'When I Went To Make That Record I Was Happy': How Pixies Went Goth By Accident

When your band’s first incarnation basically sets the template for the evolution of guitar-rock and your earliest recorded forays are lauded as seminal by everyone from Nirvana and Radiohead to David Bowie and PJ Harvey, it’s presumably no easy task returning to that creative well some time down the track.

Boston indie-noir icons Pixies have faced down that particular conundrum having reunited earlier this millennium after more than a decade apart. During that time, the game-changing grunge movement transformed Pixies’ initial splash into a tidal wave – Kurt Cobain famously attesting that the genre’s calling card Smells Like Teen Spirit was him “basically trying to rip off the Pixies” – before itself losing momentum and being absorbed into the mainstream. In 2004, the musical landscape they found themselves in was vastly different to the one they’d left behind.

After a decade of banking on nostalgia and flogging the hits from their initial four records into the ground – playing to large and routinely ravenous crowds all over the planet – the band realised that they needed new music. Accordingly the Pixies returned to the studio and emerged with what would become their fifth album Indie Cindy (2014), setting in motion a second recorded phase for the venerated outfit. 

That initial foray was followed in 2016 by Head Carrier, and while both those albums contained the Pixies’ signature stylings as well as some epic moments, they felt a tad self-conscious or contrived, as if the band members were striving specifically to recapture the intangible spirit which had made them so special the first time around.

The third album of the Pixies’ second coming, Beneath The Eyrie, however, feels more like a genuine return to the idiosyncratic magic of yore. In constructing a distinct sonic universe for these songs to take place in – each of their earlier records had existed in their own unique headspace –  Pixies give this collection a distinct tone which is both primal and elemental, one that’s typically malevolent and beholden to no convention or structure.

It’s dark and weird (in the best possible way) – full of freakish, preternatural characters who all seem cursed or doomed in some shape or form – and was even recorded in a deconsecrated 19th century church in upstate New York. Yet, according to frontman and principal songwriter Charles Thompson IV (also known by his band alter-ego Black Francis, inverted to Frank Black for his solo work), the album’s gothic vibe came around as much by accident as design.

“It was a very soft agenda,” he reflects. “It was a psychological suggestion made – 'Perhaps it will be gothic, ok, let’s make the record' – and there wasn’t much discussion beyond that. 

“Those kinds of suggestions you make at the start of the record – 'Maybe it’s going to be a heavy metal record,' or 'Maybe it’s going to have a gothic vibe', or 'Maybe this record is going to be a bit lo-fi', or whatever – you may have some sort of suggestion on the table, a potential direction for the record. But that’s as far as we take the so-called ‘artistic vision’ – that’s not really how I operate. We tend to just do. 

“Some painters might work on a painting based on very detailed studies, and other painters don’t have a lot of studies or there might not be any source sketches or whatever at all, and every mark on the canvas is kinda new and the preparation for that piece just comes from their own experience at having made paintings previously.

“So it’s not that there’s one better way to do it, but there’s ways that we’re drawn to. We might write some songs before we go into a session and we might even practice them, but some of the songs are written there on the spot – they’re written in the studio – so I don’t try to get too bogged down in some master blueprint for the record, because that’s just not how I work.”

Thematically Beneath The Eyrie seems fantastical and almost otherworldly, akin to an amalgam of fairytales. Yet there’s a distinct personal undercurrent lurking just beneath the surface, one no doubt influenced by Thompson’s recent divorce.

“There’s always a personal undercurrent to my songs,” he reflects. “There’s always a psychological aspect to it. It doesn’t matter what you’re writing about that’s just a shape, the arc of a story or whatever. 

“If I was a highly political writer and politics were important to me and all that, it wouldn’t matter what type of songs I was writing, there would always be this political thread through it and you could interpret it in that way.

“I’m not that kind of writer, but I would say that I do try to be emotionally free so I think that you could psychoanalyse me based on my songs. Obviously things aren’t black and white – especially when it comes to armchair psychology – but there’s a personal undercurrent to it. What sort of impressions are you having?”

This writer proffers that the album seems to contain a veil of sadness, punctuated by bursts of anger.

“Yeah, I think you’re spot-on there,” Thompson concurs. “I think when I went to make that record obviously I was happy to go and make the record, but I was obviously a bit sad in my life and had some anger in my life personally, and that’s reflected in the music.”

"I think that I do have a lot of existential ennui.”

Still, it’s far from a grim listen, something Thompson puts down to the disparity between the tone of the music and his lyrics. 

“I don’t how much has remained in the final recording but when I was writing the song Death Horizon,” Thompson says, “there was this organ in the studio that had a lot of bells and whistles – percussion loops and sound effects and that kind of thing, it wasn’t an old organ but was built in the style of one – so I sat down with that organ at the end of a day’s session and had a play and it was a lot of fun. 

“So I ended writing this very fun little song which ended up being Death Horizon – it was this very happy and jolly little thing that I was tinkering around with – but of course the lyric ended up being a lot darker: that’s the musical juxtaposition that happens sometimes with songs.

“I’m not trying to create that juxtaposition, not consciously anyway, but if you’re finding a musical shape you’re not necessarily worried about what the song’s going to be about, you’re just trying to find a musical shape – it might be a happy shape, it might be a sad shape, it might be a dissonant shape, it might be a very melodious shape – but there it is, there’s the shape and it seems pretty good, let’s see how we can flesh this out.

