Crossing the TASMAN to see the PIXIES

[KiwiCoromandel]

So there I am in Sydney watching the New York Dolls when the young man in front turns to ask: how many original band members are on stage?

Why ask me? Did I really look of similar vintage to that Jagger clone David Johansen - he of the wrinkled skin on heroin-chic bones?

I convinced him that I was very young first time around, possibly as young as he looked now, and could only name-check Johansen and Sylvain Sylvain - and though the Dolls were hugely influential, I was never wedded to them.

Not like the Pixies. Now there's a band to fly to Sydney for, son.

Last weekend may have been the first Australian V Festival, but far more significantly it brought the Pixies as close as they've been to New Zealand. The band that deconstructed rock in the late 80s and shook it into smart-dumb, screaming, riff-laden life. The band that were so good they never had a hit.

I'd blown the chance to see them at their creative peak, in 1991 when they played the Brixton Academy and I was travelling around Britain, listening to Doolittle on my walkman (remember cassettes?) and saving the fare to fly home.

"I'll catch them when they come out to New Zealand," I reasoned. But within a year of the Brixton show, the Pixies had dissolved in mutual self-loathing.

In 2004 they did what every second lamented and not-so-lamented band seems to do these days and reunited - in their case to find a whole new audience.

It took minimal prodding from my mate. What was an airfare, three days in Sydney in a lousy hotel and a NZ$140 ticket to atone for my youthful folly? Quite a lot, actually. But worth every cent.

The V (for Virgin, as in Branson) Festival started in England in the mid-1990s and is a famously eclectic, multi-stage affair. The line-up in Sydney's vast, leafy Centennial Park - from Nouvelle Vague, with their kitsch French jazz takes on punk and new wave classics, to the Dolls and the Pet Shop Boys - could have been a Big Day Out for sad old gits. The types whose only dance move is the pogo and who have to let everyone know the lyrics to every song, even if they get them wrong.

But this was a (mainly) young crowd and there were plenty of "new" acts as well, the best of which were the Rapture - interesting, in an early-80s funk/punk-referenced way. Groove Armada played a stomping, eye-catching set as well.

But the main event was still to come. Experience has taught me a few things: expectation doesn't always deliver; old farts at a rock concert should know their place; you can never go back, etc. I tried to keep my hopes in check but in the end my expectations were limitless.

They were surpassed. The Pixies transcended genres and generations with a blistering set, compelling from a slow-burning Wave of Mutilation to Kim Deal's Gigantic - the song I first heard on bFM in 1988 while driving along Sandringham Rd.

Famously uncommunicative, Deal wore a permanent grin, the only indication they were enjoying themselves. As for Charles Thompson, aka Frank Black, formerly Black Francis, he just stood, delivered and let the songs speak volumes.

Bone Machine, Monkey Gone to Heaven, Hey, Where is my Mind? No.13 Baby, Debaser, Vamos ... the greatest non-hits just kept coming - 24 of them with scarcely a pause for breath.

Five rows from the front, I was wedged in a boiling crowd of younger, smiling faces, male and female, pogoing and singing as tunelessly as I was to insightful lyrics like "must be a devil between us or whores in my head, whores at my door, whores in my bed" and - arguably rock's greatest line - "where is my mind?"

Back home late Sunday night, ankles and calf muscles still aching, there was a welcome-home note from my 14-year-old daughter. It was the first verse and chorus to Where is my Mind? Great music is ageless.

source:NZPA/Geoff Cumming

image:Getty Images:Charles Thompson, aka Frank Black, formerly Black Francis, 'just stood, delivered and let the songs speak volumes'...