PIXIES / THE BIG MOON | LIVE REVIEW
Motorpoint Arena Cardiff, Fri 13 Sept
The Big Moon [below], openers for the Pixies’ latest European tour, have nothing like the history of the headliners but they’ve certainly got a bright future. Their half-hour set is saturated with buzzsaw-pop anthems, with most recent single It’s Easy Then getting heads nodding throughout an already busy arena.
The main event, then. Where Is My Mind? straight into Here Comes Your Man. Bang, bang. No break. No concession to the convention that a band doesn’t ordinarily open an hour and 45-minute set with its two biggest hits. As a bold way to get a packed arena crowd fired up, it’s brilliant. And with a back catalogue as heavy on hits as the Pixies’, they nearly get away with it.
Nobody expects a lecture from imposing frontman Black Francis. Indeed, nobody’s in the least surprised that neither he, nor his bandmates (original members Joey Santiago and David Lovering, plus bassist Paz Lenchantin, who has been filling Kim Deal’s shoes admirably for a few years now) utter so much as a hello to the crowd, most of whom look like they were around to pick up a copy of breakthrough record Surfer Rosa when it hit the shops in 1988. Instead, the Bostonians pummel relentlessly through a 30-plus song setlist that shows off the breadth of a long career, taking in numbers from 1987’s Come On Pilgrim all the way up to brand, spanking new LP Beneath The Eyrie. This latest release had, in fact, only come out earlier the same day and the band had marked their newest arrival by conducting a signing in the world’s oldest record shop, to the excitement of a throng of fans who’d queued through their lunchbreaks at Spillers.
The trouble is, and at the risk of sounding curmudgeonly, there’s a marked difference in quality between this newer material and the old stuff. Numbers like Catfish Kate and On Graveyard Hill are fine tunes, lyrically evocative and possessed of decent hooks, but it’s hard to escape the sense that if a band with less pedigree than tonight’s headliners had put them out, they’d have vanished without trace into rock’n’roll’s void.
So, when they’re good, they’re stellar; nobody is going to watch Pixies, in the flying form they display tonight, rip through a lacerating Debaser and not feel awed. But for every Caribou or Gigantic, there’s a dawdle through Daniel Boone or Los Surfers Muertos. Still, the sweet taste left by a warmly delivered and rabidly demanded encore of Hey is worth the cost of admission alone.
words HUGH RUSSELL photos KEVIN PICK