The story of Pixies

Amherst, Puerto Rico and a small ad

The Pixies story begins with a boy who moved around a lot. Charles Michael Kittridge Thompson the fourth was born in Boston on the sixth of April 1965. His father ran bars, and the family bounced between Massachusetts and Los Angeles. When Charles was twelve, his mother and stepfather joined an evangelical church linked to the Pentecostal Assemblies of God. The Bible stories he absorbed there would later turn up in his songs, full of sex, violence and strange prophecy. At thirteen, at a religious summer camp, he heard the Christian rock singer Larry Norman and was hooked. He later admitted he dressed like Norman and treated him as his total idol. One of Norman's catchphrases would one day give the Pixies the title of their very first record.[1] [2]

In 1983 Charles went to the University of Massachusetts Amherst to study anthropology. There he met Joey Santiago, a quiet economics student born in Manila on the tenth of June 1965. Joey's family had left the Philippines in 1972, when Ferdinand Marcos declared martial law, and settled in Longmeadow, Massachusetts. The story goes that Joey heard Charles playing guitar in the dorm, ran home to fetch his own, and the two were soon jamming. They became roommates. Joey introduced Charles to seventies punk and to David Bowie, and they went to see bands like Black Flag together. Joey remembered his new friend as jolly and a little bit crazy, the kind of guy who practised guitar in the bathroom.[1] [2] [3]

In his second year, Charles went on an exchange programme to San Juan, Puerto Rico. He spent six months there and shared a room with a deeply troubled roommate who would later inspire the song Crackity Jones. He never learned proper Spanish, but he picked up a loose, slangy version that seasoned many early Pixies songs. By 1986 he faced a choice. He could travel to New Zealand to watch Halley's Comet, or he could start a rock band. He chose the band, and wrote to Joey urging him that now was the time. Joey agreed. Both dropped out, moved to Boston and took warehouse jobs. Charles wrote songs on an acoustic guitar and scribbled lyrics on the subway.[1] [2] [3] [4]

In January 1986 the two friends formed a band, and they needed a bass player. They placed an advert in the Boston Phoenix asking for a bassist into both the hardcore band Husker Du and the folk trio Peter, Paul and Mary, and specifically not a show off. Only one person answered. Kim Deal, born in Dayton, Ohio, on the tenth of June 1961, had just moved to Boston with her husband John Murphy. She had played guitar and sung country and folk songs with her identical twin Kelley, but she had never played bass. She did not even own one, so she borrowed her sister's. Charles played her a song called Brick Is Red, she liked it, and she was in.[1] [2] [3]

Kim paid for Kelley to fly to Boston to try out as the drummer, but Kelley was not confident behind the kit. Then John Murphy suggested a friend. David Lovering, born on the sixth of December 1961, was an electrical engineering graduate who built lasers for a living and worshipped the band Rush. Kim had met him at her own wedding reception. He was not impressed at first, but after playing along he joined. Joey picked the band's name by opening a dictionary at random and liking the definition of pixies as mischievous little elves. They rehearsed in David's parents' garage, and their first gig, at a Boston bar called Jack's Lounge, paid them seventeen dollars. Charles was so nervous his legs shook.[1] [2] [3]

The Purple Tape and 4AD

The Pixies spent 1986 playing Boston bars. One night they opened for another local band, Throwing Muses, at a club called The Rat. In the audience was Gary Smith, who ran Fort Apache Studios. He told them he could not sleep until they were world famous. In March 1987, with a thousand dollars lent by Charles's father, the band spent three days at Fort Apache recording seventeen songs. Charles later said his father had not been around much when he was young and was trying to make up for lost time. The cassette came in a purple cover, and fans have called it the Purple Tape ever since. Smith went on to produce Throwing Muses and many others, and died of cancer in January 2023.[1] [2] [3] [4]

The band's manager, Ken Goes, also managed Throwing Muses, who had just signed to the British label 4AD. He passed the Purple Tape to the label's boss, Ivo Watts-Russell. Ivo walked the streets of New York listening to it on his Walkman and loved it, yet he hesitated. He found the band too normal and too rock and roll for his label, and he already had one band from the same manager. His girlfriend, Deborah Edgeley, who worked at 4AD, talked him into it. When they finally met, the famously silent Joey Santiago told Ivo that all he wanted was to be famous in the Philippines. Ivo later joked that this was about all he ever heard Joey say.[1] [2] [3] [4]

Ivo picked eight of the seventeen songs, remixed them lightly, and released them as the mini album Come On Pilgrim on the twenty eighth of September 1987. He deliberately left off Here Comes Your Man because it sounded too obviously commercial. The record was full of Puerto Rico, with Spanish in Vamos and Isla de Encanta, and full of dark subjects, including incest in Nimrod's Son and The Holiday Song. Charles now called himself Black Francis, a name his father had been saving in case he had another son. Kim was credited as Mrs. John Murphy, a joke she took from a doctor's office caller who insisted on being addressed by her husband's name.[1] [2] [3] [4]

