The Pixies @ London Brixton Academy
9th October 2009

The Pixies have always had a tendency to indulge in odd set lists. Back in their eighties heyday, the alt rock legends would sometimes play a show with the songs performed in alphabetical order. Some furious audiences saw the band walk off after just three songs, with riots averted only when they appeared back onstage a few minutes later, and played for another hour. They had been playing the set list backwards, encore first.

Looking back to the eleven years when the band was disbanded, frontman Frank Black refusing for a long time to even play Pixies tracks at his solo shows, nothing would have seemed odder than a tour where they just played their best-loved album, in order. But that is what the band are doing, taking 1989’s brilliant, genre-shaping Doolittle on the road.

It could be looked at as a nostalgia kick for aging generation X-ers but the untouchable 2004 reunion tour introduced the Pixies to a whole new audience, and a lot of the crowd are lithe young indie things who you could just as easily picture at a Wavves show.

And there is nothing nostalgic about the music, which sounds as fresh blasting out of the O2 Brixton Academy speakers as it must have twenty years ago. In front of a chanting crowd, the lights darken and the video screens come to life with Luis Bunuel’s crazed surrealist short film Un Chien Andalou, the inspiration for the Pixies’ summery, eyeball-slicing ‘Debaser’, running on fast forward.

The Pixies – ‘Gigantic’ (live at Brixton Academy, October 2009)

Then the band come on, four unassuming middle-aged musicians looking totally at odds with the dark, biblical, skewed surf rock they’re about to perform. They ease the crowd in with the bsides first, dashing through ‘Weird at My School’ and ‘Bailey’s Walk’ like they were hits. Up in seating a pissed off-looking, white bearded security guard goes from the front to the back of the area admonishing anyone who gets up to dance, then starting over in case there have been any outbreaks of fun in his absence. But then Kim Deal starts the immortal four note bassline to ‘Debaser’ and suddenly everyone’s dancing, leaving the security guard to plod back down the stairs, a beaten man.

Frank Black’s voice is as good as ever, yelping like a dog on ‘Tame’ and crooning like a perverted Vegas singer through the beautiful, chilling ‘Hey’, the 4,000 strong crowd yelling “this… is… the… sound… that the mother makes when the baby breaksâ€? back at him.

They close with ‘Vamos’, ‘Gigantic’ and Where is My Mind?’ from 1988’s Surfer Rosa, and I doubt I was the only one who left hoping that they might celebrate that album’s 22^nd birthday next year.

By Tom Brown