Joe Costello catches Breeders mainwoman Kim Deal in Wolverhampton.
It’s highly likely that most of the people in attendance at the Wulfrun Hall can claim to have seen the original Pixies lineup performing live this summer, albeit in different venues in different places and different setlists.
Kim Deal’s first solo album arriving late in 2024 and now an accompanying first solo tour sees her arrive in Wolverhampton she believes for the first ever time, saying it was similar to her home town of Dayton, Ohio with positive and negative points. A positive for me on arrival was that the air conditioning installed in the refurb is excellent and a less than full hall ensured an additional degree of comfort that I was very grateful for given the current weather.
Three or four songs in she breezily informs us that, “You’ve probably worked out we’re playing the album in full” as the 10-piece band that expanded the standard four-piece she’s performed as part of over the past four decades. The line-up also including a trumpet, trombone, violin, cello, keyboards and backing vocalist to better reproduce the layered and eclectic sound of Nobody Loves You More, which transitions effortlessly between the swoony nostalgia of the title track Are You Mine? And Summerland, the electronic driven stomp of Crystal Breath and Big Ben Beat, experimental acapella of Bats In the Afternoon to the more reminiscent of Breeders material like Disobedience and album closer A Good Time Pushed.
A thanks to the audience follows, then a half-hearted attempt to exit the stage as if that was it for the evening but nobody believes it and she’s promptly back on stage for a second set that largely consists for the first part of deep cuts from the Breeders back catalogue and a couple of her earliest solo recordings before a triumphant finish of Gigantic, which she announces as having been a song she’s performed for many years and only recently discovered that the missing ingredient was a horn section.
The suggestion of this sounded to my ears like sacrilege but in practice it was executed and received with such joy, a real highlight to experience and the 10 of them line up along the front of the stage to take their bow before re-emerging for a two song encore ending predictably but no less enjoyably with Cannonball.
A fine evening of music then and Kim interacted cheerfully with the attendees throughout, getting a chant going for no reason other than she felt like it (It consisted of *clap* *clap* “CHANT!” in the style of We Will Rock You if you wondered). It’s to be hoped there will be more to come but given that many of the songs on the album have been around for more than 10 years and the most recent Breeders album was released seven years ago, it wouldn’t be wise to assume anything new is in the works in the foreseeable future.