Come On Pilgrim reached number five on the British independent chart and got far more attention in the UK music press than at home. It could not even find American distribution until the following year. The sleeve set a pattern that lasted for decades. Designer Vaughan Oliver and photographer Simon Larbalestier created strange, sepia images, here a man in a hair shirt taken from a series based on Flaubert's Temptation of Saint Anthony. The band also got their first taste of credits. David Lovering had co-written Levitate Me, which turned out to be his only major writing contribution to the Pixies, and he appeared on the Purple Tape's cover jogging naked, photographed from behind.[1] [2] [3]

Surfer Rosa and the Albini sound

4AD wanted a full album next, but the band's manager had fallen out with Gary Smith. On the advice of a colleague, Ivo turned to Steve Albini, the abrasive frontman of the Chicago noise band Big Black. Albini met the Pixies at a dinner party at David Lovering's house, and he later said they were in the studio the very next day. In December 1987 they booked ten working days at Q Division in Boston. The budget was ten thousand dollars and the final cost about eighteen thousand. Albini took a fee of fifteen hundred dollars and, as was his rule, no royalties at all, because he thought taking a cut of a band's record was an insult.[1] [2]

Albini was young, nervous and determined to make his mark, and he tried everything. The studio had one performing room, so he moved amplifiers and microphones into a tiled communal bathroom for its natural echo. Kim Deal's ghostly backing vocals on Where Is My Mind were recorded in there, as was her lead on Gigantic. He fed Black Francis's voice through a guitar amp on Something Against You for a ragged, vicious texture, and he left bits of studio chatter between the songs. Years later Albini said he regretted many of these ideas, not because they hurt the record but because they took away some of the band's authorship.[1] [2] [3]

Two songs from those sessions became the heart of the Pixies legend. Gigantic began as a title and a circular chord pattern that Francis could not finish, so he handed it to Kim. Inspired by the film Crimes of the Heart, about a married woman who falls for a teenager, she wrote the words and sang lead. Albini said his jaw dropped when she started singing. Where Is My Mind was built on a lazy guitar figure that Joey said was the very first thing he tried. The cover showed a topless flamenco dancer against a wall with a crucifix, an idea Francis dreamed up in his father's bar. The album was nearly called Gigantic, until the band feared the combination with that cover.[1] [2] [3] [4]

Surfer Rosa came out in Britain on the twenty first of March 1988. It spent sixty weeks on the UK independent chart, and the weekly papers Melody Maker and Sounds both named it album of the year. In America it was only an import until August. 4AD doubted the album had a radio single, so producer Gil Norton was brought in to re-record Gigantic. It managed a single week at number ninety three. Meanwhile the band toured Europe supporting Throwing Muses, and by the end the Pixies were effectively headlining. Kim remembered being annoyed that British crowds applauded before the band had played a note. In the United States, Surfer Rosa was only certified gold in 2005.[1] [2] [3] [4]

There was a sour footnote. In 1991, writing in the fanzine Forced Exposure, Steve Albini dismissed the album as a patchwork, called the Pixies blandly entertaining college rock, and compared them to four cows being led around by their nose rings. The line followed the band for years. Much later Albini explained that the band had accepted every one of his suggestions, which made him feel he had too much influence. He apologised in 2005 and said he was ashamed of how he had treated them. He also admitted that when he heard the record by chance in a bar, it sounded far better than he had thought at the time.[1] [2] [3]

Doolittle

By late 1988 the American major label Elektra had won a bidding war for the Pixies. For the next album Ivo chose Gil Norton, a producer from Liverpool who had worked with Echo and the Bunnymen. Norton arrived in Boston in October and spent weeks learning the songs. Recording began on the thirty first of October 1988 at Downtown Recorders, which the BBC later described as being in the basement of a hair salon. The budget was forty thousand dollars, four times the cost of Surfer Rosa. Francis's working title was Whore, meant in the biblical sense of the great whore of Babylon, but he dropped it, worrying that alongside the cover art people would think he was attacking Catholics.[1] [2] [3]

Norton and Francis had different ideas about song length. Many of the new songs lasted barely a minute and a half, and Norton kept asking for extra verses. Francis took him to a Tower Records store and showed him a Buddy Holly greatest hits album, pointing out that classic rock and roll songs rarely passed two minutes. Norton picked his battles. Joey Santiago had his own protest. Convinced Norton was drowning his guitar in reverb, he covered his Marshall amplifiers with blankets to make the point. For the song Hey, Francis wanted to sing and play live, so he ended up in a tiny broom cupboard, holding his guitar with the neck pointing at the ceiling.[1] [2] [3]

The songs were a cabinet of curiosities. Debaser was Francis's tribute to the 1929 surrealist film Un Chien Andalou by Luis Bunuel and Salvador Dali, which he first saw in an avant garde film class at UMass. Wave of Mutilation came from newspaper reports of ruined Japanese businessmen driving their families off piers. Dead and Gouge Away retold Old Testament stories of David and Bathsheba, and Samson and Delilah. Monkey Gone to Heaven, the first single, was about the ruin of the oceans and borrowed a numerology Francis admitted he never looked up. Its string players were hired for one afternoon, and the cellist, who arrived in concert dress, had to write his part on the spot.[1] [2] [3] [4] [5]

