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January 30, 2005

Pixies Talk About Their Reunion on ACL

I'm going to post this because last year when the news first broke, there were some questions about the Pixies reunion. The rumors were originally fueled by off-the-cuff comments Frank Black Francis Thompson originally made in an XFM radio interview quoted in the NME:

I do dream about the Pixies reunion I do have to say. It’s like those schoolboy dreams when you don’t do your homework and you don’t study for the test, but I’m at the gig and we’re hanging out, but its an utter failure and I don’t know the songs, and hardly anyone turns up for the gig and people walk out. That’s what I’m afraid of, that it’d be a big, big failure.

We might. We (bassist Kim Deal, drummer David Lovering and guitarist Joey Santiago) do get together and have private jams together, but not for public consumption.

I remember after that, the Internet buzz was high. It was almost like the speculation about the Beatles reuniting in the 70s. I'm kind of thinking that's what Bob Pollard is hoping for in 5-10 years when he reunites Guided by Voices.

Frank Black himself made some comments about it on his fan board:

Finally, as for the latest rumor (#398) that the Pixies are going to reunite for a tour (as mentioned by FB on London's Xfm radio)... here's the lowdown from the inside : The Pixies will get together later this year to record a new double album of Latvian children's lullabies, after which they will tour each and every country whose name begins with the letters Cz.

What's my point? Originally, the rumors weren't true, and there was no reunion in the works. But when Black and the band found out the amount of moola they could earn through a tour, they probably made the decision to get back together in September, as announced on PFork.

Following the band's “Austin City Limits” performance, Black and the other members shared some details of how they reunited:

I started a joke, heh heh! On the radio in London, and the whole world was crying and, uh, so—and then I said, "Oh, what the Hell, all right," So the cat's out of the Bag, so I called Joe, and then Joe called Kim, I think, and then I think Kim called Dave. Or something like that. Some sort of—something like that.

Yep. I made a joke, I made a joke. Joe called me in like the very beginning of September and we didn't know If we were going to do it. We were just talking.

Kim Deal: And then in October, on the MSNBC, the tickertape, the ticker thing down there, it said something about Pixies Reunion. I thought that was something. It was like, what are we doing on there? That's right, it was a CNN ticker. That's crazy. And then I heard that that spacecraft on Mars—I'm not kidding—that they used “Where Is My Mind?”

As a wake-up call. That's right, they did. To wake up the computer when they shut it down to reboot it or something. Right. So that was kind of, whoa. And I started seeing people like in fashion ads and sometimes there would be the rock fashion ad, and they would be having, they would wear a “Death to the Pixies” Shirt.

Terry Lickona, ACL producer: More to come? Are you guys even thinking that far ahead as far as where this might go from here?

Black: I don't know, I guess we don't chart out a lot of stuff. We tend to just be like... So where is the Starbucks? When, what are we doing today? You know, tomorrow's kind of tomorrow, you know? It's kind of hard to —

Lovering: It's one day at a time.

Black: Yeah, one day—baby steps.

Posted by timothompson at January 30, 2005 06:00 PM