I Like A Pavement Song

Mira dragged me along to see Pavement playing, several years ago. I thought it was 1999, and they were supported by Royal Trux. I remember thinking I really liked one particular song they played, and now, over 6 years later, I’ve tracked it down, in my own way, not involving borrowing Mira’s Pavement CDs and listening to them, or any other sensible method.

I could remember how the song went – I seemed to recall a droney guitar and bass riff, similar to some Stereolab stuff I liked. I also remembered them singing the word “Feeeeeeeeaaarrr” during the chorus. I did ask Mira, singing the word “Feeeeeeeeaaarrr” at her, to no avail.

The first thing to do was to see if I could find a fan site listing the set lists from all their gigs. This was key, because without it I would have had to listen to all the previews on iTunes. If I could pin down a particular gig, with a particular setlist, it would be a much shorter process.

I Googled ‘pavement setlists’, and one result was this great site. The site didn’t have a search function built in, so I used the super Google function that allows you to search within a particular site.

So, I searched for ‘london’ and found this. The most likely looking link was this one, considering I didn’t live in London in 1998.

Looking at the Fall 1999 link, I saw that they played a gig in Brixton Academy in November. That was it! Now I remembered! Then it was a simple case of listening to the iTunes previews of each song on the setlist, until I found what I was looking for.

“Folk Jam”. That was it. It sounded quite different from what I remembered, and of course it may have been the different live sound. Anyway, I bought it for 79p.

As it turned out, they weren’t singing, “feeeeeeeeaaarrr”, they were singing, “the feeeeeeeeeeeeeling is mutual”. An easy mistake to make.

Quest Ends.

I preferred Royal Trux.