There was fun too. Francis persuaded David Lovering to sing La La Love You in a mock crooner voice, a joke on love songs, and asked him to channel Ringo Starr. David was so nervous he knocked back a lot of vodka first, and Norton said that once he started, you could not get him away from the microphone. Here Comes Your Man was a song Francis wrote as a teenager. The band had long dismissed it as their Tom Petty song and were embarrassed by how poppy it was. In its video, Francis and Kim simply held their mouths open instead of miming, and when the Arsenio Hall show asked for it, the band offered to play Tame instead, and the show said no thanks.[1] [2] [3] [4]

Doolittle was released on the seventeenth of April 1989. It reached number eight in the UK, and Melody Maker and Sounds again named the Pixies' record album of the year. In America it crept to number ninety eight, yet it sold steadily, passing a hundred thousand in six months, going gold in 1995 and platinum in 2018. MTV play changed things. Joey's parents finally accepted his career once they saw him on television. And Francis told of being pulled over one night by Border Patrol officers near the Mexican border in Texas, with a little marijuana hidden in a guitar. One officer recognised him from MTV, and instead of searching the car they posed for photos with him.[1] [2]

Cracks, the Breeders and Bossanova

Success came with strain. Three records in two years and constant touring wore everyone down, and the tension between Francis and Kim Deal broke into the open. At a concert in Stuttgart, Francis threw a guitar at Kim on stage. When she refused to play a show in Frankfurt, she was nearly fired, and Joey Santiago later said that after that the two of them more or less stopped talking. Kim wanted room for her own songs, and Francis was the band's singer and songwriter. At the end of a long American tour in late 1989, the band were too exhausted even to go to their own end of tour party in New York. Soon afterwards they announced a break.[1] [2] [3]

Everyone scattered. Joey went to the Grand Canyon to find himself. Francis, who hated flying, drove across America with his girlfriend Jean Walsh, playing solo shows to pay for furniture for a new apartment in Los Angeles. Kim did something bigger. With Tanya Donelly of Throwing Muses she formed the Breeders, named after a band she had once had with Kelley. With Steve Albini recording, bassist Josephine Wiggs, and Slint's drummer Britt Walford playing under a false name, they cut the album Pod in Edinburgh in ten days. It came out in May 1990. Kurt Cobain later called it one of his favourite records and wished Kim had been allowed to write more Pixies songs.[1] [2] [3]

In early 1990 Francis, Joey and David moved to Los Angeles, to the Oakwood apartments, where their neighbours included the comedian Garrett Morris and members of the metal band White Lion. Gil Norton moved in too. Kim flew out to rejoin them. The sessions at Cherokee Studios went wrong fast. After six in the evening the mixing desk picked up pirate radio, and then every amplifier hummed. Norton hid the problem from 4AD while he looked for a fix. The answer came in a bar, where Norton and Joey ran into the producer Rick Rubin. Rubin had his secretary find them another studio, and the band moved to Master Control to finish the album.[1] [2]

Bossanova was written largely in the studio, with little rehearsal, and Francis said he was sometimes writing lyrics on napkins minutes before singing. The songs turned from the Bible to surf guitars and outer space. The single Velouria, about a furry woman from a legendary lost continent, featured a theremin player Norton found by looking under theremin in the musicians' union book. It became the band's first UK top forty hit. To qualify for Top of the Pops, they filmed twenty three seconds of themselves running down a quarry near Manchester and slowed it to fill the song. They never got on the show. Released in August 1990, Bossanova reached number three in Britain and number seventy in America.[1] [2] [3]

Trompe le Monde and the fax

The Pixies' fourth album, Trompe le Monde, French for fool the world, came out in September 1991. It was recorded in Burbank, Paris and London with Gil Norton, and keyboard player Eric Drew Feldman began to shape the sound. It was heavier and full of science fiction, alongside a cover of the Jesus and Mary Chain's Head On and U-Mass, a song built on a riff Francis and Joey had written back in college. Kim Deal wrote nothing for it and sang little. The sessions were fractious, and the whole band was rarely in the room at once. Critics later called it essentially Black Francis's first solo album, although the Los Angeles Times hailed its rekindled spark.[1] [2] [3] [4]

In 1992 the Pixies took the biggest support slot of their lives, opening for U2 on the American leg of the Zoo TV tour. It paid well, but it was dispiriting. Kim remembered looking out at empty seats night after night while U2's fans waited for the main act. Life on the road had become claustrophobic. Joey said he sometimes crept into hotel conference rooms just to sleep away from his snoring bandmates, and Francis compared their tour bus to the submarine in the film Das Boot. The Pixies played what turned out to be their final show of the original era on the twenty fifth of April 1992, at the Commodore Ballroom in Vancouver.[1] [2] [3]

