Pixies at Electric Picnic: Eardrum-shredding pop is just what a reborn festival needs

Where have our minds been in the three years since the last Electric Picnic? This isn’t a question indie rock icons Pixies are in a position to answer. But their clattering, spill-your-pint pop delivers exactly the zing day one of the festival requires as, all together at once, we regain our Picnic legs.

After so long away audiences are still getting back into the swing of a lost weekend in Stradbally when the band make their entrance. However, it turns out old-school, eardrum-shredding alternative pop is what the moment demands. And Pixies are the perfect group to knock out the cobwebs and banish intrusive thoughts about that overnight deluge potentially bound for Laois.

There’s a new Pixies album on the way — their fourth since they reunited in 2004. And they belabour the point, slightly, with a few too many fresh cuts. Mostly, though, this is a knock-out greatest hits set that jabs you in the gut with a buzz-sawing Gouge Away and a caterwauling Nimrod’s Son, before sailing off into twanging perfection with Here Comes Your Man.

Pixies’ forthcoming record is called Doggerel — just two letters and three years removed from the debut LP by Fontaines DC, who take to the Electric Arena directly afterwards. You wonder that, in the event of their meeting backstage, if the two outfits will discuss the importance of originality in album titles — or just have a stare-off (in which case our money is on the imperturbable Pixies singer Frank Black).

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Those new tracks have the sort of autumnal sheen that you expect of middle-aged indie icons. But Black, guitarist Joey Santiago, drummer Dave Lovering and new-ish bassist Paz Lenchantin (original bass player Kim Deal left in 2013), haven’t lost that old protean rumble, as they prove on Where Is My Mind?, a chronicling of physiological collapse that has become the unlikeliest of anthems.

The simplistic version of the Pixies story is that their melodic quiet/loud/quiet formula inspired Nirvana and the grunge generation. That’s true so far as it goes, but Pixies were always too dorky to fit in with alternative rock’s cool set.

Instead they blazed their own trail as awkward outsiders. And, at Electric Picnic, they come roaring through like mischief-makers who have gatecrashed their own party and turned a festival Friday night into indie disco heaven.