Pixies - Doolittle tour

Review: Now, there were technically no review tickets for this tour – hey, the Pixies retirement fund can't afford to be drained by we damned leeches of the press, right? – but given that the ticket that allowed me entrance came via the surprise largesse of a disgruntled scalper unable to offload his prize, an excited phonecall from a friend and the swiftest Newtown-couch-to-Hordern-Pavilion trip in human memory, it would seem karmically churlish not to put some words down. Furthermore, it's worth recording this show because there may well be people out there who, like myself, saw the Pixies when they last toured and thought "eh, how different could it be?" Especially since this tour is a track-by-track celebration of their 1989 album (and generally acknowledged masterpiece) Doolittle, it's not like there'd be any surprises, right?

Wrong.

At first blush, not much has changed from last we saw them: well, frontman Black Francis looks like he's slimmed down a bit, guitarist Joey Santiago's expressioness beneath a baseball cap, drummer Dave Lovering's sporting a beard that makes him resemble a wizard (somewhat appropriate, given his side career as a magician) and bassist Kim Deal is looking even more like a den mother, beaming throughout the show and providing 99% of the between song comments. Not that there's many of them, mind: they're too busy ploughing through the set, which starts with three Doolittle-era b-sides (‘Manta Ray', ‘Weird At My School' and ‘Bailey's Walk') before the oh-so-familiar bassline to ‘Debaser' heralds the beginning of the album. And while it was great hearing The Hits – ‘Wave of Mutiliation', ‘Monkey Gone To Heaven', ‘Here Comes Your Man' etc – it's the songs that they'd never play under normal circumstances that are most wonderful. After all, who'd ever imagine they'd hear ‘Dead' or ‘Mr Grieves' or ‘Silver' played live? No-one, that's who.

All of the songs are accompanied by back-projected films that ranged from the adorable (the four Pixies smiling uncomfortably during ‘Here Comes Your Man') to David Lynch-style existential horror (the grinning sack-headed creature of ‘Crackity Jones'), adding a well-realised visual touch for a band who quite literally aren't much to look at.

First encore revisited ‘Wave of Mutilation' in its UK Surf incarnation, before the stage fills with dry ice for the Deal-sung b-side ‘Into The White' (geddit?), and then the band vanish. Four minutes of dark silence follow before the house lights came up and the crowd let out a collective moan... and the band cheekily return to the stage with Deal beaming "We know some other songs too!" to lead into a kick-ass four-song set bookended by favourites ‘Where Is My Mind?' and ‘Gigantic', but containing two little-played later-period singles: ‘Planet of Sound' and – ye gods! – a charmingly sloppy ‘Dig for Fire'. 

Thank you, dear anonymous scalper. Thank you. Andrew P Street