Then came one of rock's coldest endings. In January 1993, in an interview on BBC Radio 5, Black Francis announced that the Pixies were finished. He had not told the rest of the band. He then phoned Joey, and Kim and David learned the news by fax. Kim's sister Kelley reportedly heard it on the radio during a Breeders rehearsal and turned to Kim to tell her the Pixies had broken up. Francis offered no explanation at the time. For years afterwards, the fax became the most famous detail of the story, a symbol of how completely the four of them had stopped talking.[1] [2] [3]

Francis later gave his side. He resented being cast as the bossy villain keeping Kim out of the band, and said people thought he was Paul McCartney trying to kick John Lennon out of the Beatles. It annoyed him to write and sing the songs and still feel he got no credit. He also admitted that at the time he had not understood how charismatic Kim was. She could stand on stage smoking a cigarette without playing a note and the crowd would go bananas. Back then, he said, that rubbed him the wrong way. Years later he called it an asset and a kind of star quality he finally understood.[1] [2]

Apart: Frank Black, Cannonball and magic

Black Francis flipped his name to Frank Black and went solo. His debut, Frank Black, came out in March 1993, full of UFOs, with Joey Santiago on lead guitar. The double album Teenager of the Year followed in 1994, named after an award Charles had won in high school. In 1995 he left 4AD and Elektra, made The Cult of Ray for Rick Rubin's American Recordings, and then formed Frank Black and the Catholics. They recorded live to two track, with no overdubs to fix mistakes, and their first album was among the first ever made legally available as a commercial download. He kept ownership of his masters and licensed each album separately.[1]

Kim Deal became a star. She brought Kelley into the Breeders on guitar even though Kelley had never played one, added drummer Jim Macpherson, and in August 1993 released Last Splash. Its single Cannonball reached number two on the American modern rock chart, the album went platinum, and the Breeders opened for Nirvana and played the main stage of Lollapalooza. Then drugs caught up with them. Kelley, who had used heroin since her teens, was arrested for possession in the mid nineties and went into rehab, and the band stalled. Kim made an album called Pacer with a new group, the Amps, under the name Tammy Ampersand.[1] [2] [3] [4]

Kim's own drinking grew worse. She moved to east Los Angeles around 2001, and the party life there did not help. In 2003 she went into rehab herself and later called it the best thing she ever did, joking that food was now her only drug. That same year she moved back to Dayton to care for her mother, who had been diagnosed with Alzheimer's disease. Looking back on the Breeders' heyday, Kim said that if she could change one thing she would have drunk less beer and smoked less pot. Drummer Jim Macpherson, who stopped speaking to her for fifteen years, later admitted that drugs and drink had made him the problem.[1] [2] [3]

Joey Santiago took the split hard and fell into depression for a couple of years. On a whim he moved into Frank Black's old Los Angeles apartment and played on his solo records. With his wife, Linda Mallari, whom he had met in a Boston bar in 1987 when the two discovered they were both Filipino, he formed a band called the Martinis. Their song Free landed on the soundtrack of the film Empire Records. Joey taught himself audio editing software, scored independent films, co-scored the television comedy Undeclared and wrote music for the series Weeds. He also stayed in touch with every former bandmate, which would matter later.[1] [2]

David Lovering had the strangest decade. He drummed for Cracker, Nitzer Ebb and Tanya Donelly, and turned down an invitation to join the Foo Fighters. Work dried up, he gave up drumming and moved into a rented house that banned it. A friend took him to a magic convention, and he reinvented himself as the Scientific Phenomenalist, performing physics experiments in a lab coat at the Magic Castle in Los Angeles and opening for Frank Black and the Breeders. He called himself the dying magician. Meanwhile the Pixies legend grew without them. In 1999 Where Is My Mind played over the final scene of the film Fight Club and reached a whole new generation.[1] [2] [3] [4]

The reunion

In 2003 Frank Black admitted on London radio that he dreamed about a Pixies reunion, though mostly in anxious nightmares where nobody came. He also joked to journalists that the band got together to jam all the time, and the rumour spread as far as CNN. That summer he phoned Joey, who was visiting family on Cape Cod, and coyly asked if he had heard the rumours, and who might have started them. Joey called David, who was on his way to the bank, broke and stuck in what he called a terrible relationship. He said he jumped through the ceiling. Joey then called Kim, newly sober and living with her parents in Dayton.[1] [2] [3] [4]

Around September 2003, Kim loaded her belongings into her Volvo and drove from Dayton to Los Angeles. Francis was touring in Europe, so she, Joey and David started running through old songs like Monkey Gone to Heaven and Bone Machine. It sounded just like it used to. Kim joked that either they had a special chemistry or they had not grown musically in sixteen years. Francis later said Kim's sobriety mattered, because she wanted a dry tour and that meant the band would be at its best. When the full tour was announced in February 2004, almost all the first dates sold out within minutes.[1] [2]

