Pixies drummer David Lovering relishes every show the alternative rockers from Boston play. He also freely admits his memories of most festival performances blur into each other. But still burning brightly in Lovering’s memory is the band’s last festival performance in Australia, at Golden Plains in regional Victoria, playing to 10,000 delirious fans in March 2020.

Pixies hit the stage late in the evening, just days before live music ground to a halt across the country. For many in the sprawling Meredith Supernatural Amphitheatre that night, it was the last big rock show they would see for two years.

“Right after that we left to go to Brisbane ... and then we just had to call it off, and get back to the United States as things heated up with the pandemic,” Lovering says. “I remember Golden Plains vividly. Most festivals look the same, but that is an ideal place and being the last one, it really struck home, everything about it.”

The Golden Plains show, which opened with Gouge Away from 1989’s Doolittle album, featured 10 songs off 1987 debut Come On Pilgrim and follow-up album Surfer Rosa. Those first two releases, which introduced Pixies to the world, can beheard in full on the band’s upcoming Australian tour. The Come On Pilgrim...It’s Surfer Rosa tour will feature every song from those breakthrough albums, plus other timeless Pixies tracks.

“They’re definitely two of my favourite albums,” Lovering says. “Of course, with Come On Pilgrim being the first one, it’s very special, and Surfer Rosa I love even more so. We’d worked out those songs, we’d been playing them in Boston, in clubs and stuff like that and maybe, knowing them so well, is why we still play them so well. They’re the oldest songs, and it’s like riding a bike. It’s easy to play those songs, they’re just ingrained in you.”

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In Melbourne, the band’s two Forum Theatre shows will have a different set-list to other capital cities, featuring songs from across their entire catalogue and new tracks. Anyone who saw Lovering, frontman Black Francis, guitarist Joey Santiago and bass player Paz Lenchantin laying down Bone Machine, Where Is My Mind, Wave Of Mutilation and Caribou at Golden Plains knows it’s all about the performance with Pixies.

“We don’t really talk to the audience, there’s no gaps,” Lovering says, about the quartet’s powerful live show. “It’s just bang bang bang bang bang bang ... if you do it long enough, you get used to it. I didn’t play drums much [since he was last in Australia] but coming up to this tour, since we’ve all started back again, it’s been every day, every single day ... and I love it.”

For a decade after the band broke up in 1993, Lovering was convinced he’d never again feel the euphoria of playing those songs live, or enjoy the camaraderie of his bandmates. In the mid ’90s, he turned his attention to magic after attending a magic conference in Los Angeles.