Joe Costello sees the Pixies at the O2 Academy.
I arrived at the venue about halfway through the opening set by local lads Big Special, an act I was dimly aware of but never actually seen or heard before. An unconventional set up to say the least, a vocalist, a drummer, a backing track is certainly a new one on me but they provided an enjoyable beginning to the evening. Local accents aside or perhaps including, they are demonstrably Midlands sounding, The Streets being the obvious reference point with clearly discernable Two Tone influences.
Announcing that they first met just around the corner at Matthew Boulton College, they encourage the alumni in the audience to give them a cheer and I am pleased to report I was among the small yelp this generated. They’re clearly delighted to both be playing to such a big home town audience and also be supporting who they describe as the best band in the world and promise us a 750 song set in the next hour and a half. I’ll be investigating further.
And so to the main act, for the umpteenth time. The Pixies are edging into lost count territory for the number of times I’ve seen them. There’s very little of what I wrote of them on their most recent visit to Birmingham two years ago that isn’t applicable here.
The ratio of about 30% of their more recent material with the remainder being what most of the audience are there to hear still in place, my personal opinion is that last year’s The Night the Zombies Came is actually a decent addition to the canon with the requisite amount of fuzzy surf and incipient threat you would expect from them and I felt no compulsion to retreat to the bar or check the football scores during the half a dozen or so songs they performed from it.
A crowd pleasing opening of Cecilia Ann, This Monkey’s Gone to Heaven, Wave of Mutilation and Planet of Sound set the tone for the rest of the evening with the more recent numbers spaced out over the rest of the set. It’s pleasant and enjoyable enough until we hear a particularly savage rendition of Caribou about half an hour in and it seems as if they move from second to first gear for the rest of the show. Approaching the hour mark, I feel a gnawing agitation that they’ve not performed anything from Surfer Rosa and this is when Where Is My Mind? is unleashed, Black Francis singing all the right words, not necessarily at the pace I’m accustomed to, delivering more of the same on Bone Machine.
The beauty of a substantial body of work such as they have is the capacity for surprises as well as the favourites, a cover of David Lynch’s In Heaven (Lady In the Radiator Song) I am fairly certain I’ve never heard them play live before. What I expected to be the last song of the evening a typically ferocious rendition of Tame that I have heard them end with more than once before, was followed with the house lights on with Into the White, another B-side and another song with incredibly tall new bassist Emma Richardson on lead vocals, it’s possibly notable that only couple of the tracks in the setlist were from the four albums recorded between Kim Deal’s departure in 2013 and her arrival. There was no between song chat, there was no encore. Perfect.
But they are deserving of more of a “Will this do?” style review from me. It’s hard to overstate the importance they have in my life. I’m currently on my fifth Death to the Pixies t-shirt, predictably in ever increasing sizes, my password policy is generally Pixies song titles using numbers and special characters with G19antic, #13_Baby, Where15MyMind? and others being deployed over the years.
I took up the guitar again a couple of years ago after many decades and as bad as I still am, the ability to sound like Joey Santiago for a few seconds will never get old. I was the recipient of some unsettling news on Monday which set me a little askew but an evening of unsettling music was exactly what I needed to restore my equilibrium and long may the Pixies provide this service to me.
