He was already doing music with Dinosaur then. He’s my neighbour now and I’ve known him since I was 18. It didn’t really get loud until we moved to Boston and started a real band. We had a couple of acoustic guitars and I think he had an electric, but I don’t remember it ever getting super loud. You and Pixies guitarist Joey Santiago made quite a racket together. There might have been some other cities in that area, but getting away meant you were ‘official’ that you were in the club.” It was like, ‘How do we get on some bigger circuit, out of this circuit that we were on?’ That circuit wasn’t even regional, but based on the city of Boston. Being eager to get out of town was always the focus of my band. “I suppose I was enthusiastic and eager to make a mark eager to figure something out. What were you like when the Pixies were starting out? I’ve never really done things that I would really contemplate.” I’ve always been in the moment, or the season.
It was for good students.”ĭid you imagine you would still be doing this when the Pixies started 35 years ago? It was a fun way to spend fifty bucks on college books when you went off to college. “I did! So did my brother, it was just an award that they gave out of the school we went to. Is it true that you actually won a ‘Teenager Of The Year’ award, as mentioned in your 1994 album of the same name? So sometimes I’ll go back to certain material and I think, ‘Hmm, this isn’t good enough.’ I’ve tried to be more patient and adopt rewriting as I’ve gotten older.”
I feel like I’ve done so much of that spontaneous writing that I’ve embraced it for too long. I write spontaneously and can come up with something in the moment that doesn’t need rewriting. I guess that’s what we do more than anything.
I suppose that might be where our good calls have been: the hybridisation of genres. The best way to understand something is to try to play it yourself and hopefully something good will come out of it, or some sort of hybrid. I knew I wasn’t going to be good at all of it, but I wanted to at least understand those forms a little bit more. You want to do country music, rock’n’roll, blues, punk rock, metal, hardcore, reggae. You want to try everything and see what it’s like, even if you ultimately fail at it. But when you’re young you don’t know where to begin. Lyrically and musically, I like all kinds of music and all different kinds of pop and underground records. I read Ray Bradbury and Kurt Vonnegut books. Sci-fi and UFOs have been recurring themes in your lyrics over the years. We were young enough, my brother and I, to just accept it and go, ‘Oh, okay.’ I’d have a very different reaction now, but at the time we didn’t know what we were looking at. It was moving very slowly over the house…” A big silver rocket, silent, slow, no marking, low to the ground not very high up. “I saw a UFO in my backyard when I was little. The neighbour said, ‘Sing it like you hate that bitch.’ It was a good lesson.”Ĭharles is also a member of a very exclusive club: he claims to have seen a flying saucer.
Alter ego band members how to#
“A neighbour of mine – who was a musician from Thailand – taught me how to belt things out. “I learned how to sing louder when I was a teenager,” he says.
Meanwhile, Charles, now in his mid-50s, has a hefty collection of solo records to his name – 10 in total, each one defined by a distinctive vocal range comprising angelic, choir boy swooning at one end of the spectrum and a manic werewolf’s howl at the other. “But that had always been the kind of response we’d got in certain places, especially in the UK, Holland, France, Germany, we always got very zealous crowds at all our gigs.” When they reformed in 2004, after breaking up a decade earlier, their return was treated with an almost religious adulation. Pixies have established a rep as being one of the most influential bands in heavy rock, lending their loud-quiet-loud dynamic to a raft of thrashing guitar bands, from Foo Fighters to Smashing Pumpkins. After 35 years leading the charge in a band adored by critically acclaimed songwriters in the vein of Kurt Cobain and PJ Harvey, the idea of reflecting back upon that life is a little testing, seemingly. The man commonly known as Black Francis – when fronting influential indie-rock band Pixies – and later, Frank Black in his solo artist guise, is tired. In a darkened London hotel room, wearing a black suit and heavy shades, Charles Thompson IV appears to be in a glum mood.
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