For one night only, Pavement will reunite to brighten the corners of New York City (at least) one last time next month. The group will perform a one-off show at Sony Hall on Oct. 1 to celebrate the release of filmmaker Alex Ross Perry’s new feature film, Pavement(s), which premieres the next day at the New York Film Festival.
Tickets go on sale Friday at 10am ET. Perry’s film is expected to get a wide theatrical release in the spring.
Pavement(s), the movie, is a documentary about the band by one of their biggest fans. A couple of years ago, Perry presented Slanted! Enchanted!: A Pavement Musical, whose name puns off the group’s debut album title. He first advertised it slyly at a pop-up Pavement museum in 2022 by saying he’d be filming the goings-on for a doc.
Perry revealed that year that he’d been in talks with the group’s label, Matador, for three years previously discussing a film. The holdup had been the band’s frontman, Stephen Malkmus, who didn’t want a traditional documentary or a movie with a screenplay. “No one knew what that meant,” Perry told The New Yorker.
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Ultimately, he explained that the film would be part biopic, part tour doc, and everyone was OK with that. “‘The Pavement Hagiography’ movie is not something the band would have fun participating in, nor I making,” Perry told Rolling Stone in 2022. “But to conceptualize this notion, and create a movie within a world where Pavement Hagiography is a given was — to reference the staging of the museum and the musical — a way of having my cake and inviting thousands of others to eat it.”
Pavement, the band, have been an on-again, off-again concern in recent years. After a stellar reunion tour in 2009 and 2010, the band — Malkmus, Mark Ibold, Scott “Spiral Stairs” Kannberg, Bob Nastanovich and Steve West — regrouped for more shows in 2022, 2023, and a handful this year. The label, Matador, is teasing the one-off concert as “one last chance to see America’s most beloved rock & roll group before they take a well-earned break of indeterminate length.”
