Pixies: ‘There’s enough bombast on Twitter without Trump adding to it’

Exclusive: Singer Black Francis, guitarist Joey Santiago and bassist Paz Lenchantin talk ‘going to hell in a handcart’, Kim Deal and Extinction Rebellion as the proto-grunge giants discuss new album ‘Beneath the Eyrie’ with Mark Beaumont

(From left) Joey Santiago, Paz Lenchantin, David Lovering and Black Francis

Would I storm Area 51?” Black Francis, aka Charles Thompson IV, ponders. “Only in terms of reading about it from the safety of a fine coffee shop. I’m not going to storm anything, certainly not involving a military base…”

At 54, Thompson, the lycanthropic visionary at the heart of alt-rock legends and proto-grunge pioneers Pixies, seems an unapologetic realist. The sci-fi nut who took the alien’s eye view on “Planet of Sound” and “Motorway To Roswell” and raced to meet the mothership landing on the Vegas Strip in “The Happening” in the early Nineties has clearly matured out of his sky-watching ways. Any talk of witchcraft, reincarnation and death curses that appear on Pixies new seventh album Beneath The Eyrie he dismisses as “theatrical affectation”, the biblical bawler of classic early albums Surfer Rosa and Doolittle stepping back from his dark art.

He’s reluctant to talk politics, too. “Life is short and I need to choose my battles,” he says when I bring up Trump. “What do you want me to say? Do I really need to say the guy seems like he’s a f***in’ piece of work? What the hell can I possibly say that’s gonna illuminate anyone about anything to do with this subject?”

Well, the (seminal, Nirvana-influencing) full-length debut Surfer Rosa was full of songs in tune with Latin American culture, the very people that Potus is now demonising.

“It’s always been like that,” Thompson argues. “I’m not saying every president has done that, but there’s a president or a king or a leader somewhere in the world right now that’s demonising some other group of people that aren’t from their particular part of the map for whatever the reason, because they’re racist or xenophobic or they have some sort of political or economic agenda they’re trying to drive. That goes on every year somewhere in the world. Now there’s some guy who is the president who seems to say a lot of things via his bombastic Twitter feed, oh great, we’re already doing enough bombast on people’s Twitter feeds and social media these days, goddamn it all, now the actual president of a country is utilising it too. I suppose it would make sense that that would happen, but it is sort of like ‘oh brother, the world really is going to hell in a hand basket.’”

He’s equally pragmatic about those people who claim Pixies just aren’t Pixies without their original bassist Kim Deal, who quit the reformed band in 2013, reportedly reluctant to taint their legacy with new albums.

“I’d say if that’s how they view it, I’m perfectly OK with that,” Thompson says. “There’s lots of other records to listen to and lots of other bands to follow. They don’t need to keep following the Pixies if they think it’s dead and over without a particular member, I get it. I suppose there are bands out there that I like that maybe I liked certain versions of the band better than other versions of the band, shall we say? But there are also bands I like – for example, the band Love from the Sixties, they’ve always got the same frontman but the backing band changes. People talk about certain earlier records that they made that have the quintessential line-up, a particular guitar player or whomever, and that is ‘the good stuff’ – I would argue that that may be for you, but for me as a listener a couple of their later records are my favourite records. If they only like a certain period of the band, great, I’m glad that they like some of it, they don’t have to like it all.”

Black is back: ‘Life is short and I need to choose my battles’

Indeed, Team Kim are set to miss out big time. The Pixies of 2019 are making some of the best, most evocative music of their career, steeped in the macabre spirit of their formative records. Take Thompson’s new guitar. A jet-black, customised guitar strung with just four strings like a diabolic banjo. And there in the headstock, set in resin, a human tooth streaming roots.

“A few years ago, I had lost my very first adult tooth,” Thomspon says, intoning like a fireside storytelling reading from a book of terror tales. “A very large molar. I received the tooth from the dentist intact, with all its roots. So I went to the guitar maker and said, ‘can you build me this customised four-string guitar, let’s do it in black. But I asked him to embed the tooth in the guitar, so he floated it in resin in the headstock. So this guitar has a kind of a vibe.”

