Here Comes Your Band – An Interview With Pixies

Hey hey, it’s the Pixies – alternative rock’s pre-eminent uncommunicative weirdos. That, at least, is the caricature that has comes to be associated with the snarling misfits behind such enduring indie disco faves as ‘Debaser’ and ‘Monkey Gone To Heaven’. Exhibit A for the prosecution was the 2006 documentary Loud Quiet Loud, which trailed the Pixies through their long-anticipated comeback tour and painted its subjects as angry introverts whose favourite pastime was stewing in sullen silence.

“They followed us around for two years and, to be honest, we’re very boring,” says Dave Lovering, the group’s chipper drummer (and sometime magician with a residency at Los Angeles’s Magic Castle to his credit). “They had to make a drama – so that’s what they did. In the editing, they magnified the parts where we were untalkative. It grows from this idea that the Pixies are super non-communicative.”

Loud Quiet Loud none-too subtly hinted that the Pixies reunion would peter out sooner rather than later. In fact, the band has proved surprisingly enduring since getting together after a decade apart (during which their status had soared, as the true span of their influence on loud, vitriolic rock music became apparent).

That comeback is set to crank up a gear with the release of the new album, Head Carrier – a melody-splashed tour de force that holds its own alongside their classic output of the late ’80s and early ’90s. For anyone who suffered through 2014’s half-cocked Indie Cindy, it’s the light at the end of a very long tunnel.

“With the previous record there was a lot of trepidation going into the studio,” explains Lovering. “We were saying to ourselves, ‘Well jeez, this had better be good.’ There was a little bit of hardship doing Indie Cindy. With Head Carrier, we’d already broken through that. It wasn’t a problem.”

In addition to representing their finest hour since 1991’s Trompe Le Monde, Head Carrier is the first Pixies LP recorded entirely without bassist and founder member Kim Deal. She left in 2013, in the middle of the Indie Cindy sessions (the band were recording in Wales in the studio next door to Dubliner’s Kodaline: she broke the news over coffee at the local Cafe Nero).

“I wouldn’t say it was an unhappy camp in the run up to Kim leaving,” says Lovering. “It was just the Pixies as normal. Of course when Kim decided to go it was devastating. We didn’t know what to do. At that point we’d known her for 26 years. All we could do was accept it and wish her well. There hadn’t been a big lead up. She was just done with it and we had to let her go.”

They replaced her twice over, first with former Muffs guitarist Kim Shattuck (reportedly fired because of her love of stage diving) and now with Paz Lenchantin, previously best known as one fifth of Billy Corgan’s batshit bonkers post-Pumpkins project, Zwan.

Oddly, it was newcomer Lenchantin who provided Head Carrier with arguably its most emotive moment – and the track best-positioned to win a beloved place in the Pixies canon. ‘All I Think About Now’ is a cooing chugger in the tradition of ‘Gigantic’ and ‘River Euphrates’. Both of those numbers featured substantial vocal contributions from Deal. So it is appropriate the new tune should be a meditation on her exit from the perspective of her bandmates.

“We had worked for several weeks on the rest of the material,” recalls Lovering. “There were just three days left in the studio. Paz comes in and says she has this idea for a song. Charles [aka singer Black Francis] says, ‘Okay – you sing on it, I’ll write the lyrics.’ And we did it the next day – a track that we wrote in an evening at the end of seven weeks of recording and rehearsing. It’s very ironic because it has such classic Pixies sound.”

Does this feel like a new – dare we say, better – version of the Pixies? “I wouldn’t say it’s a DIFFERENT Pixies. However, Paz has put a new life into us. And because she is relatively new, being with us for three years, it has put the gentlemen in the band on better behaviour, in terms of how we relate to one another. We’re all getting along famously.”

The idiot’s guide to the Pixies paints the outfit as a vehicle for the increasingly ambitious and idiosyncratic Black Francis [real name Charles Thompson]. On early records such as Surfer Rosa and Doolittle, he and guitarist Joe Santiago moulded the group’s era-defining sound – a shrieking guitar pop that would influence grunge and, especially, Kurt Cobain. However by the time grunge had itself arrived, Francis seemed bored with many of the tropes the Pixies had created. As he called time on the project in 1993 (breaking the news to his bandmates by fax), people were disappointed but not surprised.

“When we broke up it was devastating,” says Lovering. “Here was something I loved and suddenly it was gone… However, looking back, I’m glad it happened. Otherwise we might not have gotten back the way we did and I would not be talking to you now. It was devastating for years and years – but perhaps it has worked out for the best.

“We were a very young band and quite dysfunctional. Charles has said that, had we taken a break, we might have stayed together. We are older and wiser now – more willing to put up with each other’s bullshit.”

That Pixies’ status as indie icons might be more curse than blessing is something they have themselves occasionally acknowledged. Speaking to Hot Press two years ago, guitarist Santiago expressed frustration at the dismissive reviews of Indie Cindy. “If someone wants us to sound like Surfer Rosa, go listen to Surfer Rosa,” he said.

“That album is out there for you – it still exists. [Fans] could have put that on, if they feel the need to revisit. It’s not our job to make a sequel. You don’t get into music to do the same job over and over. The only way we would have done it is if we’d had Surfer Rosa outtakes lying around – which we didn’t.”

Twenty four hours after our chat, the Pixies will drop a bombshell, announcing Santiago is to go into rehab to deal with drug and alcohol issues. If Lovering was in on the secret, he gave no inkling to Hot Press – saying the band were nowadays a thoroughly no-drama affair.

“We did everything when we were younger,” says Lovering, asked about their days of on-the-road excess. “We’re pretty much normal people now. We don’t wear costumes or have any affectations. We go out and deliver the material, without taking a break. I see us as the Grateful Dead of indie rock.”

September marks the 25th anniversary of Trompe Le Monde. I ask Lovering if he feels criticism of the record on its release as pretentious and unfocused was unfair. Just last year, grunge luminary Dave Grohl name-checked it as his favourite LP – a pleasant surprise to Lovering.

“I like those later albums,” he says. “They didn’t suffer or anything – but it wasn’t like the early stuff. On Surfer Rosa and Doolittle we were playing around the Boston clubs so had lots of opportunities to familiarise ourselves with the songs. As we went on and the records came along at a quicker pace, there was less time for that.”

Head Carrier was released on September 30.