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glowbug
- FB Fan -
United Kingdom
26 Posts |
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Ziggy
* Dog in the Sand *
United Kingdom
2463 Posts |
 Posted - 08/20/2005 : 05:11:18
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It's a pretty long interview. Entertaining anecdotes from the band.
Some cool, happy pics in the printed version too.
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starmekitten
-= Forum Pistolera =-
United Kingdom
6370 Posts |
Posted - 08/20/2005 : 05:36:31
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I'm going to paste it because of the tendancy of links to die
I wasn't going to leave the house today, this is in todays paper yes?
Might have to take a wee walk into town.
This is very cool, thanks for the heads up!
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Misfits that fit
The Pixies were a bunch of mavericks who in the late 1980s changed the face of modern rock before imploding - the band not big enough for its [two star] players. So what finally brought them back together 11 years later? They talk candidly to Laura Barton
Saturday August 20, 2005
The Guardian
In the sticky heat of two summers ago, former Pixies frontman Frank Black made an appearance on London's Xfm radio station. He played acoustic versions of Pixies classics Caribou and Monkey Gone To Heaven before Zoë Ball, the show's presenter, took the opportunity to ask Black about a possible band reunion. "I do dream about the Pixies' reunion, I do have to say," came Black's startling admission. "It's like those schoolboy dreams when you don't do your homework and you don't study for the test. I'm at the gig and we're hanging out, but it's an utter failure and I don't know the songs, and hardly anyone turns up and people walk out. That's what I'm afraid of, that it'd be a big, big failure."
And so, says Black, in his slow, dusty drawl, "the cat was out of the bag, kinda". We are sitting in the velvety plushness of a Chicago hotel: later this afternoon, the Pixies are to perform at the Lollapalooza festival, two months into their 2005 reunion tour. Next weekend they will be headlining at the Reading Festival. Black's wife, Violet, walks in and out of the room, ferrying the couple's six-month-old son, who, with his bald head and cherubic proportions, bears an uncanny resemblance to his father. Initially, Black says, he wasn't altogether serious about a band reunion. "But who knows what kind of psychology was going on? I haven't really analysed it. I made a joke, they took it too far, so it was in all the papers ... But I was for the first time psychologically open to playing with those guys again."
Certainly the Frank Black of 2003, at 38, was very different from the dour individual of 1993, the year the Pixies disbanded, when he was still known as Black Francis. (His real name is in fact Charles Michael Kitridge Thompson IV.) "I had been through the wringer emotionally," he says. "Got a divorce, moved to a different town." He also felt that it was a tangibly different time for his fellow Pixies - bassist Kim Deal, guitarist Joey Santiago, and drummer David Lovering. "I don't think that Kim would have been so agreeable [before]. She quit drinking, you know what I mean? So while that wasn't a prerequisite or anything, when I heard that I was kinda like, oh, well, that'll be nice - she wanted a dry tour, so that meant that we're going to be at our best, probably. People corking champagne and staying up all night ... I don't think any of us saw it as a big problem, but in hindsight, I realise that it probably was. Not just her, but everybody was partying, as you do when you're 25 and you're feeling real eternal and all that."
Between 1987 and 1993, the Pixies were one of the most influential bands in the world, creating a sound that would change modern rock, from their debut EP Come On Pilgrim to their death-throe record, Trompe Le Monde, via the critically acclaimed albums Surfer Rosa, Doolittle and Bossanova. An unorthodox marriage of surf music and punk rock, their sound was characterised by Black's bristling lyrics and hackle-raising caterwaul, Kim Deal's whispered harmonies and waspy basslines, Joey Santiago's fragile guitar, and the persistent flush of David Lovering's drums. In a world dominated by Madonna, Michael Jackson and Mötley Crüe, the Pixies were bewildering, unsettling, brilliant. Kurt Cobain once said that Smells Like Teen Spirit was his own attempt to write a Pixies song, while David Bowie believes they wrote some of the most "compelling" music of the 1980s.
By the early 1990s, however, band relations looked brittle enough to snap. There were reports of an increasing sourness between Black and Deal: just how much sourness Black will go on to admit. When the Pixies finally did split, in a flurry of bile and spat feathers, Black was rumoured to have informed the band of his decision by fax.
