Pixies @ Apollo, Manchester, 4 Dec

Everyone loves The Pixies. Right? Everyone. They have a back catalogue to die for, and a humble story of producing amazing albums that didn’t make them a lot of money but went on to influence the likes of Nirvana – to the extent that, when they finally decided to resurface back in 2003, the entire world was so delighted that they've managed to surf the wave of popular adulation largely ever since. Everyone loves The Pixies. You feel it as they take to the stage. These guys have earned the right to just be adored.

And there are songs – more than 30 of the blighters are played during a colossal set – that take you right back to the first place you ever heard them. We’re talking Monkey Gone to Heaven, Gouge Away (with a stuttering, delayed, off-centre start), Wave of Mutilation, Where is My Mind?, Here Comes Your Man, Debaser. Inviolate classics all. To stand in a room and hear three quarters of the original band perform these songs is almost holy.

There are others too; songs that maybe you wouldn’t put right up there as your favourite Pixies moment, but which jump out at you like a cartoon clown holding a dripping knife and have you nodding like a goon to smiling strangers. We’re talking U-Mass, Velouria, Cactus and their cover of Neil Young's Winterlong. Jesus, but their cover of Winterlong is good.

If we're splitting hairs – and we’ll split them really, really quickly – some of the newer songs aren’t as good as their vintage work. But then some of them – Classic Masher, for one – feel good, feel like they belong; even as another less-than-stellar number from recent album Head Carrier limps by, they punch and kick right back with another old favourite: Havalina, Caribou, Mr Grieves.

Are they the aliens they felt like first time around? Are they as unsettling, as visceral, as tear-your-beating-heart-out-of-your-chest, as kick-you-in-the-crotch-spit-on-your-neck as they used to be back in the day? Not quite. We maybe know what to expect these days. We maybe even have to forgive them when they go a bit 'rock show', as they do at the end of La La Love You. But they are easy to forgive because they are the Pixies and we love them. And we don’t mean maybe.