Pixies' frontman Black Francis on artistic rabbit holes, new bassist Emma Richardson, and ninth album 'The Night The Zombies Came' • Interview • DIY Magazine

Trying to keep up in conversation with Charles Thompson IV is not too dissimilar an experience to hitching a ride on the surrealist sonic train that’s carried his alter ego, Black Francis, and his band Pixies down the tracks through rock’s most wild-eyed backwaters for the past nearly 40 years. Both are unique ways to spend your time. Highly entertaining, wonderfully weird, prone to non-sequiturs and extremely fond of an immersive tale, the two versions of the man are clearly two sides of the same coin save for one key point: on stage, Black Francis has never been known to utter a word of chat, while on today’s call Thompson does not stop.

If the image of the frontman, carved over eight studio albums and now - with the advent of this month’s ghoulishly-titled ‘The Night The Zombies Came’ - an imminent ninth, is one of a howling musical shaman, dredging up grizzled tales of monsters and men from life’s murky depths and delivering them with a feral scream, then today at least he’s more of a friendly uncle. Peering down the Zoom lens of his phone, he careens animatedly between topics, often ending up in a completely different place to where his initial thought began: “How the hell did we get on this? What was the question?!”

If you want an album that explains itself simply, well, go listen to another band. If you’re after a brief submersion into the singular mind that’s helmed one of the greatest, most adventurous and juxtaposed canons in modern music, however, then Black Francis is your man. It’s all, he suggests, about following your brain down the rabbit hole. “Rabbit holes: that’s a popular word in the modern vernacular. ‘I really went down a rabbit hole the other day with this whole seed oils thing’,” he mimics in his most rabbit-holey voice. “I would say a lot of our songs are very rabbit hole in nature. For example, the [new] song ‘Chicken’. Even though it’s just a little ditty, it’s a little rabbit hole of the expression ‘running around like a chicken with your head cut off’. It’s a bloody, violent moment right? So I was thinking, is it really like that? The chicken is dead, because the head has been removed from the body. It doesn’t get any worse than that, right? Your head’s been removed!

“Also, coming out of the pandemic, I had chickens for the first time in my life. I didn’t slaughter the chickens, I only took them for their eggs, but then the coyotes came. I’m not the best survivalist but I got some eggs for a few months…” He pauses briefly for breath. “So I’ve been thinking about chickens a lot, and I was thinking, if I did want to eat the chickens, I guess the old school way to do it is just to break their necks or pick them up and chop real fast? And then I guess I’d understand this expression I’d heard my whole life!”

“The parameter of a popular song is a keyhole into a door that has a much bigger [thing behind it].” — Black Francis

As is the way with Pixies albums, ‘Chicken’ arrives as but one in a number of distinct vignettes that peep into the eerier quarters of consciousness (or lack thereof). ‘Jane (The Night The Zombies Came)’ gives the record its title via a tale of a man slain whilst walking in the woods; ‘I Hear You Mary’ speaks of “runaway gargoyles” and “broken tombs”, while ‘Ernest Evans’ depicts “the king of the god damn twist” through the sort of immediately world-building sub-three minute surf rock stomper that no one does quite like them.

As is also the way with the Massachusetts titans, within every moment of visceral frenzy remains a heightened sense of melody, of keeping things perversely pretty throughout it all; this is, lest we forget, a band that could nestle the clipped bark of ‘Dead’ next to populist hit ‘Here Comes Your Man’ on ‘Doolittle’’s hallowed tracklist and think nothing of it. Coming into the fold on the album, and replacing bassist of ten years Paz Lenchantin, was Emma Richardson, formerly of Band of Skulls. Her voice, says Black Francis, lent a new dynamic to the tracks. “I’m enjoying her voice. We have a little bit of a binaural world of two voices in the Pixies repertoire, so it’s exciting for me to be singing with a new voice,” he nods before a glint comes into his eye.

“And this is gonna sound weird, and it might be because we’re getting older now, but more and more,” he chuckles, “it’s as if the attributes of actual pixies - actual little people that live in the forest - those are the things that we, in a soft way, are kind of looking at, and I would say [Emma is] very pixie-esque. I don’t know how to define it but certain people, they’re definitely not pixies. They could never be. They could be perfectly fine people, whoever they are! But they could never represent little green people that live in the forest. But some people fit that role, and we sort of fit that role a little bit, so it’s comforting when we have a pixie come in and it’s like, ‘Oh yeah, you’re from the forest too!”

“It’s comforting when we have a pixie come in and it’s like, ‘Oh yeah, you’re from the forest too!” — Black Francis

Though their personnel may once more have shifted, the methods remain the same. Rather than channelling some sort of divine inspiration (“I hardly ever hear shit in my head”), the frontman describes fleshing out the world of a Pixies album as like peeping through a series of windows into the band’s collective galaxy. “The parameter of a popular song - a three minute rock song - is a keyhole into a door that has a much bigger [thing behind it]. I can’t put that huge picture in my keyhole; only so much of it will go through. It’s become almost a random selection and a lot of times music is like that for me,” he says. “The songwriting part is the part when I’m sat at the keyhole and I’m deciding, as the interpreter, what I see.”

From the mouth of most other musicians, it could seem like an abstract statement. But over the decades, from their original tenure until ‘93 and their subsequent reunion that’s now celebrating 20 years in itself, Pixies have - more than most - created an entire universe for themselves. Flag bearers of a whole oft-imitated style of loud-quiet-loud dynamics (so much so that a 2006 documentary about the band was called just that), they’re undeniably one of the most influential groups still in existence. For his part, Black Francis isn’t getting complacent. “I don’t think that all of it is amazing,” he says of his back catalogue. “A lot of it is OK, and occasionally something goes, ‘Ding ding ding!’ But I’m never quite sure which is which, so the best thing for me to do is keep my head down and keep doing it.”

These days, a whole new generation are clocking onto the band via their perhaps surprisingly active TikTok presence. More than 35 years after the release of ‘Where Is My Mind?’, the track has its own trend page. “Thinking about [young people] and what they respond to, I don’t know what it is in my own music but it’s got this folk thing that a lot of people are comfortable with even if it isn’t necessarily nice-sounding all the time?“ he suggests. “I’m not trying to convince anybody of anything. I’m not trying to get people to join my army. It’s completely expressive and sometimes sing-songy and sometimes not, and sometimes silly and sometimes angry and sometimes quiet and sometimes loud. And well, why would something go in all these different directions? I don’t know, but I was watching this thing the other day about the Japanese puppeteers…” And off he goes down another alley of thought.

On the cusp of 60, it’s fair to say Black Francis is not like most men his age and Pixies are not like most bands of their tenure. They’re not continuing to make and release records out of any desire to notch up bigger and greater successes, but they also clearly see no world in which they’d stop. The frontman has considered what getting older at the helm of the band might look like. “We haven’t had to make any adjustments with anything to do with our physical bodies yet, but I don’t imagine there’d be a problem with doing that because we’re artists so whatever. We’ll just David Byrne the shit out of it. We’ll go ask him what to do. We’ll all have kazoos or something. This is art - sorry! This is what we can manage!” he laughs. But whether they’re sat down or standing up, giving it a lungful or parping the hits out on a kazoo, it’s hard to imagine Pixies plugging up the creative keyhole any time soon. “We just make records,” Black Francis shrugs. “Isn’t that what we’re supposed to do?”

‘The Night The Zombies Came’ is out 25th October via BMG.

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