The Breeders - Shepherds Bush Empire, London - 3/9/08
4/5
By: Thomas Hannan
On the rapturously received and, it seems, finally finished Pixies reunion tour, each individual Pixie was reportedly getting paid around a squillion dollars per show. Kim Deal has not spent hers on a new wardrobe. "What's that? A large, shapeless black t shirt? Perfect! I'll take ten. Gotta dress up for the new Breeders tour, after all..."
Kim never spoke those words on stage at the Shepherds Bush Empire last night, but her body language screamed them. The Pixies bassist and, primarily, Breeders frontwoman might be one of the most famous and influential presences in indie rock, not to mention now an incredibly wealthy one too, but a traditional rock and roll star she is not and never has been. Still the most remarkable thing the appearance of this apple of many an indie boy's eye is how unremarkable she looks. She's still her own roadie. She admits that there are some Breeders songs that she can't play standing up because she "wrote them sitting down."
And its qualities such as these that endear you to her band all the more. They mess up songs occasionally, losing key, time or seemingly any awareness that they're in front of an audience whatsoever. If it weren't for the on stage banter (which varies from slagging off Florida to stories about Kim's life at home with her Alzheimer's suffering mother), I'd wager that even though this is their 20th year of performing under the name, there's very little that's different about watching The Breeders at a gig than there would be when gazing upon them rehearsing in a garage.
But whoa, steady! Think of this not as an attempt to paint them as anything other than brilliant. Their almost complete lack of anything resembling a 'performance', twin sister Kelley Deal's admittance that the only song she can play on the violin is 'Drivin' On 9' and the only Spanish she knows are the words to 'Regalame Esta Noche' (both of which she nails)... given that I'd wager a good seventy percent of people here are in bands themselves, seeing such a ramshackle way of being an astoundingly good band is a vitally inspiring phenomenon.
So no, The Breeders might not be technically stunning musicians, but it matters not one f**king iota. Why? Because the Deal sisters are amongst the finest songwriters, most beautifully gifted singers and charming on stage presences of our age. Couple those attributes with the fact that being in The Breeders is obviously a heck load of fun and you can't really fail to deliver a great set. They've settled in to these new songs now, the (dare I say it?) patchy recent LP Mountain Battles only being milked for its strongest material ('Here No More', a serene 'We're Gonna Rise' and a handful of others), but mostly it's a set that's drawn from 1993's seminal Last Splash album.
Though initially playing songs from a record that's sound tracked a good proportion of the last decade and a half of your life mightn't on paper seem like the most necessary of setlist additions (especially when they actually play more songs from Pacer, recorded with side project The Amps, than anything off Title TK or Pod combined!), it's the vigour and obvious glee emanating from the performers that make 'New Year', 'No Aloha', 'Divine Hammer', 'I Just Wanna Get Along', 'Saints' and 'Drivin' on 9' the real highlights of the set. Really, that a band can play a song as many times as The Breeders have played 'Cannonball' and still inject it with this amount of unadulterated pleasure is a miracle we were privileged to witness.
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