PIXIES

Manchester, Apollo | November 21st

To paraphrase: “I know the new songs are good shit”. This was a boast made by Pixies axeman Joey Santiago in a recent interview with the Nostalgic Music Express. But even if this were to be true, if you’ve ousted your iconic bassist and backing vocalist you’re at risk of pissing off your hardcore fanbase, diminishing much of the credibility you’ve garnered across a career that straddles 27 years and five seminal albums.

Tonight’s first cut from EP[1], a record that took Boston’s Pixies twelve years to release, could be a mellowed-out Weezer B-side covered by Mark Owen. It’s called Andro Queen and its limpness is emphasised by the two songs that follow – Cactus and Ed Is Dead – which remind us why everyone came out tonight: to gorge on the celebrated collective works of alt-rock’s freakiest howled by the maniacal mass of screaming flesh that is Black Francis.

In between drummer David Lovering’s deep pan croons on La La Love, White Album indebted Here Comes Your Man and the deranged cackles of Mr Grieves, there are murmurings amid the crowd with regard to the recent reshuffle in their groove section. “It’s a real shame Kim Deal quit the band,” one purist 40-something-year-old fan-girl scoffs. Meanwhile – in the pursuit of journalistic rigour – we invade the privacy of a teeny bopping fan-boy garbed in a ‘Death To The Pixies’ t-shirt in-between choruses of “Your bone’s got a little machine” from the amorphous most-pit. “I’m not really arsed Kim Deal’s quit,” the aforesaid fan-boy says, mopping the sweat from his brow.

So how do you overcome the problem of like Kim Deal’s abscence? Easy, enlist the skill-set of another bassist called Kim of course. That’s Kim Shattuck – erstwhile lead singer and guitarist for the Muffs – the added lilt of oestrogen to Francis’ self-deprecating masculinity.

And with this line-up Monkey Gone To Heaven, Gouge Away, Wave of Mutilation and Rock Music succeed in sounding as relevant as they did 20-plus years ago, with the each song being yelled back at Francis en masse. It’s the oddball lyricism of the anthemic Debaser, the tender touch of Caribou and Santiago’s guitar throttling mini-freak outs on Vamos which preserve Pixies’ legacy, not the faux-stadium Nickleback rock of Toe In The Ocean. Thankfully, the mantric Where Is My Mind? chimes in to an onset of flashbacks and bleary-eyes, before an assault of Trompe Le Monde’s squalling encore staple Planet Of Sound lays the monolithic 35 song set-list to rest. The verdict: Francis and co are still expert purveyors of the kind of jams make you sweat profusely; the soft-core new stuff is permissible, and for in the live arena, Pixies are still the real Deal.

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Words: Joshua Nevett

Photo: Shirlaine Forrest