It was March 17th, 1992, and the indie-rock superstars Pixies were ready to put on the show of their lives. “We were playing in Boston, our hometown, on St Patrick’s Day, at Boston Garden,” says the band’s drummer, David Lovering. “This is the place where I saw all my shows, all my sporting events. This was a big thing for me.”
Pixies were opening for U2, who had picked the band to support them on their ground-breaking ZooTV dates across the United States. Alas, this gig from heaven had come at a hellish time for the New Englanders, who were falling apart in slow motion as the quiet-loud-quiet punk-pop they pioneered with albums such as Surfer Rosa and Dolittle was taken up by Nirvana on their way to world conquest.
The previous September Pixies had released their fourth LP, Trompe Le Monde. While it is today regarded as an underappreciated gem, it was thoroughly overshadowed at the time by Nirvana’s Nevermind. Behind the scenes, moreover, Lovering and his bandmates – uncommunicative in the happiest of circumstances – had become increasingly alienated from one another. Being in Pixies had stopped being fun. Everything was crumbling before their eyes.
But there was still Boston, a hometown show in front of a huge crowd. Whatever the future had in store, here was something to hold on to. “Boston Garden on St Patrick’s Day,” Lovering says. “I even wore a Boston Celtics shirt.”
Sadly, the reception fell short of his expectations. “When we walked out and played in our hometown, that audience didn’t know or didn’t care who we were ... It was, like, ‘Get off the stage, we’re here to see U2.’”
He shares the memory with a smile. Thirty-four years later, Pixies are in a very different place. A hectic 2024 saw these legends of the thinking person’s mosh pit play five sold-out shows in Ireland, and they’ve just released a fantastically rollicking new album, The Night the Zombies Came, their fifth LP since they put their differences behind them and re-formed in 2004.
Still, it wouldn’t be Pixies without backstage drama. This time the controversy has revolved around the abrupt exit of Paz Lenchantin, the band’s long-serving bassist. Having more than adequately filled the shoes of Pixies’ original bass player, Kim Deal, since 2013, she announced in March that she was leaving – and that her parting had been the choice of the rest of the band, not her.
She added to Rolling Stone that her departure was “a bit of a surprise” to her, “as it is to many”. Several weeks later Pixies kicked off their tour in Dublin with their new bassist, Emma Richardson, who had been recommended by Tom Dalgety, the producer of their new album.
“It does give you a new spark, because you want to impress Emma,” Lovering says. Having always had a woman on bass, Pixies were keen to “keep with the female ethic”. He’s vaguer about Lenchantin and her leave-taking. “The reason with Paz, it’s something you’d have to ask her. We’re very fortunate with Emma. I’ve got to play really well. I [didn’t] want to be a hack when she joined the band. She’s great – she’s a wonderful singer. We’re having a wonderful time.”
Feral, catchy, funny, surreal: Pixies put the “art” in “cathartic”. The albums they cranked out in the late 1980s and early 1990s cast a long shadow, influencing not just Nirvana and Radiohead but also modern groups such as Fontaines DC, whose molten guitars owe a lot to Pixies’ Joey Santiago and his quicksilver style. And yet their impact goes beyond alternative rock. You can just as readily hear echoes of snarling, uproarious tunes such as I’ve Been Tired and Hey in the music of the Gen Z pop star Olivia Rodrigo, whose recent hit Bad Idea Right? is heavily indebted to Pixies.
Pixies are also a great example of how to execute the perfect comeback. After getting back together 20 years ago – their first Irish gig after their return was opening for Red Hot Chili Peppers at Phoenix Park in Dublin in June 2004 – they leaned into nostalgia for several years until beginning a new chapter with the Indie Cindy LP, in 2014.
They now embark on an entirely new phase, with the cheerfully eclectic The Night the Zombie Came potentially their best LP since they re-formed. It’s a record with everything from chugging indie (on You’re So Impatient) to spooky goth-rock (Chicken) and exuberant surf-rock (Johnny Good Man), all illuminated by the ongoing obsession with UFOs, urban legends and Las Vegas of their frontman, Black Francis (aka Charles Thompson).
Given that Pixies have mastered the comeback, would Lovering have any advice for Liam and Noel Gallagher of Oasis, another 1990s outfit who have recently announced that they’re putting their band back together?
“I have two things,” Lovering says. “They’re older. As you’re older you’re supposed to get wise. You don’t actually get wiser. You learn to put up with people. My only word is, ‘Put up with each other.’ Another thing is, I know a band called the Pixies – if you need an opening band for the America tour or something, there you go.”
The cliche – every band gets five years and it all kind of blows up – basically, that was our schedule. There was just a lot of unhappy people, and I can’t say that I didn’t contribute to that atmosphere. I think everyone did
The Gallaghers would be lucky to book a support as exhilarating as Pixies today. The Night the Zombies Came finds the band firing on all creative cylinders. Lovering says that the process of making the album, at the remote Guilford Sound studio in rural Vermont, was one of the most enjoyable he can recall, even allowing for the regular Pixies soap opera around a new bass player. (Richardson is the band’s third since Deal delivered the bombshell to her bandmates, at a Caffè Nero in Wales in 2012, that she was leaving.)