In the summer of 2003, after he had let the cat out of the bag, Black decided to get back in touch with Joey Santiago, who since leaving the Pixies had earned moderate success in a band with his wife, The Martinis, and composing television scores. "He called me on my cellphone and I was in Cape Cod visiting family," recalls Santiago. "He said in this coy voice, 'Hey Joey, uh, you been hearin' these rumours that we're getting back together? Gee, I wonder who started it?' I go, 'Charles, did you do that?' and he goes, 'Yeah.'"
Over the years, Santiago, now 40, had served as the linchpin of the band, staying in touch with all its members. He then called David Lovering, who had given up the drums and become a magician. "I remember I was on the way to the bank, and I was just bummed out - everything, financially, was really a mess for me," says Lovering, 43. "I was involved in this relationship that was absolutely terrible. I was bottoming out. And I'm on the way to the bank and my cellphone rings. It's Joe; he says, 'Guess what?' And I just jumped through the ceiling."
Santiago also telephoned Deal, who recalls the occasion between long draws on countless cigarettes. "I was visiting Kelley [her sister]. She lives about a mile away from ..." Deal, 44, leans in close to the cassette recorder, and says in a gravelly whisper: "I live with my parents, OK? I live with my mom and dad, I'm a loser." Another tug on her cigarette. "So I was visiting Kelley and Joe left a message. He just said, 'Hey, Kim, give me a call back.' It wasn't a 'Hey! I was wondering whether you were still in LA! Me and my wife are having a show ...' There was a point to his voice, he wanted something. And I was like ohhhhhuh." Deal makes a slow, groaning sound, as if she is desperately hungover and cannot countenance the idea of getting out of bed.
So it was a while before Deal called Santiago back, but by then she was aware of the Pixies reunion rumour. "He's like, 'David's into it.' And then I talked to Charles briefly. I said, 'Hey, I hear you're thinking about getting the gang back together.' Like we're bank robbers or something, doing another heist. And, in the meantime, me and Joe had already talked about: well, it wouldn't hurt to get in a room together. And if we started playing and it sounded like shit, then we'd just forget about it."
Around September, Deal put her belongings in her Volvo stationwagon and drove from her home in Dayton, Ohio, to LA, where Lovering and Santiago both lived. Black was touring in Europe, but the three Pixies began a tentative rerun of their back catalogue. "Monkey Gone To Heaven, Bone Machine, Isla de Encanta ... and it sounded pretty good," says Deal. "It was amazing that we sounded so much like we did then. Me and Joe made a joke about that - does it mean we have some sort of special thing, where we just make this beautiful music together? Or does it mean we've actually had absolutely no musical growth for 16 years? We stopped learning and growing at that moment?"
The story of the Pixies really begins in Boston, Massachusetts, where Black was at university studying anthropology in the mid-1980s. There, he met Santiago, by his own admission a "creepy-quiet" economics student. The pair shared a disdain for the heavy metal of the day, all frouffy hair and unwilting guitar solos. "He was a nice guy - jolly fellow," Santiago recalls of Black. "He would practise guitar in the bathroom, and I remember one time he just started spitting in the mirror. I thought, this guy is crazy."
Partway through his course, Black went on an exchange programme to Puerto Rico, a place which was to exert a lasting influence - from the somewhat warped imagery of his lyrics to the slightly mangled Spanish that crops up on several Pixies songs (Isla de Encanta, for example, is a mispronunciation of Puerto Rico's motto, Isla del Encanto, island of charm).
In 1986, still in Puerto Rico, Black was planning to travel to New Zealand to see Halley's comet, "but then something started to nag at me. I realised I wasn't being true to myself, and what I really wanted to do was be in a rock band, be a musician." He decided to write a letter to Santiago formally suggesting they drop out of college and form a rock'n'roll band. Back in Boston, the pair settled into a routine of sorts. "Joey got an apartment across the park from where I was. I'd write the songs, I'd walk over to Joey's. I'd show him the songs, he'd come up with guitar chords. I'd walk back over to my place."
"It was definitely not your standard stuff," says Santiago. "I think it might have been Levitate Me that I heard first - he came up with this riffy thing. I think we were trying to make it sound like [Blue Oyster Cult's] Don't Fear The Reaper. It doesn't sound anything like Don't Fear The Reaper, but whatever ..." Black's distinctive singing style was already established: legend holds that, while working in a flower shop, his employer's cousin, a minor Thai rock star, imparted the wisdom, "Scream it like you hate that bitch", which Black took to heart.
