Pixies: 'The more you try to recapture youth, the sillier it sounds'
Pixies: 'The more you try to recapture youth, the sillier it sounds'
Pixies frontman Black Francis wouldn't be your first pick to read the CBeebies Bedtime Story.
Over the course of his band's wildly influential career, his fractured, often abstract songs have referenced Biblical violence, mutilation, incest, torture and death.
"Sliced up eyeballs" and "goats of lust" aren't traditionally the sort of images that help your toddler drift off to sleep.
Luckily, he didn't recite his own lyrics when he popped into CBeebies earlier this month. The book he chose did have a distinct Pixies flavour, though. It's called There Was A Young Zombie Who Swallowed A Worm
"I usually don't do things like that, but I enjoyed it," the 59-year-old says.
"My girlfriend sort of insisted, so I did it with feeling and, you know, I raised five kids, so I'm pretty good at bedtime stories."
It's hard to imagine Pixies appearing on children's television at any other point in their career.
The abrasive riffs and intertwining harmonies of songs like Debaser, Monkey Gone To Heaven, and Where Is My Mind signposted the future of alternative rock in the late 1980s; and they were cited as inspirations by everyone from Nirvana and Radiohead to... er, James Blunt. ("They'd be furious to hear that, wouldn't they?" he recently said).
Just as the artists they inspired began to hit the mainstream, the band broke up - but their reputation grew in their absence.
In 2003, the NME named their 1989 album Doolittle (recorded for $40,000 in the basement of a hair salon) the second-best record of all time.
Twelve years later, it sold its 300,000th copy in the UK, gaining the band their first ever platinum record, 30 years after they formed.
By that point, they'd reunited for a first-rate second phase. When we speak, they're about to set off on an Australian stadium tour with Pearl Jam.
"Our audience just seems to get bigger all the time," Francis says... Hence the cameo on CBeebies.
Pixies formed in 1986, when Francis (born Charles Thompson IV) dropped out of university and persuaded his guitarist room-mate Joey Santiago to do the same. A local newspaper ad brought in bassist Kim Deal and, through her, drummer Dave Lovering.
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A buzzy demo tape won them a contract with British label 4AD, and they were quickly embraced by the indie music press, where one writer described their corrosive sound as "a wild new shock".
But the secret to their success, Francis says, is simplicity.
He describes the first time Pixies headlined Reading festival in 1990. Further down the bill was a group whose show was a "very Vegas kind of affair".
"They had lights and confetti and balloons," he recalls. "A lot of schtick going on.
"Their tour manager turned to our manager, Chas Banks, and said, 'So what do you have prepared for your set?"
"And he replied, '25 good songs'".
"I was very proud that that's how he responded, because that is literally all we had. We had no dance moves, we had no balloons, we literally just had our music.