“It was a joy,” Lovering says. “One reason I say that is we were very familiar with the studio.” (Pixies also made Doggerel, their 2022 album, there.) “There was a familiarity to all this. Because of the comfort level and everything, it had a different work ethic. Not only being comfortable. I think Charles’ songs [were top notch]. Everyone played exceptionally well. I’m very happy.”
The earliest version of Pixies formed in 1986, after Santiago and Thompson met at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. They had advertised for a bass player who was into both the 1960s folk troupe Peter, Paul and Mary and the postpunk act Hüsker Dü.
The only reply was from Deal, then a legal secretary who had never played bass. Lovering was hired at the suggestion of Deal’s husband – Kim met the drummer for the first time at her wedding. After initially practising in the Loverings’ parents’ garage, they launched themselves on the Boston college-rock scene alongside groups such as Dinosaur Jr and Throwing Muses.
The 2024 version of Pixies is a long way from the dysfunctional crew who played to an indifferent audience at Boston Garden in 1992. Back then Pixies were infamously uncommunicative – a point underlined by Thompson’s decision in early 1993 to choose a BBC radio interview as the place to announce he was breaking up Pixies. He later called Santiago and informed Lovering and Deal by fax.
“We weren’t fully developed” as individuals, Santiago told me in 2019. “The fingerprint of the band was pretty much developed. We didn’t know what we had: we weren’t fully developed [about] this thing we ‘created’. The Pixies itself was developed by the time Surfer Rosa was recorded. However, as individuals, we were not … We weren’t around that long. We didn’t have time to gel – get to know each other’s quirks and personalities. We had to learn the hard way.”
Amid the critical acclaim and heavy touring, a huge amount of pressure was coming to bear on Thompson, in particular, and he did not take it well. “I was wanting to free myself of the stress of being in a band context,” he told the London Independent in 2021.
“The cliche – every band gets five years and it all kind of blows up – basically, that was our schedule. There was just a lot of unhappy people, and I can’t say that I didn’t contribute to that atmosphere. I think everyone did. Even the last couple of Pixies records, the producer [Gil Norton] had to deal with a young, stoned, obstinate person that wanted to scratch a whole lot of itches about the stuff he was learning about the recording process. I don’t know if the band loved that necessarily, that suddenly I was burning the candle at both ends, wanting to write songs in the moment, spontaneously, doing things that were maybe even ill prepared.”
At that point Pixies were being eclipsed by the indie scene they had done so much to help create. When Nirvana broke through, for example, Kurt Cobain famously claimed he had been “basically trying to rip off the Pixies” – a quote that has followed Lovering and his bandmates ever since.
“It’s nice to have an influence on bands. It’s nice to hear how they liked us,” Lovering says, though he adds that the fandom of Cobain and legends such as David Bowie “doesn’t have a lot of impact”.
He adjusts his baseball hat and continues. “I’m just a guy who plays drums. It’s a nice thing to hear. But I have a funny story, ‘cos I knew Kurt. This was once on Super Bowl Sunday – this is a long time ago.” Lovering, Cobain and Courtney Love, his wife, “went all together to an amusement park called Six Flags in Valencia, California. There was nobody there. Just us – five people total. We were walking around. Kurt was in pyjamas. All of a sudden we hear, ‘Oh my God, it’s David Lovering, it’s David Lovering.’ Some kid had recognised me – not Kurt Cobain. He recognised me. You’ve got to be kidding me.”
By the time of the U2 tour the negativity around Pixies wasn’t simply from within the ranks. Steve Albini, the maverick producer who had worked wonders on Surfer Rosa, Pixies’ 1988 masterpiece, which features their best-known track, Where Is My Mind?, turned on his former collaborators, labelling them naive shills who would do whatever it took to get ahead. Or, as he put it, “Never have I seen four cows more anxious to be led around by their nose rings.”
The criticism said more about Albini and his attitude towards success than it did about Pixies. The producer, who later apologised, came to accept that Surfer Rosa would be one of his defining works – a point reiterated in the many tributes to him when he died in May, at the age of 61.
“Getting to work with him back then, and knowing him, and trying to figure him out and discovering [Albini’s 1980s industrial trio] Big Black and talking to him later … I liked him, I understand him,” Lovering says. “I understood his persona ... It was sad when he passed away. He was someone I did get to know.”
When Pixies got back together they could easily have milked the nostalgia circuit for all it was worth. And it’s true that they played a lot of shows before recording new material. But with The Night the Zombies Came they have demonstrated that they still have something new to say – that they are a going concern rather than a glorified covers act.
“There’s no formula. Honestly, I don’t think there is a formula on any record,” Lovering says. “We had a 12-year hiatus and then Indie Cindy happened. They’ve all been different. We’re not doing a formula. It’s where Charles is writing and how we are progressing. This is one is different than other ones – the songs have poppy little things. It’s that progression.”
“Progression” is not a word people would have used about the Pixies when Thompson was getting ready to pull the plug in 1993. Back then, they were fuelled by chaos and warring egos. Today, they are older and wiser and The Night the Zombies Came is as an inspiring example of musicians finding a new groove in their middle years. Oasis will do well to pull off their big comeback with as much style, wit and grace.
The Night the Zombies Came is released by BMG
