Pixies open up about last year's comeback album

A round of applause, ladies and gentleman, as we give you the Hot Press Indie Heroes of the Year. Accepting the gong on behalf of Pixies is drummer Dave Lovering, who agrees the indie icons’ cracking new LP, Head Carrier, is a long-awaited return to form. Honestly, he can’t remember the last time they all got on so well in the studio – and you can hear the results on a rollicking record that recalls their late ‘80s glory days even as it blazes a trail distinctly its own.

“With the previous album [2014’s] Indie Cindy] 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 assembled 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 delivered the bombshell 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 both appropriate and deeply ironic 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 funny because it has such a 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 Joey Santiago moulded the group’s era-defining sound – 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.” The Pixies are often caricatured as sullen introverts – a stereotype that was cast in marble by the 2006 documentary Loud Quiet Loud, which trailed Lovering and chums through their long-anticipated comeback tour and painted its subjects as monosyllabic moochers whose favourite pastime was stewing in silence.

“They followed us around for two years and, to be honest, we’re very boring,” says Lovering. “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 stock had soared, as the true extent of their influence on loud, vitriolic rock music became apparent). 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.”

Santiago went into rehab to deal with drug and alcohol issues ahead of the group’s autumn tour of Europe. Nonetheless, according to Lovering, the band are nowadays a largely no-drama affair.

“We did everything when we were younger,” he says, 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 marked 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.”