The Pixies’ frontman brought his solo set to London.

Years ago, my friends and I would go to the shopping centre on a weekend and visit our local high street music store (that is still going strong) and have a rummage through the vast bargain bins of their summer CD sales.   On one of these occasions, someone handed me a couple of CDs, one was Pixies’ Live at the BBC, the other Frank Black’s Teenager of the Year. “Trust me” they said, “you’ll like this”. At around four or five pounds each and, being a casual Pixies fan already, the risk was minimal. 

Getting home and putting the latter CD on, I remember being immediately captivated by the frenetic chaos of the opening track and the abstract picture the lyrics painted,. as 22 songs and just over an hour later I found myself exhilarated, confused and endeared. 

Tonight, almost 30 years on, I got to bear witness to this album being performed in its entirety for its anniversary in the final show of its mini-world tour.  

Even better, original album creators Eric Drew Feldman, Lyle Workman and Nick Vincent all joined Charles Michael Kittridge Thompson IV — aka Frank Black — on stage at the Palladium to commemorate the album.

We were fortunate to find Mr. Black in fine form and he came with treats for the audience. Opening with tracks from his first eponymous solo album, he ran through Czar and the excellent Ten Percenter with the appropriate zeal the album exudes, and this bodes well as he introduces us to the feature album’s opener Whatever Happened to Pong?, a story about Frank and his friend hustling guys for money in a sports bar over games of table tennis.  

If I had any reservations about this show going into it, it might be that: this album has so many tracks; being over an hour long; being replayed in an all-seater auditorium; and hosting a band 30 years older reliving old material. You might have been forgiven for anticipating a languid lounge set, weighed down with anecdotes (or just silence if you’ve ever seen some FB shows in the early 2000s). 

Any reservations about this disappear as we quickly move onto the equally awesome Thalassaocarcy (a name derived from a Greek word pertaining to a maritime-based empire, of course) and (I Want to Live on an) Abstract Plain, the band showcasing effortless style and skill, particularly the metronomic precision of drummer Vincent, while Lyle Workmen’s stylish zeal on lead guitar consistently provides the idiosyncratic spark to the album and tonight’s set.

The seated, largely middle-aged audience began to find static audience participation difficult as we started to see men running down the aisles with their drinks, joining arms with complete strangers as we got into US Billboard charting single Headache and the anthemic Freedom Rock, with the arena’s ushers at first struggling to get them seated and then seemingly giving up. Incidentally, two men are in the audience tonight dressed as Frank Black from the album cover; complete with white gown, crown and a bunch of roses – they weren’t sat together, I like to entertain the idea they didn’t even know each other, and they spend most of the show waving across the Palladium to one another, desperately trying to get their neighbours on their feet. Alcohol is of course featured — but tonight isn’t about that.

By the time Pie in the Sky brings the album to a close, we are again rewarded (for no reason) with another single off the first album Los Angeles, before finishing the show with the much better-known I Heard Ramona Sing. Some may know the track from Scott Pilgrim vs. the World — not this audience, probably. But that’s OK.   

Tonight was a genuinely thrilling return to a time capsule of a treasure of an album. Billed on its cover as “the best album the Pixies never made”, I always felt this to be a surreptitious name drop rather than it being potentially factual. This is its own beast: irreverent, funny and melodic. A vital mix, and seeing Mr. B smiling and tapping from foot to foot as he reeled through this piece of art all this time later was both refreshing and endearing and something to truly cherish.