Llangollen international musical eisteddfod
More than merely a mutual love-in, this tour finds the two bands – and longterm friends – spurring each other on to be provocative and potent

Thirty years after they toured together as young men across Europe, cementing a lifelong friendship, Manic Street Preachers and Suede’s UK co-headline tour kicks off in rather more refined surroundings: a white pavilion on the edges of the pretty market town of Llangollen, launching the town’s 77-year-old international festival of music and literature.

The Blackwood-born-and-bred Manics may headline tonight on home turf (the bands are rotating the billing on this tour), but Brett Anderson bounces on to the stage at 7.25pm nevertheless, a Tiggerish gladiator determined that Suede win the crowd over. They do so audaciously, kicking off with the little known, darkly energetic 2022 album track Turn Off Your Brain and Yell, followed quickly by 1997 hit Trash (which Manics’ frontman James Dean Bradfield called his favourite Suede song in an interview last year).

The broadcaster and record label owner on swapping BBC 1Xtra for 6 Music, overcoming her fear of swimming, and leaving the radio on for her dog

Born in south east London in 1990, Jamilla Walters, AKA Jamz Supernova, is a broadcaster, DJ and boss of record label Future Bounce. In 2021, she became the presenter of BBC 6 Music’s Saturday early afternoon show, broadcasting global club sounds, alternative R&B and left-field electronica. A current Mercury music prize judge and part of the BBC’s presenting team at Glastonbury, she lives with her partner, music producer Sam Interface, and their two-year-old daughter.

You wanted to be a BBC presenter since your teens. Why?
I always thought of it as a trusted place as a kid, watching things from CBBC to Saturday morning TV. Then I came across BBC 1Xtra in the mid-2000s and heard the kind of radio they were doing – a bit closer to the old pirate-radio days, but not as commercial as places like Choice FM. I loved it – it felt like a place of freedom in terms of how you could be a presenter and where that could take you.