The Pixies played their first reunion show on the thirteenth of April 2004 at the Fine Line Music Cafe in Minneapolis. On the same day, NASA woke the team running the Spirit rover on Mars with Where Is My Mind. At the Coachella festival they played before Radiohead, whose members revered them, and they toured the world through 2005. The 2004 tour alone grossed more than fourteen million dollars. They also recorded their first new song in thirteen years, Bam Thwok, written and sung by Kim for the film Shrek 2. The film makers rejected it, so the band sold it on iTunes, where it went to number one on the first UK download chart.[1] [2] [3] [4]

The reunion had shadows. The 2006 documentary loudQUIETloud followed the tour and showed a band that barely spoke to each other off stage. It also caught David Lovering in a bad stretch. His father died midway through the tour, and David began drinking heavily and fumbled songs at a few shows. Francis later said the film makers re-edited the footage so it looked as if the whole tour had careened into a drunken stupor, which he insisted was not true. Francis had his own private storm. A divorce and time in therapy had fed his 2003 album Show Me Your Tears.[1] [2] [3]

The money was good, and for a while it was enough. Asked in 2007 whether the Pixies would make a new record, Kim replied bluntly that she would not. So the band kept touring the old songs. From October 2009 they played Doolittle from start to finish, with its B sides, around the world, opening shows with a clip of Un Chien Andalou. Francis said that after a while he would space out on stage, with a Groundhog Day feeling of not knowing where he was. In between, he produced albums for the British band Art Brut and formed a duo, Grand Duchy, with his then wife Violet Clark.[1] [2] [3] [4] [5]

Without Kim

By the early 2010s Francis and Joey finally wrote new songs, and even Kim was excited enough to travel to Wales to record with Gil Norton. A couple of nights in, the four of them went out for an Indian meal alone, with no managers or crew, something Francis could not remember them doing in years. Two days later Kim walked into a coffee shop near the studio and said she was flying home the next day. There were no hugs. Francis said he had to switch from coffee to alcohol. He later wondered if that meal had been her way of saying goodbye, their last supper. Her departure was made public in June 2013.[1] [2]

The band mourned for three or four days, then erased Kim's parts and finished the sessions with Simon Archer, known as Ding, on bass. The first result, Bagboy, was released free in July 2013. Francis wrote it in a Harvard Square coffee shop about a hundred feet from where he had written lyrics for Break My Body twenty five years earlier. A backing vocal by a young helper named Jeremy Dubs sounded so much like Kim that some fans suspected a trick, which Francis insisted was a fluke. For touring, they hired Kim Shattuck of the Los Angeles punk band the Muffs. The first new EP, EP1, drew a rare score of one out of ten from Pitchfork.[1] [2] [3] [4] [5]

Kim Shattuck lasted five months. On the twenty ninth of November 2013 she announced she had been dismissed, saying she was super disappointed. In her place came Paz Lenchantin, born in Argentina, a veteran of A Perfect Circle and Billy Corgan's band Zwan, and a self described die hard Pixies fan as a teenager. She had first crossed paths with the band in the nineties, when Joey asked her to tour with the Martinis. The three EPs were gathered as Indie Cindy in April 2014, the first Pixies album in twenty three years. Critics were cool, but it reached number twenty three in America, their highest chart placing there, and Francis declared his solo career over.[1] [2] [3] [4] [5] [6]

Lenchantin became a full member in July 2016, and the band made Head Carrier in London with a new producer, Tom Dalgety. At her urging, and as her condition for singing lead on it, Francis wrote All I Think About Now as a thank you letter to Kim Deal, full of regret about the past. It was as close to a public apology as Francis had ever come. That September, just before the album came out, the band announced that Joey Santiago had checked into rehab for alcohol and drug problems. He missed all the promotional appearances, including a television spot on Conan, and has been sober since. David Lovering said the band were very proud of him for taking that step.[1] [2] [3] [4] [5]

Losses, a new line-up and the legacy

In 2019 the Pixies recorded Beneath the Eyrie in a converted church in upstate New York, and named it after a huge bald eagle's nest they found behind the building. Its cover was designed by Vaughan Oliver, who had shaped the look of every Pixies record since Come On Pilgrim. It was his last. Oliver died in December 2019 at the age of sixty two. Earlier that autumn, on the second of October 2019, Kim Shattuck died at her home in Los Angeles of ALS, the nerve disease, aged fifty six. She had never spoken publicly about her illness. The Pixies said they were devastated and praised the life force she had shared with them.[1] [2] [3] [4] [5]

The pandemic cancelled most of the Beneath the Eyrie tour. Stuck at home, David Lovering began posting weekly magic tricks on the band's Instagram in 2021, a series called Magic Mondays. The band's eighth album, Doggerel, was recorded in an eco friendly studio in Vermont, and when Covid interrupted, the members finished parts at home. Francis said he wanted big, bold, orchestrated songs rather than trying to fake youthful punk energy. For the first time Joey Santiago received songwriting credits, writing music for one song and the lyrics of another, Pagan Man. Doggerel came out on the thirtieth of September 2022, and critics called it one of the stronger records of the band's second life.[1] [2]