Ever since they emerged from the Boston underground in 1987 with their flamenco-infused songs of mania, melody and menace, Pixies have been masters of the malevolent “vibe”. The moniker itself was a stroke of Guillermo del Toro genius – the sweet and playful turned sordid, supernatural, sinister – and their records were steeped in art house atmospherics. The deviant sex, deformity, religion, incest and exotic travelogues of 1988’s Surfer Rosa came awash with a seamy Latin American heat-haze and a south-of-the-border lawlessness. The 1989 million-selling Doolittle was danker still, all myth and mutilation played out like the world’s most tuneful death cult. The more sci-fi albums of Pixies’ first incarnation – 1990’s Bossanova and 1991’s Trompe Le Monde – created craterous planets of sound, by turns Plan 9 From Outer Space and a Starship Troopers battle scene. Before the band imploded from in-fighting in 1992 – drummer Dave Lovering and Deal were notified that they were out of a job by fax in January 1993 – they seemed to exist in a series of colourfully creepy worlds entirely their own.

Two fantastic comeback albums consolidated their 2004 reunion, imagining what sort of band they’d be after a couple of decades stranded on the “Planet of Sound” for 2014’s wonderfully erratic Indie Cindy and then reconnecting with their grimy punk roots on Head Carrier in 2016. But it’s only now that the reunited Pixies have once more submerged themselves in a “vibe”. With half an album written in rehearsals near Charles’ home in Massachusetts and, as usual, no plan, they holed up in Dreamland Recording Studios, a converted church deep in the woods of upstate New York, there to commune with ancient American spirits.

“We were there in the winter before Christmas,” Thompson says. “Woodstock is a very moody place in the winter, it’s very spooky, the studio we recorded at was an old church with a one-armed cross missing all the other limbs and lots of animals scurrying around in the walls of all the buildings.”

“It was like ‘the Pixies are out in Woodstock making a record in this church and they live in this cabin, broo-ha-ha!’” adds bassist Paz Lenchantin.

Sounds like there might’ve been some Blair Witch moments during recording.

“No, not at all,” says Thompson. “It should’ve been really spooky because every single element of the studio was totally Headless Horseman, Ichabod Crane.”

“Right in back of the church in the woods there was an old train track from the 1800s that was all grown in,” recalls Lovering. “When you walk to the train track you can get a glint of a giant eagle’s nest, a bald eagle’s nest. It’s huge, quite a sight.”

The nest gave Pixies’ seventh album its title and the studio environs gave it its vibe: American gothic. “When I arrived there for the session that was the vibe that we talked about, gothic,” Thompson explains. “So whatever suggested that in the songwriting, we totally let it hang out. ‘Make a record, and your improv word of the record is gothic, go!’ We allowed that to flourish – to harken back to the so-called dark stories of the early Pixies repertoire, maybe there was something that felt a little bit gothic but felt right, like, ‘we do that pretty good’. There was a little bit of a sense of ‘gothic is probably gonna be our friend in this batch of songs, so without trying too hard let’s allow it to be there when it shows up, and if it does show up, let it fly.’”

The result is a record that feels like a yellowed storybook of 19th-century Americana, a compendium of fur-trader folklore, mid-western mythology and mountainfolk magick. Lenchantin’s lyrics for first single “On Graveyard Hill” concern a witch casting a curse over some wayward lover. “Silver Bullet” is the Byronesque tale of a condemned man wandering the night in search of a duel. The loping ragtime noir “This Is My Fate”, a sozzled cousin of Doolittle’s “Mr Grieves”, is about an alcoholic mule train driver working out in Death Valley, hooked on mandrake root. “There’s a Borax works out in the middle of Death Valley called Harmony, and these mule trains of 50 mules a day, they pull out,” says Thompson. “I wanted to intermingle with the spirit world, with life and death and with the mystical and a more surreal landscape.”

