Pixies, O2 Academy, Birmingham review - indie veterans pack the house

Pixies might just be the ultimate Radio 6 Dad band. They’ve been around (on-and-off) for around 40 years; they’ve got a fine back catalogue of slightly weird, guitar-driven scuzzy rock music and they have absolutely no pretentions to being flash at all.

However, while Black Francis and his crew pulled in plenty of their core fan base into Birmingham’s O2 Academy this week, it was also pleasing to see plenty of young men and women who couldn’t have even been born when Pixies temporarily decided to knock things on the head and go their separate ways in the early 1990s. It was also clear that everyone present were up for a good time and that they had it in spades.

I was a teenage Pixies fan back in the 1980s, having seen the band four or five times when they were promoting their initial run of stellar albums, but not at all since. So, it was with a degree of trepidation that I turned up to see this show. Of course, I wasn’t expecting the same kind of energy as when Black Francis used to yelp and howl like a lunatic, Joey Santiago’s lead guitar would have ears ringing for days and Kim Deal was still very much a permanent fixture in the line-up. Nevertheless, while the show ebbed and flowed between raw and feral takes on classics such as “Bone Machine” and “Gauge Away” and more gentle fare like “Mercy Me” and the title track of their most recent album “The Night the Zombies Came”, it was certainly no disappointing heritage show.

Pixies’ performance, however, was an almost dictionary definition of workmanlike: dressed super-casually in front of a “winged P” backdrop and with no conversation with the audience. The show was an emphatic rendering of almost 30 anthemic and the quirky tunes from their back catalogue over an hour and a half, which only came to an end just after the house lights came back on during, new bassist, Emma Richardson’s swirling and hypnotic take on “Into the White”. Pixies may not be showmen, but they can certainly still rouse their audience to get down and get with it.

Highlights were many and included, an Emma Richardson voiced version of David Lynch’s weird and wonderful “In Heaven (Lady in the Radiator Song)”, that was much more mellow than when the band first started covering it several decades ago. “Hey” was an almost bluesy audience singalong with a laidback, funky groove, while “Caribou” was introduced by a harsh guitar intro, before Black Francis weighed in like a deranged fire-and-brimstone preacher. “Planet of Sound” came on with a squealing blast of feedback and “Tame” was a dose of punk rock fire.

Pixies have clearly still got a creative tiger in their tank and are certainly nowhere near ready to retire. After unplugging their instruments, they basked in some well-earned West Midlands adulation from a full house, before exiting the stage and leaving broad smiles on plenty of Brummie faces.

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