On the fourth of March 2024 the Pixies announced that Paz Lenchantin had left to concentrate on her own projects. She quickly made clear that it was not her decision, telling Rolling Stone her departure was as much a surprise to her as to anyone. Her last show had been at the Hollywood Bowl the previous September. Her replacement was Emma Richardson, formerly of the English band Band of Skulls, who had quit music to paint full time. Producer Tom Dalgety phoned her out of the blue. She recorded her parts remotely before she had even met the band, and first played live with them in Dublin on the eighth of March 2024.[1] [2] [3] [4] [5]

Richardson's first tour had the Pixies playing Bossanova and Trompe le Monde in full, including songs they had never performed live. Francis admitted it felt like homework at first, then called it delightful. Their ninth album, The Night the Zombies Came, followed on the twenty fifth of October 2024, produced again by Tom Dalgety. Francis said the title was simply the least corny phrase in the lyrics. Some critics were harsh, and the Guardian called it an echo of an echo. That year also brought another loss. Steve Albini, who made Surfer Rosa and later worked closely with Kim Deal, died of a heart attack in Chicago on the seventh of May 2024, aged sixty one.[1] [2] [3] [4] [5]

The legacy is enormous for a band that never had a hit album in America. Kurt Cobain admitted Smells Like Teen Spirit was an attempt to rip off the Pixies and hired Steve Albini because of Surfer Rosa. David Bowie called their music some of the most compelling of the eighties, and Thom Yorke said they changed his life. Kim Deal went on to release her first solo album, Nobody Loves You More, in November 2024, with one song recorded by Albini in his final sessions. As of 2026, Black Francis, Joey Santiago and David Lovering are still the Pixies, with Emma Richardson on bass, playing to crowds far bigger than they ever saw the first time around.[1] [2] [3] [4] [5]

The people around Pixies

Black Francis and Kim Deal. The central partnership and the central fault line of the Pixies. They wrote Gigantic and Silver together, and her harmonies softened his screams. But she wanted room for her own songs and he held creative control. He threw a guitar at her in Stuttgart, they stopped speaking, and she learned of the split by fax. They reunited in 2004, and she left again in 2013. In 2022 he said they were always friends, but nothing is for ever.[1] [2] [3]

Black Francis and Joey Santiago. College roommates at UMass Amherst who dropped out together to start the band. Joey turned Francis on to punk and Bowie, and Francis wrote the songs while Joey found the guitar parts. Joey was the only Pixie Francis phoned personally after announcing the split, and he played on Frank Black's solo records. In 2003 Francis called Joey first about reuniting, and Joey rounded up the others. In 2014 Francis said the after show music depended on who reached the stereo first, Joey with AC/DC or Francis with Bill Evans.[1] [2] [3]

Kim Deal and Kelley Deal. Identical twins from Dayton, Ohio, with Kelley the elder by eleven minutes. They sang folk and country together as teenagers. Kim borrowed Kelley's bass for the Pixies, and Kelley flew to Boston to audition as the drummer. Kim later brought her into the Breeders, where she learned guitar on the job. Both went through addiction and rehab in the nineties and two thousands, and both got sober, reuniting the classic Breeders for Last Splash anniversary tours and the album All Nerve.[1] [2] [3] [4]

Pixies and Steve Albini. Albini recorded Surfer Rosa in ten days for a flat fee, and its huge drum sound made his name and led Nirvana, PJ Harvey and others to him. In 1991 he publicly insulted the band in a fanzine. He later apologised and said he was ashamed. Kim Deal became a close friend and worked with him on Breeders records and her solo album. He died of a heart attack in May 2024.[1] [2] [3] [4] [5]

Pixies and Gil Norton. The Liverpool producer first re-recorded Gigantic as a single, then produced Doolittle, Bossanova and Trompe le Monde, and returned for Indie Cindy. He pushed Francis to lengthen songs, added the strings on Monkey Gone to Heaven, and was accused by Joey of drowning his guitar in reverb. Francis grumbled that Norton had a knack for getting hits out of bands, yet the polished Doolittle sound made Norton a highly sought after producer.[1] [2] [3] [4]

Pixies and Ivo Watts-Russell. The co founder of the British label 4AD signed the Pixies from the Purple Tape, though he first thought them too rock and roll and was talked round by his girlfriend. He chose the eight songs for Come On Pilgrim, left off Here Comes Your Man, and chose Gil Norton for Doolittle. He also signed Kim Deal's Breeders, calling their demo magical. He sold his half of 4AD in 1999 and moved to Santa Fe.[1] [2] [3]

Pixies and Vaughan Oliver. The 4AD graphic designer created every Pixies sleeve from Come On Pilgrim in 1987 to Beneath the Eyrie in 2019, usually with photographer Simon Larbalestier. The monkey with a halo on Doolittle and the flamenco dancer on Surfer Rosa came from that partnership. Oliver said that if there were a fifth Pixie, it would have been Larbalestier. Oliver died in December 2019, shortly after finishing his final Pixies cover.[1] [2] [3]

