The Shriek Shall Inherit The Earth

Joe Santiago doesn’t miss Kim Deal. In fact, he doesn’t even think about Kim Deal much nowadays. When the Pixies bass-player walked out half-way through the recording of the storied indie band’s first album in more than ten years, guitarist Santiago’s first response was a shrug: they didn’t need her.

The fulcrum of the Pixies was always the tension between Santiago’s screw-ball riffs and singer Black Francis’ demon howl. Sure Kim brought something – a fucked-up sweetness maybe. But would her departure sink the band? You must be kidding.
“It was a shame,” says Santiago, in a ‘what you gonna do?’ tone of voice. “As far as her impact on the music... The way we work is that everybody collaborates. She collaborated too. It didn’t really make any difference that she left. Had she stuck around it would have been the same deal – no pun intended. I’m not kidding, whether she was there or not, it was going to be the same.”
Deal, hankering to resume her Breeders project with sister Kelley, informed Santiago and Francis of her decision in what was possibly the least rock and roll setting on the planet: a Café Nero coffee house near the Monmouth, Wales studio where they were recording. Initially the axeman and vocalist were shocked – a feeling that quickly turned to indifference.
“Do we wish she was back?” muses Santiago, a small-town Massachusetts native who can sound like a Sopranos tough guy when he gets going. “It is the way it is. I really don’t have time to miss her. We got right back on the road and told ourselves ‘okay we have to prove it – now that she’s gone, we have to make this work. We are still the Pixies'. We love her, love what she brought. The point is that this is the only musical endeavour we want to be in. We came back with fire.”

