Black Francis during a show in Spain last October. Photo / Getty Images
Black Francis during a show in Spain last October. Photo / Getty Images
Pixies, Spark Arena, Auckland, Friday March 6
You wait 10 years for some banter from Black Francis and then three bits come at once.
Yes, it's comedy time with the Pixies' lynchpin, who looks — from way up in my eyrie — not unlike Russell Crowe's TV take on bad Fox News boss Roger Ailes all these 33 years after their debut release.
This was their fourth Auckland show in New Zealand since reforming in 2004 and I'm pretty sure he's not uttered anything beyond the tics, clicks, howls and — yes — actual singing required by the setlist in any of them.
But here he is, almost a decade to the day since the first entry in that Kiwi quartet (yes, we had to wait six years) joshing about why they're playing Vamos for the second time in an hour; there he is going on about leaving his phone in the hotel and how he has to leave the stage to do something never-quite specified; now he's telling his bandmates that if, while he's gone, they touch his stuff they'll f****** die, and informing the audience that anyone who leaves the room while he's away will suffer the same fate.
Then he does go, for a quite inexplicable jaunt, leaving stage left, wandering behind the backdrop and returning via stage right.
Okay, so the "f****** die" bit is only partial bantz. It's a riff on the recorded-in-the-studio spoken word interlude between tracks 10 and 11 on Surfer Rosa, the debut album they're playing in full.
But it's definitely beefed up and extended. And by Pixies (read Black) standards it's like Chris Rock jamming a 20-minute bit about the hilarities of dating.
It's actually lovely, perhaps even unsettling, because you've not seen it before and because, for the opening stanza of this regression session, you could have been forgiven for wondering if any of them were actually enjoying themselves. There was minimal movement and definitely no chat.
That they probably were having fun became evident as they tore through debut EP Come on Pilgrim and Surfer Rosa in track order, then a grab-bag of other prime period tracks and a cover to finish.
They've been hard at it on the road, but this is their first show, at least recently, built around that concept. So there's every reason to think they may have enjoyed playing some of the deeper cuts live. Unfamiliarity breeds contentment.
While it's true that, live, their songs typically remain facsimiles of the recorded versions, there's more flexing here than usual, in Francis' fluid vocal phrasing, some new, albeit subtle, guitar harmonics and the extended intro to set closer Gouge Away, for example. They played Vamos twice because it was on Come on Pilgrim and the record company told them to re-record it for Surfer Rosa, funnyman Francis tells us. The solo's different but it's the same song.
Lead guitarist Joey Santiago, looking a bit Peaky Blinders in a spiffy shiny waistcoat and flat cap, gets his chance to improvise in the second version, showing us just how different that solo became.
A standard moment in Pixies shows, this time he's up for larks too. After mucking about with his pedals, he swipes at his strings with his cap, then uses one of drummer Dave Lovering's sticks as a slide before chucking it back JUST IN TIME for the shift into the final chorus. It's a bloody rock and roll circus!
Loosening up suits them. As well as attending all four of the post-reformation shows here, I've seen them in the UK recently and I don't think they've ever sounded better. Santiago's squall, Lovering's mad-but-economical drumming and Paz Lenchantin's engine room bass create the perfect platform for Francis — far from a slouch on the six-string himself — to scream stories of rage, violence and freaky sex.
It's not just that they sound so good. The ire and fire of the records showcased here justify their place in the select group of truly influential rock bands. Their impact on a young Kurt Cobain is well-documented, and he went on to spearhead a movement of his own.
But listening to the almost-single-chord hypnoshuffle of Cactus I reckon you can look the other way too, back to the drone of the Velvet Underground. You can trace a line between the really important groups, and Pixies are at its pumping, bloody heart.
They played nothing of theirs released after 1989 and everything sounded as vital, powerful, important and fresh as if it were released last week. Gigantic was, Tame wasn't. Where Is My Mind justified each of its 250,000,000-plus Spotify plays.
The set was simple, with the quartet grouped in the centre of the stage around a row of beautiful amps, spotlights switching, primarily, from Francis to Santiago and back as the arrangement alternated between vocals and guitar flourishes.
Visual interest was heightened by the use of still and video images created by Vaughan Oliver, the in-house sleeve designer for their label, 4AD, who died last year.
They did a tight 90-minutes (quite a bit shorter than most sets these days) and were gone without the frippery of a staged encore.
That Pixies' post-hiatus albums have been patchy is irrelevant. That a near-capacity crowd contained more than a smattering of teens is far from. They are one of the most important rock bands there has been. They may finally be relaxing enough to enjoy that status.
