Recently I seem to have been going to see lots of reformed bands. First there was Blur, back together for a few gigs last summer, and then there was Pixies at the back end of last year, who were touring to celebrate the 20th anniversary of Doolittle’s release.
Next on the list was Pavement, who decided to get back together again for a pretty comprehensive world tour. There had often been rumours and calls for them to reform, and these were fairly often dismissed by frontman Stephen Malkmus, who seemed to be (to me anyway) the main one holding back any potential reunion, and obviously it’d be a bit hard to have a reunited Pavement without their main man. And anyway, he had his own solo career going along nicely, so there was no real need to look back.
Obviously something changed last September because the rumours suddenly became fact and Pavement’s website declared that a temporary reformation would take place for some gigs in New York, with others around the world to be announced. Luckily for me, a handful of these dates would be at their old haunt in London, the Brixton Academy. They played they when touring Slanted & Enchanted in 1992, they played their last ever gig (well, until these ones obviously) in 1999 there, so fittingly they stopped by to play four consecutive nights there.
As I’m a bit of a fan, I bought tickets for three of these dates (I was otherwise engaged for the fourth date, seeing a delightful beat combo from Oxford by the name of Foals). Now don’t worry, I won’t go into tedious detail regarding exactly what happened on each and every night, mainly because I can’t remember exactly what happened now anyway (guess that’s the drawback of waiting a week to put a review up). Suffice to say, all three nights were good. Very very good indeed. They rattled through all their best known and most loved songs, such as Shady Lane, Cut Your Hair, Gold Soundz and the like, and these were undeniably awesome. However, some of the lesser known songs also stood out for me, songs like Frontwards, which I only vaguely knew from the second disc of the Slanted & Enchanted special edition, or Debris Slide, which doesn’t even appear to be on any of the special editions of the main five Pavement albums.
In fact, a lot of the songs that featured percussionist/shouty bloke Bob Nastanovich were highlights, like Unfair, Conduit for Sale! or Two States. This might be because they are amongst the most upbeat and fun of Pavement’s back catalogue, or it might be it was pretty darn entertaining to see him bounding around the stage screaming into his microphone. The slower songs were also good, with Here suitably epic and We Dance (a personal favourite of mine) was excellent. I also liked the expanded versions of Fight This Generation that they served up, probably again because I really like that song in the first place. Moreover, I can’t think of a song that they did where I thought “Pfft, wish they hadn’t played this rubbish” or “Oh dear, that was nowhere near as good as on record”, which is always a good sign when you’ve seen them play a total of around 80-90 songs or something in three days.
The band themselves also seemed to be having fun, particular the non-Malkmus ones. Mr Malkmus’ mood seemed to vary from day to day, Tuesday he was alright, Wednesday in a bad mood presumably triggered by technical difficulties blighting the first two songs, but on Thursday he seemed much happier and the whole band even had a bit of *gasp* banter. I do think it was a bit telling also that he was stuck out on the left of the stage, with the remainder of the band congregated in the centre/left of centre, and also that he would leave the stage on his own, on the other side from the rest of them.
As such, I am very much pleased that I went to see them three times. I can’t unfortunately see this temporary reunion being anything but that, and unless someone turns up with another suitcase full of cash in another 10 years, I doubt they’ll bother doing another tour. I certainly can’t see them doing a Pixies and reforming so that they can just tour incessantly.
It would have been very disappointing to have waited all that time for the chance to see Pavement, and then they went and sucked. It would have been even more disappointing if they’d done that and I still had tickets to see them again. However, this didn’t happen. They lived up to my rather high expectations, played almost every single song I’d have liked to have heard, and they were pretty excellent all round. Can’t ask for much more than that, can you?
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