“So you flesh it out and maybe you start to add some lyrics to it then, and then something starts to happen – maybe the lyrics reflect that shape, but frequently they don’t. Frequently the lyrics don’t represent the musical feeling that is already present, so what happens is that you have an interesting juxtaposition. Certainly Death Horizon is that kind of a song.”

Death Horizon closes out Beneath The Eyrie in a perfect blaze of pop – breezy and catchy but with a definite existential bent that lingers long after the last note has faded.

“I don’t know if I’m a deep philosopher or particularly academic, but I think that I do have a lot of existential ennui,” the singer says. “Because I’m human, and I think most humans have a fair bit of existential ennui going on, but I’m aware of it and I don’t try to beat it off – I don’t try to get rid of it – because, let’s face it, sad music can be very uplifting or cathartic anyway.

“It’s not that it’s a bad thing if you have sad music, for example, I don’t even know how it works – you have sad music and I’m in a sad mood, match the two things and, lo and behold, I feel better – how does that even work? It just does, I guess it’s about finding something that resonates and it’s the resonation that feels good.”

There’s a slightly different timbre to the Pixies’ music these days, one which can be largely attributed to a change in personnel. Founding bassist Kim Deal left the band during the Indie Cindy sessions – her sizeable shoes eventually filled by Paz Lenchantin – but it seems from a distance that the band is currently a unified bunch and in a good collective headspace.

“We’re happy to be here, we’re happy to be working musicians,” Thompson ponders. “We’re happy with our station, with our responsibility. We’re happy to have patrons so that we can do our art. I can’t say that this is a new thing – it might be an extra good version of that harmony, and maybe it is extra harmonious right now, I don’t know.

“Paz, our bassist, brings a lot of harmony to the band, and she has since she joined. She’s been playing with us for nearly six years and she definitely brings a spirit of harmony to the group, I have to give her a lot of credit for bringing that into the band and kinda teasing that out of everybody.”

Lenchantin has also provided Thompson with something of a songwriting foil, Beneath The Eyrie’s three co-writing credits the most to be found on any Pixies album since the get-go.

“I think she and I wrote four or five songs together and three of them ended up on the record,” Thompson tells. “She’s fun to write with. We stay up late and drink a bottle of wine, we get some food, we sit around the kitchen with our guitars and we listen to a lot of other music – we have a good time writing songs. 

“It’s not easy to collaborate with other people, at least for me, so when you can find someone that you get along with in that context it’s good. I’m sure that we will continue to write songs together, I enjoy creating music with her. She’s a fun person to hang around with.”

“Your old challenge was just to be valid enough to just exist in the first place and then your next challenge is to continue to be valid."

Pixies have certainly not turned their back on their earliest music. Their impending return to Australia will find them playing their first two releases in full – namely 1987 mini-album Come On Pilgrim and 1988’s debut full-length Surfer Rosa – and Thompson has no qualms at all about giving the older fans what they want.

“We haven’t stopped playing those songs,” he attests. “We draw heavily from those two records in particular in our [normal live] sets, so we’ve never shied away from those records. I can’t say that we play every song off those two records – there’s a couple of songs off Surfer Rosa that we tend to not play so much in a live setting – but when we played them a couple of years ago for the same show it didn’t feel unnatural. It was more, like, ‘Oh yeah, why did we stop playing that song?’

“I’d say that we play everything from Come On Pilgrim all the time anyway, and then with Surfer Rosa we play most of it – like I said there’s about two songs we don’t often play – but we’re pretty comfortable with most of our repertoire. 

“We tend to not play so many songs from Trompe Le Monde [1991] and Bossanova [1990], but I think that’s because some of those arrangements are a little complicated and they’re kinda hard to remember. I don’t know why that is – maybe it’s just the way that they were written or the way that they were recorded – but there’s something about some of the material that doesn’t feel as great to play.

“With the earlier records they really represent your earliest repertoire that you’d play down at the nightclub before you even had a record out at all, so certainly all of Come On Pilgrim and Surfer Rosa and then a bit of [revered 1989 second album] Doolittle are all from this period of time when we were just starting out and we were playing our first shows and doing our first rehearsals together, so they have a kind of special quality to them – the muscle memory is pretty deep on those.

“Like that old saying goes, ‘You have your whole life to write your first record and then six months to write your second record,’ so there’s a certain emotional response we get from Come On Pilgrim, Surfer Rosa and half of Doolittle, because they were the songs that we were playing before we were a band, or before we were an official band and just a live nightclub act that was trying to make it. 

“Those are special times, they’re very naïve times, and you can’t duplicate that. You can’t duplicate that experience and you can’t duplicate that dynamic. That’s why with so many bands it’s like, ‘Why were they so good in the beginning, and why does it change at some point?’ It’s because all of that naivety and everything goes away, so that becomes your new challenge.

“Your old challenge was just to be valid enough to just exist in the first place and then your next challenge is to continue to be valid, and it’s difficult to do that. All artists have this challenge: it’s just the deal. It’s just the gig.

“We’ve played a lot of the Beneath The Eyrie material live in this past year while we’ve been out on tour in North America and it went down particularly well. I hope that we’ve been able to find something from our earliest naïve kind of headspace in the new songs – we tried – so hopefully that’s what happened and it will be accepted. That’s out of our hands now.”