Over in Dayton, Ohio, Kim Deal was playing guitar with her sister, Kelley; the two would perform Hank Williams and Everly Brothers songs at truck stops. "But I wasn't ever in a band," she says, delivering the word with leaden gravitas. "Guys in Dayton don't like chicks in bands. You can play tambourine, backing singing, some keyboards, but you have to wear a lot of spandex. And even if you're doing that and you're really good and you're adding to the band musically, the guys would think, that's just a piece of ass up on stage there to get the guys to come in to look at the girl so they drink more beer ..." She rolls her eyes.
"So, obviously, I didn't play in a band in Dayton. I couldn't do that or else I'd puke. I mean, I would literally get physically sick." She sits frowning for a minute, as if contemplating a life made up of Dayton, spandex and tambourines. "I remember the bands in Dayton," she says, resurfacing suddenly, "changing the words to a Pat Benatar song they covered to 'Put another notch in my guitar case', instead of 'Put another notch in my lipstick case', so the guys - who were wearing spandex - can sing that song. It's just weird what extent they'll go to so there's no girls in the band. So they can keep it cool and rocking."
Deal got married and moved to Boston. "I'd lived in Boston for one week and I got this paper called the Boston Phoenix that had ads in the back. A lot of them are, like, 'Bring your chops [talent], must have own van.' Which means, basically, they're looking for someone with a van, because they don't have their own transportation." But one ad caught her eye. "It said: 'Looking for female bassist, high harmony, must like Hüsker Dü, Peter Paul & Mary, no chops.' I thought it was really cool. And I called the people. I'd never done this before. Or since. And I found out from Joe on this tour I was the only one who actually answered that ad."
Deal went to meet Black and Santiago, who supposedly didn't care how well she played. "I thought Joe was Mexican. He was quiet as hell. He's still like that. Charles was really friendly, really hospitable. Anyway, Charles had an acoustic. He played a song, A Brick Is Red. I liked it, and it was nice that they were so different to anybody in Dayton." The three started hanging out, going to gigs and inspecting one another's record collections: the Cure, Human Sexual Response, Iggy Pop, Sonic Youth. The only problem was that Deal did not own a bass, nor had ever played one, but she picked it up easily enough. "It's got four strings, pleeease!"
Deal's husband had a drummer friend called David Lovering. "David was an electrical engineering student who was really into [prog rockers] Rush," says Black. "But whatever's misfit about Dave fits in with the rest of us. We're kinda misfitty. Which is why I think people like us - because we're not real suave."
The Pixies' first gig was on a Wednesday night at Jack's Lounge in Boston, for which they were paid $17. Black says he was so nervous his legs shook. "I remember I wrote the lyric to this song called Break My Body a few hours before, on the steps outside a pizza place in Harvard Square. I hadn't finished it, but we knew how to play this music, so I wrote a quickie lyric. The lyric may, in fact, show that if you were to look at it today ..."
It was around this time that Black became Black Francis, and Deal took to calling herself Mrs John Murphy. "I was working at a doctor's office," she explains, "and I answered the phone, and it was a lady called Ethel Goldfarb. I said, 'Oh, hello, Ethel.' And she said, 'Don't. Call. Me. Ethel. My name is Mrs Harold Goldfarb.' And I thought that it was so cool that for me to show respect to her I would have to refer to her by somebody else's name. I thought, oh my God, I'm married, I'm going to be 'Mrs John Murphy'."
The band's absence of visible hipness was at odds with the fashion of the day. "It was '85 or '86," says Deal, "and in Boston there was something going round that was really weird - you would go to these stores where you could buy a $100 ripped T-shirt, because you were punk. And I just thought that was really funny. So at some of the shows, I would make sure not to change from my skirt and comfortable, sensible heels and the shirt with the bow on. Just to piss off the punks. And that's really thrilling. Because of course they hated it. That's a fucking secretary? Please."
With quite blinding speed the band found a manager, recorded a demo, and signed to cult UK indie label 4AD. They left town as soon as possible. "Between moving back to Boston and our first record coming out, I think it was almost a year. Within a year and a half we were gone," growls Black. "We were like, we want to go to England. We want to go to LA. We want to be real. We want to be on the radar. We were touring out of state well before there was any demand for us to be there."
