Pixies - Alhambra Theatre 21st May 2026

A great night. Hometown delivers.

40 years of Pixies. And of all the towns, they came to Dunfermline.
Black Francis reckoned that this was the bands first show here. Having lived in and around Dunfermline for most of my life I had no real reason to doubt him. Bands like Pixies dont play here. They play Glasgow, they play Edinburgh, they get on a bus heading south. So the fact of them turning up at the Alhambra (a 1922 theatre thats done time as a cinema and a bingo hall before settling into its current shape) felt a bit unreal walking up Canmore Street.

GANS opened the night with a veritable wall of noise. Birmingham duo signed to Pete Dohertys Strap Originals, expanded live into a three-piece by way of a member playing flute, saxophone and samples on top of the standard drums and guitar/bass setup. You dont expect flutes on a Pixies support bill. Half krautrock motorik pulse, half mad piper at a wake, the kind of thing that probably split the room down the middle but had me grinning. By the end of their half hour the bar queue had thinned out, which is about as ringing an endorsement as a Dunfermline crowd ever hands a support act.

Then Pixies. No intro, no banter, no ‘hello Dunfermline’. They walked on and went at it. 90 minutes, barely a word spoken, just back to back songs hammered out in succession. Two versions of "Wave of Mutilation". Three covers, including a sweet, weird "In Heaven" lifted from Eraserhead and a "Head On" by the Jesus and Mary Chain that I had not seen coming. Theres something nicely circular about Pixies covering Scottish noise pop royalty on a Scottish stage. The Mary Chain are practically neighbours.

Black Francis is sixty-something now and the voice has worn exactly the way youd want it to. Frayed at the edges, still able to go from a whisper into the full howl mid-line, still the most distinctive instrument in the room. Joey Santiagos leads on "Caribou" and "Mr. Grieves" cut through everything like he was carving them out of the air. David Lovering hit the kit like it owed him money. Emma Richardson, now on bass, was locked in with him all night and brought a slightly tidier low end than the band used to have during the Kim Deal era. The older songs sounded better for it.

The new tracks landed politely. "Chicken", "Mercy Me", "The Vegas Suite". All good, all played well, all received like reasonable houseguests by a crowd waiting for the actual family to arrive. Which they did. "Velouria", "Gouge Away", "Tame", everything youd want, and then the one Id quietly been waiting on the whole set.
"Debaser".

I dont know what it is about that song. Two minutes and fifty-something seconds of cinema slicing eyes and Black Francis bellowing the title like an accusation, and somehow it lifts the room two feet off the floor every single time.

The only real ding on the night, and its a small one, is that we didnt get "Monkey Gone to Heaven". I think Id been quietly mentally locating it in the set the whole way through. It never came.

"Where Is My Mind" did what "Where Is My Mind" always does. Whole room on the woo-hoos. You knew it was coming and it still landed.
A word on the Alhambra. Its a beautiful little theatre and Ive watched all sorts in there over the years, but it has never felt like a band of this size could fit inside it. They did. Sound was excellent. Every note travelled cleanly to the back and the room held the noise in a way bigger venues dont. International acts rolling through Dunfermline isnt normal. I hope it gets a bit more normal.

No encore. The lights came up, the band walked off, and that was the show. For something marketed as a 40-year anniversary I expected at least a small bit of reflection on the way out. Got none of it. They just turned up, played the hell out of their songs and left. Which, on reflection, is more Pixies than any speech would have been.
A great night. Hometown delivers.

Review and photography by Fraser Doig

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