For a long time, it looked as if Pavement might never return to Manchester. By the time of their last appearance in town, at the Academy in November 1999, the wheels were already coming off, with the highly influential indie rockers growing increasingly exasperated at the commercial shackles of the music industry. It was to be their penultimate show; the following night, at London’s Brixton Academy, frontman Stephen Malkmus told the crowd that the pair of handcuffs attached to his mic stand symbolised “what it's like being in a band all these years.” Two weeks later, they announced they’d “retired”.
A reunion followed a decade later, but within a matter of months, intra-band relations had again collapsed; Manchester was overlooked on the touring schedule, but reports from London painted a portrait of a band going through the motions, participating in a cash-grab that went against their principles as a group never comfortable with the idea of music as a commodity. If eyebrows were raised when a second reformation was announced in mid-2019, then, they would have been justified, and fans would have been entitled to wonder whether they’d be paying to watch a band look as if they’d rather be anywhere else than playing music with each other.
Originally scheduled to kick off in 2020, perhaps it was the pandemic’s stinging reminder that nothing should be taken for granted that instilled a change of attitude in Pavement. By the time they finally played their long-awaited headline set at Primavera Sound festival this past June, they were unrecognisable from the band that had last shared the stage in 2010, with sullen disquiet replaced by sheer ebullience.