Some bands burn brightly and are suddenly snuffed out, others stumble wearily into self-parody so that, by the time they do finally break-up, nobody much cares either way. Francis, Santiago and drummer Dave Lovering – the Pixies as nowadays constituted – found a third way: they blazed like a comet for five years, fell messily apart and then, a decade later, were back – old, balder (okay we’ll say it: fatter) and yet, in their essence, unchanged. Somehow they'd survived where so many of their alternative nation peers – Husker Du, Nirvana – were chewed up and spat out.
Depending on your opinion of musical reunions – what they say about the artist, what they say about us – this was either a boon for those who had missed the group’s first twirl around the pre-grunge maypole or a protracted crapping on of their legacy. Written down it's quite incredible: by the time Pixies rolled into The Olympia in Dublin last November on their umpteenth comeback tour, the group’s reunion had surpassed in length their original incarnation. Behold the comeback kids who just kept coming back.
In one vital respect, however, the return of the Pixies was something of an anomaly: there were plenty of gigs but no new music. An outfit that, between 1987 and 1990, put out one album every year – and at least three bona fide masterpieces – had, it seemed, nothing more to say. To compound the insult, Black Francis was ploughing on with his solo career, a one man and his guitar crusade that had started to feel increasingly like an indulgence.
The world wasn’t craving new Pixies music – actually, there were justifiable fears that new Pixies music might sound like a bland pastiche of old Pixies music. But still, fans didn’t want to believe the group, who had split by fax in 1993, were just back for the cash (not very famous first time around, they'd toured to modest audiences, even in Europe where they were relatively acclaimed). Frankly, when a group reassembles for an extended period and doesn't give you new product, you start to wonder. Through the '80s and early '90s, Pixies weren’t so much a band as a cluster bomb going off in the middle of indie rock. What were they now?
The way Santiago tells it, Pixies had always intended to make new music. The problem was finding the right moment – conjuring the correct (yes, I’m going to say it) “vibe”. A few years ago, they rented a studio, tried a few things. Magic did not manifest itself, so they put their instruments away. Then in mid-2012, Santiago played Francis some riffs he’d been working on and they were in business. The result is new album Indie Cindy, a solid affair that captures much of what people love about Pixies: the loudness, the divine messiness of Francis’ shriek, Santiago’s gorgeous, deranged guitars.
That not everybody should be instantly smitten is no surprise. What ‘legacy’ act blows its fanbase away with new music? It doesn’t happen, has never happened. Santiago shrugs – he wasn’t stung by the one star review of their comeback EP that ran on Pitchfork and could care less about the much re-tweeted Grantland essay which sardonically congratulated the Pixies on coagulating into schlubby middle-age guys, comfortable in mediocrity.
“If someone wants us to sound like Surfer Rosa, go listen to Surfer Rosa,” says Santiago. “That album is out there for you – it still exists. The guy [Pitchfork reviewer] could have put that on, if he feels 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 is voluble – if he was British you’d call him a geezer. This is at odds with the Pixies’ reputation for introversion. On stage, they stare straight ahead, scarcely acknowledging one another – let alone the audience. Just how bad they were at personal interaction was made clear in the documentary Loudquietloud, chronicling their 2005 US and UK tour, in which each band member appeared to shuffle around in their own private bubble, existentially removed from the rest of the group.
“That movie was pretty accurate,” Santiago admits. "Okay, so we were probably a little extra quiet ‘cos there were cameras around all the time. A lot of people don’t understand that. What can I say? We are quiet people.”
He appears to contradict himself, however, by adding that he and Francis have a somewhat fiery relationship. They row all the time he says: things often turn heated.
“We're friends and colleagues. We butt heads too. At times, we really get at it. There is no tension – nothing passive aggressive. We just have it out – it’s healthy.”
But the passive aggressive charge surfaced once more following the surprise departure of Deal’s replacement on bass, Kim Shattuck, after just one tour (she, in turn, replaced by former Zwan member Paz Lenchantin). The way she tells it, her manager had to call her with the news: in all their time on the road together last year (including their brace of Olympia dates), not one of the Pixies had so much as raised the subject of her departure. Santiago’s chief beef is that she expressed her unhappiness via-
social media.
“I don’t know if it’s indicative of who she is – she went on a social media network,” says Santiago, as if he is the aggrieved one. “It could have been more graceful. The way we would have handled it is that she would've been the bass-player we had hired, and now she was doing something else. That’s how we would have presented it. Instead, she's known as the guitar player the Pixies fired.”
The Pixies came together in Boston in the late '80s. Francis, real name Charles Thompson, and Santiago were room-mates at the University of Massachusetts, who bonded over a shared love of Iggy Pop and the Velvet Underground. Lovering, a mutual acquaintance, was their first choice as drummer. Last to join was Deal, who'd been working as a secretary. Around New England, they'd had the standard small-yet-devoted following. Still, nothing seemed to be happening – with songs about UFOs, eyeballs and razorblades, it was unthinkable any American label of stature would hand the Pixies a record deal. Instead, London’s 4AD, then best-known for giving the world Cocteau Twins and Dead Can Dance, reached out and paired them with producer Steve Albini for what would become their 1988 debut, Surfer Rosa.
Soon, they had a substantial European following – their profile raised with 1989’s more accessible Doolittle, and its quasi-hits ‘Debaser’, ‘Monkey Gone To Heaven’ and ‘Here Comes Your Man’. Four years later, U2 brought them on the road as support for their Zooropa tour and a scruffy young rocker named Kurt Cobain was proclaiming the Pixies’ genius to anyone who cared to listen. And then, just as real success seemed within grasp, frontman Francis broke up the band – informing the others by fax.
“If you’ve been on a tour bus after a while it’s kind of like being on a submarine,” he proffered to a UK newspaper in 2004. “Everything kinda turns into Das Boot. Whether there’s dialogue, or lack of dialogue, there’s a tension. Because it’s not natural.”
But there was more to the break-up than worsening band chemistry. Francis and Santiago wrote the bulk of the music – and yet, increasingly, Deal was the focus of media interest. She was cool where they were not – and people loved her for it.
“It’s really annoying to be the singer and the main writer of the songs, and then not really get the credit,” the frontman told The Guardian, on the occasion of the group’s 2004 comeback. “ You know what I mean? Because it’s ego-driven. I’ve got an ego. So everyone’s suddenly like, ‘Well, whatever, fatboy, let’s talk about this or that guy. Or her'.”
When I spoke to Deal about it last year, she had a different perspective. Friendly through the interview, she became agitated when it was suggested that she might have started The Breeders because the Pixies would not accommodate her songwriting aspirations. Life, she said tartly, doesn’t work like that.
“Lemme ask you a question,” she said. “If you wanted to write fiction, would you ever say that the newspaper was stopping you writing fiction? Nobody can stop you writing songs. As I said, people think there is a TV movie aspect to all that. It’s not realistic. And yet, I always get the question. So maybe I’m the one who doesn’t understand. I don’t know. Everybody likes melodrama.”
There was conflict between Francis and Deal, Santiago insists now. From his memories, though, that wasn’t the cause of the split in ‘93. They'd been out there too long, were exhausted. Something had to give.
“We were basically burning out,” he recalls. “You have to remember we were releasing one album a year. After a while that has to take a toll. The tension between Charles and Kim was a little part of it. Ultimately, though, the band just burned out.”
The timing could not have been more unfortunate. From the beginning of Nirvana’s rise, Kurt Cobain had cited Pixies as an influence. Now grunge was in the ascendant and every band with a scowling singer and FX pedal was being signed. After scraping by for so long, it could have been their meal ticket.
“I regretted breaking up,” Santiago sighs. “At the same time – it felt odd good. I'd always wondered when we would split. Then we split and I felt a weird relief: it was like, ‘Oh, so now I know the answer!’”
The Pixies were flattered by Cobain’s praise. Still, they didn’t take it to heart. Maybe a little of their DNA was in Nirvana – then, isn’t every band the sum of its influences?
“He mentioned us: he could just as easily have said Velvet Underground, Husker Du... without those guys there wouldn’t have been an ‘us’ either,” says Santiago. “We filter that into our sound. But it’s true: when we hit the mark there was a greatness.”

Indie Cindy is out now. Pixies play Marlay Park, Dublin with Arcade Fire and Live at the Marquee Cork in June