‘The more you try to recapture youth, the sillier it sounds’

Pixies frontman Black Francis would not be your first choose to learn the CBeebies Bedtime Story.

Over the course of his band’s wildly influential profession, his fractured, typically summary songs have referenced Biblical violence, mutilation, incest, torture and demise.

“Sliced up eyeballs” and “goats of lust” aren’t historically the type of photos that assist your toddler drift off to sleep.

Luckily, he did not recite his personal lyrics when he popped into CBeebies earlier this month. The e book he selected did have a definite Pixies flavour, although. It’s known as 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 arduous to think about Pixies showing on kids’s tv at some other level of their profession.

The abrasive riffs and intertwining harmonies of songs like Debaser, Monkey Gone To Heaven, and Where Is My Mind signposted the future of other rock in the late Eighties; they usually have been cited as inspirations by everybody from Nirvana and Radiohead to… er, James Blunt. (“They’d be furious to hear that, wouldn’t they?” he not too long ago stated).

Just as the artists they impressed started to hit the mainstream, the band broke up – however their popularity grew of 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 file of all time.

Twelve years later, it bought its 300,000th copy in the UK, gaining the band their first ever platinum file, 30 years after they fashioned.

By that time, they’d reunited for a first-rate second part. When we converse, 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 fashioned in 1986, when Francis (born Charles Thompson IV) dropped out of college and persuaded his guitarist room-mate Joey Santiago to do the identical. An area newspaper advert introduced in bassist Kim Deal and, by way of her, drummer Dave Lovering.

A buzzy demo tape gained them a contract with British label 4AD, they usually have been rapidly embraced by the indie music press, the place one author 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 pageant in 1990. Further down the invoice was a gaggle whose present was a “very Vegas kind of affair”.

“They had lights and confetti and balloons,” he remembers. “A lot of schtick going on.

“Their tour supervisor turned to our supervisor, Chas Banks, and stated, ‘So what do you have ready in your set?”

“And he replied, ’25 good songs'”.

“I used to be very proud that that is how he responded, as a result of that’s actually all we had. We had no dance strikes, we had no balloons, we actually simply had our music.

There’s a tussle in the music, too, which vacillates between blood-curdling punk and what the band known as “dust-bowl songs” – country-tinged, heartland people ballads.

Lovering has stated the album is “more traditional” than earlier Pixies information. Francis says these seeds have been sown in his Nineteen Nineties solo work.

“I’m going to go out on a limb here, and I’ll say something that I’ve not said in an interview before,” he says.

“When the Pixies broke up, I began to allow myself to stand outside of so-called underground music. I even went and made a couple of records at Nashville.

“And once we acquired again collectively, there was plenty of reticence from the producers and, quietly, behind-the-scenes, the managers, who have been making an attempt to ensure that Charles did not flip it into some type of ‘nation factor’.

“I think I deferred to that somewhat, but I didn’t feel like the results were necessarily notable. So I started to allow more of that stuff into the mix.

“And I believe everybody round me has, consciously or unconsciously, relaxed and allowed me to do it.”

He warms to the theme, saying it’s unreasonable to expect a band in their fifth decade to re-capture the spittle-flecked anger of youth.

“It will get tougher to do these sort of issues, as a result of when you’re younger, there’s a lot naïvete driving the bus. Even if the music compositionally is flimsy, you make up for it with all that vitality.

“But what happens is you get better at playing guitar, better at composing, and that naïve energy is gone. It’s very hard to tap into it. It’s much easier to tap into the I-know-what-the-hell-I’m-doing energy.

“And perhaps that is not what folks need to hear however, you know what? I am unable to be 19 years previous once more. And the tougher you try, the sillier it sounds.”

One of his new songs disproves that theory.

Oyster Beds is two minutes of lean, vigorous riffs coupled with what, on the surface, appear to be some of Francis’s most surreal lyrics to date: “A musketeer and her two deers / A rustic home in Dadasphere.”

In fact, he wrote the song in his art studio, and the lyrics are “slightly laundry checklist of issues I’ve painted in the previous few years”.

“I used to be sort of like, ‘I simply want some phrases right here’, and it’s a punky music, so I wasn’t feeling strongly about the message.

What does he get from portray that music would not present?

“Solace [from] other people,” he laughs. “Not that playing with people is bad, because it gives you companionship, but sometimes it can get laborious.

“With portray, I realised, ‘Oh, I can do that and have all of the debates and fights in my head, and there is no one to reply to’.”

He proceeds to describe that process at entertaining length.

“So if the brushes are driving the bus, I’ll be like, ‘Don’t overlook about your narrative’. But then my internal monologue will go, ‘Screw the narrative, as a result of proper now massive brush is in cost and massive brush is making an enormous mess’.

“Then it’ll be like, ‘Alright, you’ve ruined the painting enough, it’s time to think about what this painting is about. We’ve got to let figurative take over for a while to bring some order to all this chaos’.

“And so it turns into this argument between the completely different parts of the portray. They’re all professors at the Black Francis artwork college, and I actually get pleasure from that.

“It’s crazy, even insane, what’s going on in my head, but I do it for hours.”

Crazy, perhaps, however the most compelling artwork comes from artistic chaos – and that is why, in spite of everything these years, Pixies are nonetheless a thrill.