The record is populated with dark fairy tales, from the “selkie bride” of “St Nazaire” (“That’s Gaelic folklore for the seal woman,” Thompson explains, “a man falls in love with her and she removes her seal coat and takes on human form – as long as her seal coat is preserved she can don it again and return to the sea”) to the story of single of the year frontrunner “Catfish Kate”. The equal of any Pixies tune, it recounts an epic river battle between woman and catfish up in the mountains of South Dakota, as told by her boyfriend Black Jack Hooligan.

“I think the pedigree goes back to Scotland or whatever, the tales of Black Jack Hooligan. When I was a kid I’d hear stories, and I’m sure a lot of them were made up on the spot by my father, but there’s a few it seemed like he’d heard from somewhere and I’ve carried them through. I was kinda stuck on a lyric and I just spontaneously said ‘y’know what, I don’t know what people are gonna think about this but I’m going to tell the story of Catfish Kate’.”

Add a spot of reincarnation into the mix in the form of the gorgeously spectral “Daniel Boone”, inspired by Thompson’s near-collision with a deer en route to the studio, and one might start wondering if he has been dabbling in the supernatural himself of late.

“For me, music and performing music is a theatrical kind of thing,” he says. “Witches and ghosts and things like that are good enough for Shakespeare, so they’re good enough for me. Doesn’t everyone want to hear a spooky story, right? It’s not a question of whether I believe in something or not. All you’ve got to do is put on a history programme and ancient Brits and hear about what they believed and not be caught up in like, ‘oh how interesting, they thought that blah-bladdy-blah blah blah blah blah’. How could you not be attracted to that information? If you’re writing something, then you’re prone to incorporate that into your stew because how could you not? They’re the human belief systems, it’s not about what I believe.”

Black Francis: ‘Music is a theatrical kind of thing’ (Getty) (Getty Images)

The most telling autobiographical elements of Beneath The Eyrie are subliminal. Behind the album’s scenes, Thompson was undergoing a marital breakdown, which unwittingly seeped into tracks such as “In the Arms of Mrs Mark of Cain” and “Bird of Prey” (“You’ve stolen my tomorrow so I come for it today, you stole it when you stole my yesterday”).

“It isn’t even like I knew that that seemed to be happening in my life at the time,” he confesses. “But we’ve been performing a lot of these songs on the last tour we’ve been on, it feels like, ‘oh yeah, now I realise what this song is about’. Even though it’s maybe darker or sad or represents unhappy things in one’s life, it feels very grounded because it’s like ‘I’ve earned this, I’ve earned the right to sing what I’m singing’.”

Listen closely and you might even discern a little Morricone-inspired freshness in guitarist Joey Santiago’s trademark wails and snarls, since he completed a rehab course in 2016.“It was kind of a different person [who made Head Carrier],” Santiago says, “but someone who went back in his shoes more comfortably instead of running away and trying to find something different I just said ‘f*** it, this is what I am, I can’t really do anything else, it’s a good problem so stop whining, you’ve done this so long and people like it!’ I put a lot into this record, I delved into it more than any other record and it was fun, probably the most relaxed I’ve been on a record. I was trying to be more in the moment, more present.”

“When you’re drinking it isn’t necessarily bad,” Thompson adds. “It wasn’t like there was all this unexpected stuff that happened, musically. To his credit, whether he was a drinker or now as a non-drinker, while that may have a lot of effect on your personal life, Joey has always been very good about showing up to do the work, whatever was going on in his life. Whatever was different or difficult or challenging or new was really about him and his relationship to alcohol, as opposed to completely changing the dynamic of the band. The dynamic of the band feels exactly the same, it’s just better.”

All four Pixies speak enthusiastically about the solid, family feel of the band in 2019 – of their relaxed and creative studio bond with each other and their new regular producer Tom Dalgety and of Lenchantin’s invaluable contribution since she became the fully paid-up replacement for Kim Deal.

“Back of my head,” Santiago says, “I always wanna have a band out there that are ‘branded’ and have been around for so long – I can’t believe I’m even saying we’ve been around for 30 years – for a band to come out, have a break-up and do records later on, I just hope we’re one of those bands that makes that record and ‘a comeback’. They have such things going against them – the old fans, we lost an original, highly regarded member, to go against all the odds and make a great record. This is what it is and hopefully people will put aside their prejudices and give this a listen. It is good, but I hope people embrace it without this ‘oh no, they’re not gonna be the same’... but with ‘let’s listen to it anyway’.”