Black's instincts were right, and the band's raw, sinewy sound found a more welcoming audience in Europe, particularly in the UK, than in the US. Accordingly, the band toured Europe extensively between recording albums: their first, Surfer Rosa, was followed by Doolittle in 1989, which, with its singles Monkey Gone To Heaven and Here Comes Your Man, entered the album chart top 10 in the UK (the top 100 in the US).
It was at this point that the first rumblings of discontent began to be heard, and the band elected to take a break: Black to pursue a solo career and Deal to form the Breeders, first with the Throwing Muses' Tanya Donelly, and then with her sister, Kelley. The Pixies reconvened to record Bossanova, although it was notable that, where the previous albums had housed some of Deal's work (the single Gigantic, a co-writing credit on Silver), the new record was entirely Black's work. Nevertheless, they succeeded in touring amicably, in 1991 headlining at the Reading festival. Trompe Le Monde, released the same year, received a lukewarm critical reception.
The split came soon after. Deal remembers the band's final live dates, supporting U2 on their Zoo TV tour, as an exhausting run of gigs, every night looking out at empty places in the crowd. The constant touring, living in close proximity, was also starting to pall. "At one point all four of us were in the same room," says Santiago. "It's like, ah man, I can't stand this. I just couldn't sleep. People were snoring. Some hotels I would sneak into the conference room and just sleep."
"If you've been on a tour bus," says Black, "after a while it's kind of like being on a submarine. Everything kinda turns into Das Boot. Whether there's dialogue, or lack of dialogue, there's a tension - because it's not natural." Black was finding the pressures and the unrelenting attention that went with being the frontman increasingly difficult. "The thing that wound me up the most was the presumption among journalists that there was a lot of in-fighting in the band, which there wasn't," he says, his voice growing a little gritty. "In 1988, that was the starting point of every interview." He lolls back in his chair, and his eyes acquire a snakey coldness. "And then the other presumption was that somehow I was like this big, bad, bossy guy, and I was" - Black adopts a diddums voice - "'Keeping Kimmy out of the band, not letting her sing.' Which was kinda nonsense. So that irritated me."
Is he suggesting that he in no way resembled this character? "Well, I mean, I was the guy that they were painting me [to be]," he admits, softening into a smirk, "but it was more as if they were questioning that it used to be different. Look," he says, wearily, as if throwing a punch too late, too slow, in the direction of 1991, "I totally love this band. I think that they're great, and they bring the best out of me etcetera, etcetera, etcetera. But it's really annoying to be the singer and the main writer of the songs, and then not really get the credit. 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.'"
The "or her", of course, is the elephant in the room. The real wonder of the Pixies reunion is that Black and Deal ever got to speaking again. Black gazes steadily across the table and admits, "The thing is, what I didn't understand at the time was how charismatic Kim Deal is. And how attracted to her people are. On stage, when she's just standing there smoking a cigarette, she's not even playing, and people are going bananas. At the time that just played into the whole everything-rubbing-me-up-the-wrong-way thing. Now I recognise what an asset it is. I'm older and I'm, like, OK, I get it. There's some sort of star quality thing going on over there." He laughs, a slow, oozy chuckle.
The years between the split and the reunion have been somewhat kinder to Black and Deal than they have to Lovering and Santiago. Black has continued to tour and record, solo and with his band the Catholics. Deal enjoyed a hugely successful period with the Breeders in the 1990s, and says new Breeders' material is imminent. Deal has also been credited as "producer" on a number of records, from Guided By Voices to Brainiac, though she is quick to dismiss her involvement with most of these. "One time," she says, "I came to buy pot and the band credited me with production." Meanwhile Joey Santiago moved to LA, panicked for a while, then began making music for film and TV. Lovering embarked on his magic career, touring as the Scientific Phenomalist and opening for the Breeders. Of all the band, he seems the most elated to have the gang back together. "The saddest thing," he says, "is that when I sat down to rehearse for the Pixies, I couldn't believe that I had given up something that I loved. Now I hold the drum at night and I want to go to bed with it." He continues: "My yearbook in high school, they had this thing called Future Ambitions, you wrote when you were 17. And my future ambitions were: 1) to be an electronic engineer - I did do that; 2) to be a rock drummer - I did that; and 3) to tour with Rush. So Pixies and Rush touring together. Then that's it. It's all done."
The Pixies say that the reunion tour, which began in spring 2004, has been pretty similar to those they've done before, only there are fewer spats, the hotel rooms are plusher and they are all older, wiser, mellower. There are also fewer empty seats: this tour has been one of the fastest-selling in history and, with the exception of a heavy metal festival crowd in Vienna, the response has been rapturous. There are now also mutterings of new material from both Black and Deal for a sixth Pixies album.
