Thursday night

cast a long, long shadow over the weekend. Friday...I just don't want to talk about Friday. Suffice it to say that working until 9pm while feeling that bad is an experience that I don't intend to repeat in a hurry. Or, with luck, ever.

Saturday was another rehearse-and-mix-recordings affair, followed by a cretin-free train home and a mercifully quiet evening with some of the usual suspects in Mather's.

I got up reasonably early on Sunday to go home for a family lunch; Ruth's going to Oz fairly soon, so this was a last toute la famille occasion. Our cousin Kerr, his wife Marie (French) and their two kids (two and four, and effectively bilingual) came along and I felt a little guilty rushing away to make the Pixies concert that evening.

The spare ticket that I'd assumed would practically give itself away turned into a bit of an albatross, necessitating call after call to just about anyone I'd ever accused of being a Pixies/Idlewild/Teenage Fanclub fan, but eventually, as I got off the train in Edinburgh, I'd arranged to meet up with Ally before heading to Meadowbank. I steered McCloy and some of her friends from Glasgow (Dochan of Soul Candy - "Ha! We stole your drummer" - and Sophie the murderous pixie) to the Café Royal to rendezvous with Ally and off we went.

We arrived in time for Teenage Fanclub (my support band jinx is finally overcome) and we found a reasonably central spot to listen from. As ever - I've seen them three or four times now in different supporting slots - the sound wasn't great. The songs, and the sheer feeling behind them, were excellent, but they were finished too soon and the indistinct bass didn't help matters.

Idlewild, it turns out, are a very good live band. Having seen them just once before playing mainly acoustic stuff, I had no idea what they'd be like with a full electric set, but they were just as good this time. I thought they were fairly brave in doing some of the more punky songs from Captain and Hope Is Important, but they knew exactly what they were doing, and even Roddy's floppy art-student angst didn't dull the impact. Excellent stuff.

Finally, just as the light was dimming, the Pixies came on. The Pixies. I honestly thought I'd never see them play. I came late to the whole Pixies thing and I occasionally kick myself for it; I came across them going backwards from Nirvana to Teenage Fanclub and then to the Pixies, via an ex-girlfriend who'd actually been paying attention at the time that they came along.

The Pixies were not there to fuck spiders. They walked on stage, picked up their gear and kicked off. I don't have much to say about the set other than bloody hell; what a band. It was incredible to see them play. They finished on Vamos and the crowd made a shitload of noise until they came back for an encore. What on earth have they got left to play? I thought. They played Gigantic, and it was good.

P.S: Two pointless observations:

1. All of the bassists played P-basses. This pleased me greatly.
   
2. Teenage Fanclub and Frank Black on one stage? I hoped, but it didn't happen.