This is not about how great and influential The Pixies were and still are. Check Pitchfork’s best albums of the 80’s if you really want to know. Or just listen to Nirvana’s ‘Smells like teen spirit’. No, this is about adolescent folly, about missing events and experiences for all the wrong reasons. Some of my most favourite bands I never saw live because I was too young. The Clash split up by the time I was 13. To this day I hate it that I never saw The Clash live, but not really a lot I could have done about it. I also never saw Joy Division. I was only 11 when Ian Curtis, the Joy Division singer, committed suicide. In short, I was just too young for the first wave of (English) Punk and early 80’s New Wave and Gothic. C’est la vie.

The Pixies are a different story. Here’s a band that existed during my early adulthood, between 1987 and 1993, between my 18^th and 24^th birthday. I guess they also played quite regularly in The Netherlands. After all ‘Holland was the first place they made it’ according to Black Francis. But I never saw The Pixies live, not before they reunited in 2004, so not while they were still playing fresh and new material. Frankly I already liked The Pixies circa 1990, but my problem was that my girlfriend also liked them, and I was still too much a kid to like what she liked. I had to pretend I was not into The Pixies. Fun fact: once I was at a Front 242 concert with her, a band she absolutely adored. I ruined the concert by making it bloody damn obvious I did not have a good time. We left before the encore. I was horrible at the time. Took me a long time to sort of grow up. And yeah, I do like Front 242. Sorry.

Which brings me to Death to the Pixies, a double CD, covering the 1987-1991 period. It was originally released in 1997, memorizing the 10 year anniversary of ‘Come on Pilgrim‘. A bit of a strange release, definitely aimed at hardcore fans. CD one was a bit of a lazy ‘best of’ CD. CD two was the real prize, a Pixies concert, recorded on 25^th September 1990 at Vredenburg, Utrecht. Just after my 21^st birthday. My first Pixies concert experience.