Pixies – Reading Festival – 26/8/2005

Pixies – Reading Festival – 26/8/2005
Maps and musical notation are good ways to sell me a t-shirt. A bit of guitar tab doesn’t hurt either. In this case it’s ‘Bone Machine’ from ‘Surfer Rosa’ - the first full album, and possibly their finest (today, it’s better than ‘Doolittle’, but that may change tomorrow). This album, and its ½-size predecessor ‘Come on Pilgrim’ were ground-breaking in the emphasis of vocals and lyrics, in a genre where noise and melody had been enough. Biblical and classical themes jostled with teen angst and just plain weirdness. For a band that lasted such a short time they had a massive impact and the reunion tour took them around the world more than once.
This was the first day of the Reading Festival and we were still relatively clean and only slightly drunk. We’d enjoyed a bit of punk, a lot of indie, and the glorious misery-pop of Elbow. Just prior to Pixies we’d had The Killers – not really my cup of tea but some bouncy sing-alongs.
The Pixies were over a year into the reunion tour and were a little jaded by now. Not to say they didn’t put on a great show, but the relationship between Kim Deal and Frank Black seemed a tad Fleetwood Mac – was he making fun of her have a cold affectionately or nastily?
Musically, they blazed through nearly thirty songs, leaning towards the early albums including the lovely acoustic version of ‘Wave of Mutilation’. It was good, but Pixies is a band designed for small halls, not festival fields and is all felt a little dissociated. In some ways I missed the Frank Black solo years, where he was limited to small rooms with the desperation to escape the legacy of a band he eventually returned to.
Although they continued to tour and eventually recorded an album, I didn’t see Pixies again for many years – this gig was just not exciting enough to bring me back. But I still pop on ‘Surfa Rosa’, to be reminded that my “…bone’s got a little machine”