Kurt Cobain and Pixies. Nirvana's singer was the Pixies' most famous disciple. He admitted Smells Like Teen Spirit was his attempt to rip off the Pixies' quiet and loud dynamics, and said he connected with them so heavily he should have been in the band. He hired Steve Albini for In Utero because of Surfer Rosa, called Gigantic their best song, and wished Kim Deal had been allowed to write more. David Lovering once spent a day with Cobain at a theme park.[1] [2] [3] [4]

Kim Deal and John Murphy. Kim married John Murphy on Memorial Day 1985 and moved with him to Boston. He was the link to the band's drummer, since David Lovering was his friend from a Radio Shack job and a guest at the wedding reception. Kim used the name Mrs. John Murphy on the first two Pixies records as an ironic joke. The couple divorced in 1988, and Murphy co-wrote the Breeders song Hoverin with her.[1] [2] [3]

Joey Santiago and Linda Mallari. Joey met Linda Mallari in a Boston bar in 1987, when she shocked him by rattling off Tagalog swear words to prove she was Filipino too. He fancied her but would not let her join the Pixies. After the split they formed the Martinis, whose song Free appeared on the Empire Records soundtrack, and released the album Smitten in 2004. They had two children and later separated.[1] [2]

Paz Lenchantin and Pixies. Lenchantin replaced Kim Shattuck at the end of 2013, became a full member in 2016 and played on Head Carrier, Beneath the Eyrie and Doggerel. She studied Kim Deal's parts and harmonies closely, co-wrote several songs and pushed Francis to write a thank you song to Deal. She called Francis the greatest artist she had worked with. In 2024 the band replaced her, and she said the decision was not hers.[1] [2] [3]

David Bowie and Pixies. Bowie was an unlikely champion. He said the Pixies made some of the most compelling music of the eighties, heard a psychotic Beatles in them, and covered Cactus on his 2002 album Heathen. He once took the band to an Indian restaurant in Manchester and paid with a card in his birth name, David Jones. Black Francis sang at Bowie's fiftieth birthday concert in 1997 and gave him a special recording as a present.[1] [2] [3] [4]

