Pixies

Press Quotes



Here follow a selection of press quotes about the Pixies from: Alternative Press, Blissed Out: The Apocalypse Of Rock (book), Daily Telegraph, Financial Times, The Independent, Les Inrockuptibles, Melody Maker, Music Week, New York Times, NME, Q, Rolling Stone, Select, Sounds, Vox.

1987

"In six months time, every right-thinking rocker on the planet will have realised that Pixies are a band made in heaven, taught rock'n'roll in hell" (Sounds, 1987)

"The Pixies, in the new year, are going to leave a lot of people stunned" (Mr Spencer, Sounds, 1987)

"Don't be fooled by the name. These Pixies are closer to Gremlins, seemingly cuddly and wholesome on the surface but in possession of teeth and tempers that would shame the stripes off a rabid tiger. At the very least one wouldn't want them living in one's toilet" (Jack Barron, NME, 1987)


1988

"The finest double act since the Romans decided to put the Christians and the lions on the same bill" (?,?, 1988, about Throwing Muses/Pixies gigs in March 1988)

"Black Francis is a fire and Flinstone preacher dressed in plasterer's clothes" (Ted Mico, Melody Maker, 1988)

"I can't really remember when I last heard a music with this degree of lazy evil injected into it. A music that forces Anglos to put their world-view through agonising reappraisal" (Select, 1988)

"The Pixies are welcomed on stage like gods, which I felt was underestimating them somewhat" (Jon Wilde, Melody Maker, 1988)

"It's like they wanted to live on Tin Pan Alley, but when they got there barefoot, Ali had come to Mohammed...This album kicks asps" (Chris Roberts about Surfer Rosa, Melody Maker, 1988)

"Surfer Rosa took the title of Melody Maker's Album Of The Year fair and square, or rather, dark and funny- shaped. A scorching, surging blitzkrieg of warped rock, voluptuous vocals and manic guitars..." (Melody Maker, 1988)

"They run strange gamuts and achieve peculiar juxtapositions of feeling - one minute haggard, the next luscious. There's a deformed sister of conventional pop geometry" (Simon Reynolds, Melody Maker, 1988)


1989

"Animals, violence and comedy. It's a start. It's The Pixies, no closer to sense than before, but more brutally intimate with their senses" (David Stubbs about Doolittle, Melody Maker, 1989)

"Peel back that little monkey's scalp and you'll probably be both appalled and fascinated at the tumour of evil genius that's squirming there" (Edwin Pouncey about Doolittle, NME, 1989)

"While you're Pixies-led into thinking about "jubilation" they're really mouthing "mutilation"...spot the difference?" (Edwin Pouncey, NME, 1989)

"Personally I find Black Francis's lyrics, together with the various ways he chooses to translate them, a delight. He manages to push a kind of Beefheartian naivety into his work that suggests a love affair with the very language he is dabbling in" (Edwin Pouncey, NME, 1989)

"The songs on 'Doolittle' have the power to make you literally jump out of your skin with excitement" (Edwin Pouncey, NME, 1989)

"A roaring foursome who mix and mash abrasive guitar propulsion with Thompson's quixotic melodicism and brutal, beguiling lyric surrealism" (David Fricke, Rolling Stone, 1989)

"'Doolittle' is The Pixies' finest half-hour so far, which is to say it's a scintillating rock'n'roll album" (Tim Rolston, Daily Telegraph, 1989)

"'Doolittle' obviously, painfully, joyfully can't help itself...It's stunning, amplified inanity" (Steve Sutherland, Melody Maker, 1989)

"Of all the rock LPs released in 1989 the Pixies' Doolittle was undoubtedly the most innovative and inspiring" (James Brown, NME, 1989)

"That's when the Pixies' reality becomes the only reality that really matters" (James Brown, NME, 1989)

"The phrase 'cult band' will never be the same again" (Music Week, 1989)

"Mr Francis' words are offhand rather than meticulous, primal rather than clever" (John Pareles, New York Times, 1989)


1990

"Rock can only be defined by its limitations, and with "Come On Pilgrim" The Pixies stretched those boundaries into the twilight zone" (Ted Mico, Melody Maker, 1990)

"Suddenly, in April 1989, their third album 'Doolittle' vaulted into the real album chart at Number Eight. They became the biggest indie band since The Smiths" (Q, 1990)

"A vocabulary of their own that mixed the exhilaration of weirdo noise with the formality of the pop song. They sounded like the world's best-read garage band and a little more" (Stuart Maconie on Doolittle, NME, 1990)

"Without the atmosphere of a Pixies show, the songs are stripped down, with only the words and the base structure to see them through. Doesn't matter, those base structures are peerless" (Roy Wilkinson about Black Francis solo gig at the Borderline, Sounds, 1990)

"If rock is meant to discomfort and disorientate, then The Pixies have got it right. They seem the best possible proof that for white American rock bands, there is life after Talking Heads" (Andrew Clements, Financial Times, 1990)

"The 14 songs confirm the murmuring that The Pixies fourth album was set to explore a less cacophonous radius" (Jon Wilde about 'Bossanova', Melody Maker, 1990)

"The Pixies are masters of the calculated incongruity" (Q, 1990)

"Black Francis may be the urbane spaceman of the Nineties, but with The Pixies, he has fashioned a flight path to untold fame and fortune on an extremely loveable album" (Terry Staunton on Bossanova, NME, 1990)

"They're now the most important band from the East Coast of America" (The Independent, 1990)

