A Big Big Love

They may be ambivalent to one another, but the Pixies’ music is still adored as the documentary charting their reunion reveals. By Alastair McKay

Pixies memory #1. Fifteen years ago, the Pixies played the SECC in Glasgow. The SECC is a big tin can with all the atmosphere of a diving bell, but that night the Pixies did something strange. They came, they played for maybe eight minutes, and they left. Something had collapsed — the safety barrier, the stage, the cracked carapace of grunge — and someone decided that it was too dangerous to continue.

But they achieved a lot in those eight minutes. The details of the songs they played escape me — maybe ‘Debaser’ was in there — but I can remember the sound. It was fierce and loud and sharp, an ear-bleeding noise, like heartbeats thumping against the cochlea; brutal and melodic, but somewhere near pain. It was too much, really. They couldn’t have gone on like that. It was too dangerous to continue.

And so the Pixies split. They didn’t do it that night, but maybe they should have. Walking off a collapsing stage would have been a better way to go than what actually happened. In January 1993, Charles Thompson IV, then known as Frank Black, and previously as Black Francis, told Mark Radcliffe on Radio 5’s Hit The North that the Pixies were finished. Which, apparently, was news to the Pixies.

He later explained this decision to the NME, saying he had grown sick of the band, and bored of singing Monkey Gone to Heaven. He needed new challenges. “It’s like a film-maker who’s started out making cowboy movies — after a while, if he were to be forced to only make cowboy movies, that doesn’t seem like a very good proposition. It seems it’s like it’s holding you down. And that’s the way I feel about it. I don’t wanna just make cowboy movies, I wanna try and see if I can make another kind of film.”

Photographs: Jonathan Furmanski