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In honor of the dramatic rescue of 33 trapped Chilean miners on October 13, the Pixies concocted a special 33-song set for their concert at Santiago’s Teatro la Cupla. Front man Black Francis greeted the enthusiastic 1100 person crowd, introducing the set in Spanish. In a subsequent statement released he said, "We wanted to do something to show how affected we were by this, so we played a special set at tonight's show; 33 songs for the 33 miners." Spanning their 25-year career, the epic show was the band’s first-ever headlining concert in Chile, and their longest ever set. The 33 songs and two encores included “Wave of Mutilation,” “Monkey Gone to Heaven,” and “Here Comes Your Man.” The main set’s closer was “Vamos,” whose chorus “Vamos a jugar por la playa,” ("Let’s go play by the beach") one can only imagine, must’ve been enthusiastically embraced. The miners had been trapped 2300 feet below ground -- nearly half a mile -- for 69 days after the San Jose gold and copper mine in which they worked collapsed. It took two months of planning and careful drilling of a relief tunnel to get to them, and then a 22-hour rescue mission for each man to be lifted to safety. "We found out five minutes before we went on stage that all of the miners had safely reached the surface," Francis continued. "This was definitely one of the most meaningful shows we've ever played."

Die-hard Pixies fans need to start saving because it’s not long until June 15 when the new Pixies box set is released. Minotaur is a collection of all the Pixies studio albums in one friendly box, repackaged with lots of bonus artwork courtesy of original artists Vaughan Oliver and Simon Larbalestier. Musically there is nothing new: Jeff Anderson, the man in charge of the venture, has confirmed that there will be no remastering, no live tracks and quite possibly no bonus tracks. Pixies frontman Black Francis, aka Charles Thompson, is far too busy with Grand Duchy these days to worry about uninspiring Pixies re-releases, and his reaction to the re-release was suitably low-key: ‘I don’t know much about that,” Thompson admitted, “except that it seems very big and very expensive. But we’re working on our own box set for the Der Golem soundtrack (a silent movie soundtrack for the 1920 German expressionist film, due out late May - Ed). It will also be nice, but much less expensive.” Aiming for ‘less expensive’ shouldn’t be too hard to achieve - the Pixies box set will cost $175 for the deluxe edition and $450 for the limited edition.

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