock in which Anderson — his shirt buttons slipping open even more — whips the crowd into a frenzy.

We’re lucky to have them back.