Back To Black

Don’t believe what they tell you, the food in Kevin Street Garda Station is great,” deadpans Black Francis from the Vicar St. stage. Hours earlier, the legendary Pixies frontman had been whisked off in a Garda van following some top notch busking in front of 700 rabid fans at Stephen’s Green.

This ‘pre-core’ had been announced on his website and is a fixture on all dates of the current tour. That afternoon, when we chatted at the venue about the novel practice, I had asked whether he had investigated the suitability of the location.
“No! We just go,” he said, looking slightly appalled, although one wonders if the approach has changed in light of what happened later.
The drama continued that evening when 40 or so punters arrived at Vicar St. expecting Celtic songstress Frances Black. One woman saw the humour in the situation, explaining to her friend: “Some heavy metal fella – I won’t be throwing me knickers at him!”
Rewind again to the Vicar St. front-bar, 4pm, pre-precore pandemonium and concert confusion. Black Francis (real name Charles Thompson IV) sits opposite me at the window, pondering the decision to return to his iconic moniker. A passer by glances in, does a double take and nearly trips over.
“It was almost kind of a Pixies thing,” he muses. “It was like, well you don’t want to be in my band anymore, fine! I’ll be Black Francis again, I’ll show you. You don’t think I can write music anymore, well there you go! I’ll show you. I’ll write some rock music. It’s kind of fun, not really a spiteful thing but there is a little bit of that attitude in it.”
The current album Bluefinger and forthcoming mini-album Svn Fngrs are as dark, visceral, frantic and disjointed as any Pixies fare, proving that Black Francis is a compelling artist with or without his former bandmates.
“Another guitarist was never brought into the mix so the three-piece thing is very stripped down and raw,” he avers.
By contrast, his most recent solo outings, Honeycomb and Fast Man/Raider Man, both culled from Nashville sessions with Muscle Shoals stalwarts such as Spooner Oldham and Steve Cropper, were sparse, elegant country-tinged confections.
“It’s not like going from being a butcher to being a priest where it’s like a whole other thing,” he contends. “As Iggy Pop once said, it’s all disco. It’s all just a backbeat primal thing, it’s music. It’s not like a big transition: ‘Oohh this is a whole other subgenre? How do I get my head around this?’ We got tape recorders, we got guitars, we gotta come up with something entertaining for everybody. We gotta charge money for this and it has to be entertaining. It’s all good fun and not challenging in that sense.”
Bluefinger is a concept album inspired by the Dutch pianist and painter Herman Brood, famed for his eccentric lifestyle and drug habit, who commited suicide in 2001.
“I saw a clip on YouTube and I was really sucked in by his charisma and his performance,” Francis explains. “I thought I would just do a cover of that song but ended up writing all the songs about him and I sort of got obsessed with him.”
Another deceased pianist Francis holds in similar esteem is Warren Zevon.
“I remember having this really cosmic weird experience years ago,” he says. “I was in Nebraska to do a show, and there’s a promoter there, a tattooed tough-looking biker fellow who’s actually a sweetheart. He told me he was talking to Warren Zevon the night before and when he told him I was playing there he said, 'Pah, Black Francis, that guy should change his name to Frank Black.' It was spooky as I was just about to!”
Interestingly, the inspiration for the imminent mini-album Svn Fngrs is rooted in Celtic mythology.
“Yes, Cuchulainn, he was born with seven fingers and seven toes,” Francis explains. “The theme for this LP is demigods, and so there are a couple of songs referencing him. I never say his name in the song because I can never quite pronounce it.”
On the subject of demi-gods, I broach the subject of Glen Hansard, who Francis became quite chummy with following a few post-gig sessions from Irish visits past.
“I was going to call him but he's always on the road so I don’t even know if he's in town. I just heard about the Oscar nomination last night! He's out hanging with the beautiful people somewhere. I haven’t seen the movie, I have four children so the only movies I see involve dinosaurs and things like that.”
His wife and band member Violet Clark is absent from this tour as she's expecting for the fifth time. What do the offspring make of his music?
“They’re not so impressed. They say, ‘Can you turn that down please? Can we have the music off in the car please? We just want to read back here.’ They are very smart, and actually our oldest Julian did the artwork for the Bluefinger record so he is a very talented young boy. They're all very arty intellectual types, as small as they are.”
On the subject of movies, specifically U23D, I remind Francis of The Pixies’ support slot on the 1992 Zoo TV tour. Was Bono a gracious host on the road?
“He has always been very gracious over the years,” he states. “He has frequently shown up at a gig and offered a ride on his airplane or whatever. All of them are really nice, typically Irish hospitable people. At the end of the day, even with all the politics and things they're involved in, people like that are basically music geeks. They say things like, 'Have you heard the new Scrubby Muffin record? And I’m like, ‘The who!? The what!?’ They're more up on that sort of stuff than I am. I've found that with other big dudes like that, they are just really into the music. They love it and that’s why they’re still doing it.”
On the subject of big dudes, does he have many dealings with the other Pixies?
“Mostly just in a business kind of sense,” he reveals. “Like, do we have to fire someone that’s guarding our bank account. There’s not really that much day to day business now. (Adopts semi-mock-wistful tone) We were a band many years ago, and that was it’s own period and you move on in life. It is hard, you know each other really well, but there's not any reason for us to be married any more so let’s be done with it and move on. It’s not bad when you see each other, it’s nice, but there’s no reason. What’s the reason? Oh, there’s a bunch of people here that have paid good money to see you sing the old songs again, oh, okay, that’s a reason, but you do that a few times and then it’s like, ‘We don’t want to suck blood out of a stone here, enough is enough.’ It just didn’t feel natural.”
So who would be victorious in a Frank Black/Black Francis celebrity death match scenario?
“I'm not in touch with my own faculties enough to be able to get into the hypothetical,” he smiles. “I don’t have a lot of artistic vision. I'm here right now in this moment, and in a little while I will be playing some music. I’m in the moment and this is what it's all about.
“In the Chinese Zodiac I'm a snake and the snake only reacts to what is directly in front of him. He is sliding around; he can’t see down the road. The monkey can climb up the pole and see down the road and see everything that is going on and have a plan and have an artistic vision and be able to answer hypothetics. But you ask a snake and they’re like, ‘What? That’s too confusing! I’m too busy just looking at what’s in front of me.’”
I was going to ask what’s in the pipeline but I guess the snake doesn’t know and we’ll just find out.
“Exactly!!!”

Bluefinger and Svn Fngrs are out now on Cooking Vinyl.