Green and Blue

There are some things which I just take for granted. For example I'm just a defacto fan of Pixies. This might be despite going months, maybe years without listening to any of their music. Although  with the advent of the new album - 'Indie Cindy'-  they've been much in evidence on my turntable of late.

What really reminded me of why and how much I love Pixies was seeing them at Field Day in London last Sunday. We travelled up on the day; both Sian and I were hung-over after hitting the Ginger Collins a bit too hard the day before. It was apt that we were hung-over, cause it was a hang-over kinda day. It was the second day of the Festival and there was a definite jaded 'can't be arsed' atmosphere in the ait, heightened by the sunshine. We met up with the ever lovely Bill MacLehose and spent the first few hours at the site trying to find some drinkable beer and feel human again. I think it was pushing it a bit to call the second day a Festival. A lot of the stages were closed and a lot of the bands were pretty samey, Pond, Temples, Drenge all sorta Indie Psych. The first band I really paid attention to were The Horrors cause I love their new album 'Luminous', I thought they were great, but they were swallowed up a bit by the size of the space and by an indifferent audience. They are definitely a band to be seen up close, in a dark club in the Provinces.

Just after them I went to buy a Pixies t-shirt, because I don't own anywhere near enough of them, and heard one Beardo fried hipster ask the Merch seller if they had any "better" Future Sound t- shirts.

"What do you mean?" the seller asked, not unreasonably.

"That t-shirt, it's shit, the album covers much better. I can show you a photo."

"There's nothing I can do."

"It's like she doesn't even want to sell any t-shirts!"

The Merch seller stopped just short of saying that she couldn't give a shit to his Metropolitan fuck wittery.

…and the next thing you know…Pixies! Boom! Song after song with no screwing around. 'Debaser' appeared very early on in the set, and you could almost feel the mood of the crowd lift. There was no crowd banter which is what I like. They played around five songs from the mighty Dootlittle and peppered only three new songs through the set, and very robust they sounded too. I always love seeing Joey Santiago doing the guitar solo during Vamos because regardless of how cool he and the song are he screws something up every time. This time he dropped Dave Lovering's drum stick which he'd been using to play the guitar, which made me laugh. Yes I missed Kim Deal, not just because when she'd yap Black Francis would look daggers at her, but Gigantic was always a natural set closer. Yet you can't take it away from the band, 27 songs in a tight hour and a half, they were fucking amazing.