Saturday Night

The rhythm arrives immediately and sets the terms: a compressed, almost ecstatic drum loop that belongs more to the dancefloor than the guitar-band world Suede otherwise occupied. There is a glam-stomp quality to the production, something that owes more to T. Rex and disco than to the Smiths or Bowie's Berlin period — a deliberate choice to reach for release rather than atmosphere. Brett Anderson's vocal performance here is looser and more celebratory than his usual gothic romanticism, the delivery riding the groove with something that sounds like genuine physical pleasure. The guitars are choppy and funky rather than lush, the whole arrangement lean enough to let the percussion breathe. Lyrically the song is a study in the specific freedom of an ordinary night out — the anonymity of a crowd, the temporary escape from a life that weighs too much, the way a particular evening can feel like it was made for you specifically. It captures the way certain British cities in the mid-1990s offered working-class and queer youth a space of temporary sovereignty: the club, the night, the borrowed glamour of a few hours outside normal life. There is no tragedy in it, which is unusual for Suede; the song permits itself pure pleasure without the subsequent comedown. It belongs to getting dressed to go out, to the forty minutes before midnight when the night still holds its promise intact, to cities that were once grittier and stranger and perhaps more alive.