Lies And Betrayals, Fruit Covered Nails:Pavement @ The Roundhouse.

20th April 1992. Over thirty years ago. That's when Pavement's debut album, Slanted and Enchanted, came out and, with the possible exception of Underworld's Dubnobasswithmyheadman and Big Black's Song About Fucking, could an album ever have been more aptly named?

I was won over immediately. I'd heard of Pavement a few years earlier when The Wedding Present covered Box Elder as a b-side to Brassneck (John Peel, of course, played it) but it was in 1992 they began to seriously impinge on my consciousness. I was already a huge fan of both The Fall and Pixies so when I heard of a band who split the difference between them, and chucked in just enough of their own esoteric charm to keep it fresh, I was at first curious. Soon I became enchanted.

Slanted and enchanted. Summer Babe, Trigger Cut, Conduit For Sale, Zurich Is Stained, Here, Two States. The album was rammed full of instant classics and by the time the second album, Crooked Rain, Crooked Rain, came out Pavement were firmly entrenched near the top of my all time favourite bands list. A truly inspirational gig at the Windsor Old Trout had played a big part in that.

That second album had its share of instantly grafitying tunes (Range Life, Cut Your Hair, Gold Soundz) but, for me, it was the likes of Silence Kid and Elevate Me Later that proved Pavement were in it for the long run. Wowee Zowee (key tracks:- Grave Architecture, Best Friend's Arm, We Dance) was a messy and ambitious third album and though they settled into more of a groove with Brighten The Corners (Stereo, Shady Lane) and Terror Twilight (Carrot Rope, Spit On A Stranger) they remained a captivating, human, fallible experience until the day I went to see them at Brixton Academy in 1999.

20th November 1999. In the long dark shadow that fell over me following my brother's death, I hardly noticed Steve Malkmus, a pair of handcuffs attached to his mic stand, at the end of the set announcing that said handcuffs represented how it felt to be in a band. Two weeks later the split was confirmed. Pavement were no more, The Fall continued and Mark E Smith grumped about Pavement, and when they did finally come back, for a brief four in 2010 - again they played Brixton Academy and I went with Tina and Pam (who managed to cover a dating guy in Nando's ketchup beforehand) - they came back not as a new band with new songs but as a heritage act.

It didn't matter. They'd earned it. Now, in 2022, they're back again and despite a weird TikTok hit in Harness Your Hopes, they're not offering up new material. They're playing the hits. The hits they never actually had. Around the same time as Pavement's first incarnation, the dreary Hull indie rock band Kingmaker had four top forty hits (Pavement's biggest UK hit was Shady Lane which got to number forty, they never once breached the US charts) but it's hard to imagine them selling out four nights at the Roundhouse or thousands of fans hanging on every word of Eat Yourself Whole.

Pavement, with due recognition of The Velvet Underground and Japan, are the very definition of a cult band. You don't meet a lot of Pavement fans (unless you happen to either work at PRS in the early 2000s or hang around the New Inn in Basingstoke in the early nineties) but the ones you do don't just like Pavement. They love them.

 

So last night's Roundhouse gig was met with eager expectation. The trouble is Pavement, like the Labour party, have an amazing ability to fuck up when everything is going well for them. Surely this bunch of fifty-somethings couldn't screw up now. Could they? Could they?

They didn't. Phew! I knew they'd been changing their set each night so it was a disappointment that I didn't get to hear Summer Babe, Carrot Rope, or Zurich Is Stained but them's the breaks. What they did play was uniformly excellent and, of course - this is Pavement, somewhat charmingly shambolic in places.

A low key intro of Major Leagues led us into some big hitters like Stereo, Two States, Trigger Cut (I joined Adrian in singing along in what became something of a tone deaf gospel chorus), and a fiercely energetic run through of Fight This Generation. Bob Nastanovich, as ever, bounding around the stage with the rabid energy of a man half his age while Malkmus and Scott 'Spiral Stairs' Kannberg, rocking the Geoffrey Boycott/David Rodigan look, coolly flanked the wings with bassist Mark Ibold, as seems to be his role, a cordial buffer between the band's two biggest egos.

 

Serpentine Pad, Gold Soundz, Heaven Is A Truck, and set closer Shady Lane all sounded as deftly, and daftly, brilliant as ever and Silence Kid was simply sublime. Surely one of Pavement's best ever songs. Here, of course, was incredible. The room seemed to stop spinning as Malkmus quietly intoned his lines about dressing for a success that never came (four nights at the Roundhouse, mate?) and the painted portraits of minions and slaves.

It was matched by another slightly underrated tune in Grave Architecture from 1995's Wowee Zowee. When Pavement play hard they're worthy of comparison with likes of Husker Du and Sonic Youth but, of course, they often prefer to go insular. It's how they ended up garnering comparisons with the likes of Truman's Water and The Archers Of Loaf.

Unlike those bands however, Pavement, and Malkmus especially, know their way round a tune. An encore of Range Life, Spit On A Stranger, Conduit For Sale!, and Stop Breathin' proved that. Last night Pavement had nothing to prove. They'd already proved, many times over, what they're capable of. So instead the gig acted as a celebration, a singalong, and even a bit of a piss up. I had a fucking great time.

Thanks loads to Pam (whose photos I have used in this review), Adrian, Gary, Stuart, Julian, and Other Dave for the company, thanks to BEAK> for a wonderful support set (Neu! meets Hawkwind but with jokes about the Tory conference between songs), and thanks to Pavement for being Pavement. Top night.