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McDutchie
= Cult of Ray =
United Kingdom
270 Posts |
 Posted - 10/09/2013 : 12:39:10
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http://www.berliner-zeitung.de/kultur/pixies--wir-haetten-auch-kylie-minogue-fragen-koennen-,10809150,24543834.html
Published October 6th.
Here is a translation, made with Google Translate and then hand-edited. Any translation errors are my responsibility.
"We could just as well ask Kylie Minogue"By Robert Rotifer
People spend more on tickets than ever. Our customers are not going to the record store, they prefer to go to a concert, says the singer of the Pixies, Black Francis, in an interview. After 22 years, the Pixies have recorded new songs and are going on tour.
In the late eighties, the Pixies formulated with their sound, moodily oscillating between reduction and hysteria, the aesthetic basis of the alternative rock music that dominated the first half of the following decade. Twenty years ago Pixies singer and main songwriter Black Francis dissolved the band; since 2004 they have been reunited for lucrative live concerts. In June, the Pixies announced the departure of bassist Kim Deal along with the first new single in 22 years. After the release of an EP recorded without Deal, the band is now back on tour with a new bassist; next Tuesday and Wednesday they will be playing in Huxley's in Neukölln. The Berliner Zeitung spoke to Black Francis on the phone beforehand.
Successful bands like the Pixies, making new music again after such a long break, are surely faced with a dilemma: to sound exactly like before would be stagnation. In the case of your recently released EP on the other hand, the chorus of critics complained that this is now no longer the Pixies. How do you deal with that?
It's like having a certain credibility to defend. Part of our credibility was based on the original cast. Once you play around with one aspect of it, it gets tricky. Of course, we expected such doubts, and I would not ever claim that they are not appropriate. But it is still our band. We could just as well ask Kylie Minogue if she wants to play along.
Why do you publish a series of EPs, even though you have recorded enough material for an entire album?
This decision has nothing to do with my own agenda, which consists only of being a member of a rock band playing concerts and making recordings. So if someone I trust proposes to me how many songs will go on a disk, then I accept that.
Who made this decision?
Our manager Richard Jones. He has been researching this topic for a few years. The format has changed. The LP first came up for discussion in 1948, and it truly flourished in the mid sixties when people had the impression that pop artists made actual artistic progress. But there are quite a few people in this world who are younger than us and no longer buy this format. We could just say that these people don't have a particularly great attention span. But they still like to gather around the tribal fire to see someone sing, perform something or tell a story. People spend more on tickets than ever. Our customers are not going to the record store, they prefer to go to a concert. This fits with my agenda.
And still it eventually was not enough for you to always play the same old songs?
I believe that people still want new material, although pop artists are no longer on such a high pedestal as they used to be. We had pop stars in the fifties, even though the success of the early rock'n'rollers was based exclusively on singles. If something is good enough for Little Richard and Elvis Presley, it's good enough for us.
So now you have already played your first concerts with your new live bassist Kim Shattuck. How has she been doing?
She's great, she has a lot of personality, she is very personable and hard working. It feels good to have fresh blood in the band. In the past, there was some resistance within the band against making new music. That's fine, but new music is what interested me, our drummer David Lovering and guitarist Joey Santiago. We love the old songs, but we need a challenge. At the moment it's feeling very good not to get the admiration of our audience served on a silver platter.
Joey Santiago says there is always an open door if Kim Deal wants to return. Could you imagine that?
I'm not very gifted for hypotheses. Do I believe she'll do it? No. It was a reasonably friendly separation, so it could well be that she'll join us on stage again at some point to sing a few songs with us. But she is an independent artist, she has her own band, The Breeders, and sometimes people need to just do their own thing.
But you have done the same thing yourself in the past. Will you ever get to that point again?
Honestly, now that I have the Pixies available as a vehicle, I see no reason for a solo career. Twenty years ago, my needs were different. At that time I needed not to be with the Pixies. We were constantly stuck with each other, and eventually the stress became too much. People usually split up in such a situation, and there is an emotional mood, with a tone like: "Never again!" And then everybody relaxes again, and you say: Maybe I'll do it again after all.
Do you think that pop music is not as important today as in the past because its omnipresence has made it arbitrary? Exactly because it is everywhere, it is nowhere?
That's a very good observation. I'm sitting on the rooftop of a hotel in Hollywood, and somewhere in the background I'm hearing a female voice whine, but the volume is so low that I can not make out what she sings. But pop music is always there. Even when I go into a grocery store in Brussels at seven clock in the morning, there's a young Indian in there roaring along with Daft Punk. Pop music no longer has a confined space.
The delineation of the adult culture was also what made pop music such a good medium for counterculture. But today, with Miley Cyrus doing the impermissible on stage in order to fabricate commotion, it seems rather pathetic.
It is terribly pathetic, and I have the impression that exactly the same is happening in mainstream cinema. Even in the arts. When artists, 75 years after Duchamp's urinal, still throw television sets into the corner of a gallery space in order to trigger a debate about art, that's just sad. At a certain level, people will always let something dramatic upset them.
But when was the last time theatre seats were smashed? The constraints of formal society are already gone. What we need now is rather something like common decency. Everything is in disarray, but people are still not running around with machine guns, certainly not you or me.
So what's still left to achieve for art or pop?
In art, this question is actually a difficult challenge. However, when it comes to music, the only question is who finds out first. I hope it will be me. When I think about it, I was actually the last one who managed to do it. It was me!
Interview: Robert Rotifer .
Pixies: Tuesday Oct 8th (sold out) and Wednesday Oct 9th, at 8pm, Huxley's
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Berliner Zeitung interview