Rare facts about Pixies

• As a teenager, Joey Santiago wrote computer programs and named the first two Iggy and Pop. Before guitar took over, Joey was into programming. In tribute to the punk singer Iggy Pop, he called his first program Iggy and his second one Pop.[1]
• David Lovering once wired the toilet at the Radio Shack where he worked to the fire alarm. Lovering and his friend John Murphy, Kim Deal's future husband, worked together at a Radio Shack and loved practical jokes. The most famous involved rigging the store toilet to set off the fire alarm.[1]
• Lovering's high school yearbook listed three ambitions, and one was to tour with Rush. His other two ambitions were to be an electrical engineer and to play in a rock band. He managed both, and joked in 2005 that a tour with Rush would complete the set.[1] [2]
• The Pixies' first ever gig, at Jack's Lounge in Boston, paid them seventeen dollars. It was on a Wednesday night. Francis was so nervous his legs shook, and he had finished the lyrics to Break My Body only hours earlier, sitting on the steps of a pizza place in Harvard Square.[1]
• Charles Thompson's stage name Black Francis came from his father, who had saved it for another son. His father had been keeping the name in case he had another boy. Charles adopted it for Come On Pilgrim, then later flipped it into Frank Black for his solo career.[1]
• Kim Deal's alias Mrs. John Murphy was inspired by a phone call at a doctor's office. A woman called Ethel insisted on being addressed by her husband's name instead of her own. Kim found it so absurd that she used her own married name the same way on the first two Pixies records.[1] [2]
• David Lovering appears on the cover of the Purple Tape demo jogging naked, seen from behind. The seventeen song demo that won the band a record deal came in a purple cover featuring the drummer. He also co-wrote Levitate Me from those sessions, his only major writing credit.[1]
• Steve Albini was paid fifteen hundred dollars for Surfer Rosa and took no royalties. Albini refused royalties on principle, believing it was an insult to the band. The album later sold hundreds of thousands of copies in America alone.[1]
• Surfer Rosa was originally going to be called Gigantic, after Kim Deal's song. According to Melody Maker, the band changed the title because they feared the name would be misread alongside the topless flamenco dancer on the cover.[1]
• Doolittle's working title was Whore. Francis meant it in the biblical sense of the whore of Babylon, but dropped it, fearing that with a monkey and halo on the cover people would think he was attacking Catholics.[1]
• The BBC reported that Doolittle was recorded for forty thousand dollars in the basement of a hair salon. The budget was four times that of Surfer Rosa. The studio was Downtown Recorders in Boston, and the album went on to sell more than a million copies.[1] [2] [3]
• Black Francis recorded the vocal for Hey in a tiny broom cupboard. He wanted to sing and play guitar live without the drums drowning him out, so he squeezed into the cupboard holding his guitar with the neck pointing straight up at the ceiling.[1]
• The cellist on Monkey Gone to Heaven arrived in formal concert dress and found no written music. Arthur Fiacco came straight from a concert, wrote his part from riffs Francis showed him, and later claimed he sent the second credited cellist home and played every cello part himself.[1] [2]
• Joey Santiago once covered his amplifiers with blankets to protest against the producer's reverb. During the Doolittle sessions he felt Gil Norton was adding far too much reverb to his guitar, so he draped blankets over his Marshall cabinets to make his point.[1] [2]
• Francis admits he never checked the numerology in Monkey Gone to Heaven. He said someone told him about Hebrew numbers for man, Satan and God, and he simply never went to the library to check whether any of it was true.[1] [2]
• An early draft of Debaser referred to the Prince film Purple Rain. Before Un Chien Andalou took over, the chorus nodded to Apollonia, the co-star of Purple Rain. The finished song became a tribute to the 1929 surrealist film.[1] [2]
• Francis first saw Un Chien Andalou in a UMass film class, and later sat in on the same teacher's class. Professor Don Levine said students began taking his avant garde film course because of Debaser. After Francis moved back to the area in 2012, he visited the class several times.[1]
• Kim Deal's first Pixies bass belonged to her twin sister Kelley. Kim had never played bass when she joined. She borrowed Kelley's Aria Pro II, which she used on Come On Pilgrim and Surfer Rosa.[1]
• David Lovering's B side Make Believe is about his obsession with the pop singer Debbie Gibson. It appeared on the Velouria single. Apart from La La Love You, it is one of the very few Pixies songs he sang.[1] [2]
• Gil Norton found the theremin player for Velouria by looking under theremin in the musicians' union book. There were only about three listed. The band brought in Robert F. Brunner, partly to excite Francis.[1]
• The Velouria video is just twenty three seconds of footage, slowed down to fill the song. It was shot in a quarry near Manchester to qualify for Top of the Pops. The band ran at the camera once, then slowed it down. They never appeared on the show.[1] [2]
• Rick Rubin rescued the Bossanova sessions after a chance meeting in a bar. The band's studio was humming and picking up pirate radio. Rubin had his secretary find them another studio, Master Control.[1]
• While making Bossanova, the band lived in an apartment complex with Garrett Morris and the metal band White Lion. Francis, Joey and David moved into the Oakwood apartments in Los Angeles in early 1990, and producer Gil Norton moved in too.[1]
• The organ solo on Bam Thwok was recorded years earlier by Joey Santiago's father in law, a missionary in the Philippines. The song, written by Kim Deal for Shrek 2 and rejected, used a carousel style organ clip from that old recording.[1]
• David Lovering turned down an invitation to join the Foo Fighters. After the split he drummed for several acts, but chose not to join Dave Grohl's new band, later giving up drums for a career in magic.[1] [2]
• On the day of the first reunion show, NASA woke its Mars rover team with Where Is My Mind. On the thirteenth of April 2004 the song marked a software fix on the Spirit rover. That evening the original Pixies played Minneapolis.[1] [2]
• Robert Plant recognised the Pixies on a plane and called them Boston's finest. They got talking about the World Cup. The meeting led to the Pixies opening his 2015 American tour, and there was talk of Lovering drumming for him.[1] [2]
• David Bowie once treated the Pixies to an Indian meal and paid with a card in his real name. Lovering recalled Bowie pulling out a credit card at the restaurant in Manchester and announcing himself as David Jones.[1]
• Black Francis took bel canto singing lessons from an opera teacher in Los Angeles to save his voice. He learned the opera trick of looking as if you are giving everything while holding back, which he says lets him scream night after night.[1]
• As children, Black Francis and his brother saw what he describes as a flying cigar in the sky. He said it was broad daylight, slow moving, close and unmarked, and he has written about it in song.[1]
• In 2008 Irish police removed Black Francis after an impromptu gig drew around a thousand people to St Stephen's Green. He was not arrested, only briefly detained to disperse the crowd in Dublin, and he played his planned show at Vicar Street that night.[1]
• David Lovering has been metal detecting since he was eleven. He began in his backyard in Burlington, Massachusetts, where he found colonial era coins, and still searches the hills near his California home.[1]
• In October 2024 Black Francis read the CBeebies bedtime story on BBC children's television. The book was There Was a Young Zombie Who Swallowed a Worm. He said he had raised five kids, so he was pretty good at bedtime stories.[1] [2]
• Beneath the Eyrie is named after a bald eagle's nest behind the converted church where it was recorded. The band found the nest near an overgrown nineteenth century railway track at the studio in upstate New York.[1]
• The Pixies famously say nothing to the audience between songs. Francis explained he felt stupid when he rambled into the microphone, and that Kim Deal had been much better at it, but fell out of the habit after the reunion.[1] [2]
• Joey Santiago received his first ever Pixies songwriting credits on the 2022 album Doggerel. He wrote music for Dregs of the Wine and the lyrics of Pagan Man, after Francis said he was too spent to write another lyric.[1]
• Black Francis played his first ever show at the age of eight, with the Boston Folk Song Society. The BBC noted the detail in a 2024 profile, decades before the screaming began.[1]

Disputed stories

These stories are told often but the accounts don't agree. Here are the versions and who says what.