Culture

CBS Canterbury Arena, Christchurch
3 August 2010

   The Pixies are, unashamedly, my favourite band of all time. My formative musical experiences are intricately tied to their mixture of alternating screams and breathy grunts. But this is some twenty years later, and a band that once had the vitality of youth (and relevance to the times that birthed them) could not, surely, be any more than a poor facsimile of their younger selves.
   Their only previous New Zealand show was on the Doolittle tour, which was a good show, but really came to life during the second encore when they cut loose from the all-too-rigid set list and blew through some absolutely searing versions of songs, mainly from Come on Pilgrim and Surfer Rosa. Given that this latest show in Christchurch was purportedly going to be a special one-off, it shouldn’t have been a surprise that, freed from the shackles of the Doolittle straitjacket, the four silhouetted figures launched into the instrumental ‘Cecilia Ann’, from their penultimate album Bossanova.
   But it was a little bit of a surprise, and pretty much the guts of the rest of the set was too. Bossanova featured relatively heavily in the set list, and the reputation the Pixies had for churning out song after shit-kicking song with little movement or otherwise proved to be as accurate now as it was in the late eighties. Of course concessions have been made to time, and the fact that they are playing songs that are pretty much twenty years old means they could not possibly have the fire they once had. Given that, they were still able to bash these nuggets of songs out with gusto, concentrating on what might be considered an unusual set to anyone who has followed their set lists since the reformation in 2004. Surely it is unusual for the set to be centred around ‘Winterlong’, their Neil Young cover which graced the B side of one of the Bossanova singles?
   There is no way to recapture your youth, and this concert reinforces that. The only way to get away with performing twenty-year-old songs to people not able to catch you the first time around is to do it with heart-felt conviction, and hope that on occasion you will transcend that. That sums up this concert pretty well: ‘Velouria’, ‘Gigantic’, ‘Tame’, and ‘The Sad Punk’ soared tonight, and the rest of the set was quite adequate. The Pixies may be milking it (they are milking it), but as far as reunion shows by way-past-middle-age-rock-bands-purely-for-money go, it was really, really good.