Are you in competition with your own legacy? “Of course we are, but that’s the gig,” Thompson argues. “You can’t have it both ways. We can’t be considered a band with a legacy and also, as the band continues over the decades, not expect any ‘hmm, well now I have to compete with my previous successes’. It’s like ‘no! I want to have success then and I want to have success now, with no challenges whatsoever and no one questioning my station!’ Doesn’t that kinda take the fun out of it?

“I was trying to explain it to my daughter who did very well in a kung fu competition the other day. She was afraid she was going to lose because there was a lot of competition there. That’s a normal enough feeling to have, but I did try to put it in a context to her and say ‘look, if everyone at the kung fu competition just sucked and you were the star student and you were gonna hands-down win, no questions asked, because you were good and they were all terrible, that wouldn’t be very much fun, probably. If it didn’t have that sense of competition you probably wouldn’t be interested in participating in it whatsoever’.

“I guess I feel the same way in my own music, whether I’m competing against other people or against myself or my past, all right, it is what it is, I’m not complaining about it. There’s gotta be some parameters, there’s gotta be some challenges, otherwise I might as well stick VR glasses on my head and put a feeding tube into my arm. That’s all part of being an artist, you can’t constantly be afraid of failing. It’s impressive those artists that never seem to fail, but some of my favourite artists, they fail.”

It’s not just the high bar of his own history that Thompson’s up against, though. As a band that’s pulled off one of rock’s finest comebacks, both on record and at their ferocious fire-and-brimstone live shows, and stand alongside descendants such as Idles and Wolf Alice in the latest wave of guitar rock revivalism, it must be frustrating that streaming has turned the singles charts into a closed shop for alternative music?

Thompson is philosophical on the matter. “Every band and every musician has its challenge in order to exist in the world and to compete in the world of showbiz. Every generation of musicians has its own particular challenges. Now, if you’re white and you’re male and you’re from the UK or America, I’m just gonna call bulls*** on any of your challenges. What’s this band that’s getting a lot of publicity now from Beirut [Mashrou’ Leila]? They’ve got the gay singer, have death threats, get their gigs cancelled – that’s a f***in’ challenge, that’s someone trying to shut you down, that’s someone trying to stop you in a very heavy, violent kind of way. All right, you’re not getting any radio exposure because of streaming or whatever, you’re competing with the internet, you’re competing with all these people that have short attention spans and smartphones, they’re not putting you up on a f***in’ pedestal like they were 30 years ago. Oh well, boo-hoo, welcome to showbiz.”

For all of the fantastical themes of the album, Beneath The Eyrie does tackle one major issue of our times. The closing two-minute campfire strumalong “Death Horizon” touches on climate change, albeit from within the broader context of the planet drifting inexorably into the sun in the long term anyway. And having written about ecological issues on “Monkey Gone to Heaven” back in 1989, is Thompson a supporter of Extinction Rebellion?

“It’s very interesting,” he says. “I don’t want to discourage any of that kind of energy because I think it’s a positive energy, but I’m also interested in a group of people in England that have an art and literary collective called The Dark Mountain Project. They have a website and they have get-togethers and publish books and support the arts and discussion, but their take is entirely different. The people that started that organisation have a background in science and ecology and I guess you could say they have kind of seen the destruction of the destruction of human civilisation as inevitable – we’ve already gone past the line and there’s nothing that anyone can do to stop anything. The math says ‘no, this ends at some point down the road and it doesn’t really end well for homo sapiens’. But they also have a very positive kind of vibe in that they’re trying to articulate their feelings about all that. It’s not like they’re saying, ‘don’t live life’; they’re just saying life is finite as far as the human being part of it is concerned. They’ve just accepted it, said ‘this is our fate’.”

Have you signed up to go to Mars?

“Is that’s what’s going on?” Thompson chuckles. “I think that’s for a younger person. I’ll stay right here, I’ll go down with the ship.”

Beneath the Eyrie is out on 13 September