After more than a decade in the wilderness, 10 years of side projects, soundtracks, magic tricks and pot-buying, it seems the Pixies are back in business. "It feels," Black says, "like we took two years off, not 11."
· The Pixies headline the Reading Festival next Friday and Leeds Festival next Saturday
You begin saving the world by saving one person at a time; all else is grandiose romanticism or politics |
Edited by - starmekitten on 08/20/2005 08:34:58 |
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kathryn
~ Selkie Bride ~
Belgium
15320 Posts |
Posted - 08/20/2005 : 06:02:38
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Thanks for posting, glowbug, thanks for quoting, kitty.
Best quote:
Kim on the reunion: "Like we're bank robbers or something, doing another heist."
Sometimes, no matter how shitty things get, you have to just do a little dance. - Frank
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PixieSteve
> Teenager of the Year <
Poland
4698 Posts |
Posted - 08/20/2005 : 06:16:24
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aye, it's in today's in the separate weekend paper (they are on the cover). good read.
 Oh let it linger |
Edited by - PixieSteve on 08/20/2005 06:16:59 |
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Carl
- A 'Fifth' Catholic -
Ireland
11546 Posts |
Posted - 08/20/2005 : 06:32:10
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| Thanks a mil, glowbug, that's a great, interesting, informative interview. And it's in today's Guardian? I'll nip up the road later and get that. |
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Levitated
= Cult of Ray =
Chile
652 Posts |
Posted - 08/20/2005 : 06:51:57
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| OMG pixies everywhere everytime!!! :D I like that!! |
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starmekitten
-= Forum Pistolera =-
United Kingdom
6370 Posts |
Posted - 08/20/2005 : 08:31:56
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It is a nice little article, the pictures are terribly sweet.
You begin saving the world by saving one person at a time; all else is grandiose romanticism or politics |
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Surfer Rosa
> Teenager of the Year <
4209 Posts |
Posted - 08/20/2005 : 10:02:53
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I'll do my best to scan them in at work on Monday.
Fire made it good. |
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Carl
- A 'Fifth' Catholic -
Ireland
11546 Posts |
Posted - 08/22/2005 : 09:36:15
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| It's great, they're mentioned on the front of the paper, and are on the cover of the magazine. |
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Surfer Rosa
> Teenager of the Year <
4209 Posts |
Posted - 08/22/2005 : 09:51:25
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Still trying to get to the scanner - not forgotten.
Fire made it good. |
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speedy_m
= Frankofile =
Canada
3581 Posts |
Posted - 08/22/2005 : 11:38:18
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That is the best Pixies article I've read in a long time.
and you are ill prepared to fight
living in a world of soft and white
in air conditioned battle zones
I pity you!
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danwalding
- FB Fan -
Australia
33 Posts |
Posted - 08/23/2005 : 05:31:42
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Does FB love the phrase "y'know what I mean?" or what??
Grew up to be a Debaser |
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Carl
- A 'Fifth' Catholic -
Ireland
11546 Posts |
Posted - 08/23/2005 : 05:39:37
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| I know what y'mean! |
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Ziggy
* Dog in the Sand *
United Kingdom
2463 Posts |
Posted - 08/23/2005 : 06:51:34
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| I don't like the way that the writer presses Frank about 'infighting' in the band. |
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two reelers
* Dog in the Sand *
Austria
1036 Posts |
Posted - 08/25/2005 : 00:51:13
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"with the exception of a heavy metal festival crowd in Vienna, the response has been rapturous."
e x a c t l y. that was the concert i visitied and it pissed me off. extremely.
read it all here:
http://forum.frankblack.net/topic.asp?TOPIC_ID=8290
I joined the cult of Souled American / 'cause they are a damn' fine band |
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Carl
- A 'Fifth' Catholic -
Ireland
11546 Posts |
Posted - 08/25/2005 : 08:32:09
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| I thought that was this year, then I realised they've only started the 2005 european tour. BTW, I have to say, as thrilled as I am to see them live, I hate that I'll probably never see them in at an intimate, fan-friendly show here. It's always going to be these big commercial events, with a few other bands playing an loads of people who ar'nt necessarily there for The Pixies. |
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Guardian article