"Pixies have always combined an intuitive intelligence with a naivety that allows them to ignore all the detritus that's been poured on rock'n'roll over the years" (Roy Wilkinson, Sounds, 1990)

"For although a brilliant performance at Reading proved that large-scale shows were no problem for them, Pixies music remains too quirky, too abrasive for the perceived dictates of daytime radio" (Roy Wilkinson, Sounds, 1990)

"If prime-time America can adapt to David Lynch, or vice versa, then there's no reason a band of the Pixies' awry magnificence cannot succeed on a mass scale" (Roy Wilkinson, Sounds, 1990)

"Most bands have a leader, but they also have someone who embodies what the band is all about: the Stones have Keith Richards, the Who had Keith Moon and the Pixies have Joey Santiago. Santiago is a man of few words, most of them rather puzzling" (Michael Azerrad, Rolling Stone, 1990)

"THE PIXIES ARE THE BEST BAND ON THE PLANET. Discuss. OR is there anything to discuss? For 10 weeks now I've known the truth. Ever since The Pixies climbed on stage, late at night, on the last day of Reading Festival and shook the ground beneath the feet of 30,000 awe- struck souls with a display of pure rock brutality, I've realised their status. They tore the roof off the sky, and staged a simultaneous earthquake. Just for good measure. The Pixies were one sexy gospel. Nobody else even approached them." (Ian Gittins, Melody Maker, 1990)

"If this is a hell, then they're the house band" (Ian Gittins, Melody Maker, 1990)

"It's clear what a genius Joey Santiago is. It's too easy for his contribution to be ignored in the rush to heap praise on Charles" (Ian Gittins, Melody Maker, 1990)

"Kim Deal is a regular sunbeam. She's fun to be with and whatever she thinks, she says. She's the drinkin', smokin', rockin' Pixie, the one who keeps the spirits up. She's also the only person in the world who rolls worse funny cigarettes than me." (Ian Gittins, Melody Maker, 1990)

"We end the interview when David starts playing his 1979 Billy Joel cassette" (Ian Gittins, Melody Maker, 1990)

"Wittingly or not, the Pixies have a knack for pressing all the right buttons, using a standard vocabulary of screams, croons, twangs and thumps familiar to anyone who grew up on rock music" (Michael Azerrad, Rolling Stone, 1990)

"I'm being harsh, of course - but it is the Pixies, and they are (still) the best rock'n'roll combo in the cosmos" (Everett True, Melody Maker, 1990)

"Pixies are what's left when all the obstacles and absences that once prompted rock'n'roll into being have faded away or been catered for, and all that remains is the urge to holler, shriek and whoop it up for the arbitrary, unnegotiable hell of it. They're a poltergeist whose restlessness can never be pacified, the ghost of rock'n'roll" (Simon Reynolds, Blissed Out: The Apocalypse Of Rock, 1990)


1991

"Charles might be the brains behind the music, but the others are more than just drone Pixies. Joey Santiago's guitar from Hell, David Lovering's pendulous skins and Kim Deal's groove thang bass are all essential to the Pixies' sound" (Bruce Dessau, Vox, 1991)

"Next year Christopher Columbus will be 500 years old. This makes the man who discovered America just 494 years older than The Pixies, the band who helped put American music back on the map" (Ted Mico, Melody Maker, 1991)

"Black Francis has a scream that would make Hannibal 'The Cannibal' Lecter shudder - a scream that has the power to batter the senses and results in heaving mass of bodies and flying Evian bottles. Few bands reach this kind of intensity by the end of their encore. For The Pixies, it's only their second number" (Ted Mico, Melody Maker, 1991)

"The lesson is clear: attitude can be learnt; altitude you're born with" (Ted Mico, Melody Maker, 1991)

"By the time the band soundchecked that afternoon, Kim had already drunk enough to send any self-regarding hard-man into a coma. By the end of the night, she'd consumed enough alcohol to kill off most known forms of animal and plant life, yet could still talk coherently and enthusiastically about Teenage Fanclub and new Breeders songs. She is indeed more than just a Pixie - she's a medical miracle" (Ted Mico, Melody Maker, 1991)

"They're still four normal people playing very weird pop, or to be more accurate, they're four very strange people playing at being normal" (Ted Mico, Melody Maker, 1991)

"A fringe band doesn't finish the gig and plan a night on the town, only to discover that every place in a 20-mile radius has been shut tonight because a Pixies show in Rennes meant that no one under the age of 30 wanted to go clubbing" (Ted Mico, Melody Maker, 1991)

"They have the capacity to make the unpredictable sound obvious ('Mr Grieves') and the inane sound obtuse ('Here Comes Your Man')" (Ted Mico, Melody Maker, 1991)

"Reality is just a crutch for people who can't handle The Pixies" (Ted Mico, Melody Maker, 1991)

"There's no doubting that Pixies are capable of taking us where no band has gone before - to a place where seamonkeys control the oceans, bored beer-drinking university kids dressed in black rule the land, and toneless blues bands dominate the airwaves" (Jon Wiederhorn, Melody Maker, 1991)

"The Pixies live are visceral and VERY demanding. You can lose yourself in the reverie, and never be found again" (Dele Fadele, 1991 Pixies European tour book)

"One day, we will wake up and we will not like the Pixies anymore. That day, we will not accept rock anymore. And the Pixies will be the first victims of this change, because no-one else incarnates rock in a more basic, more physical, more sensual, more direct way" (JD Beauvallet, Les Inrockuptibles, 1991) - translated from the French

"Guys like this, who incarnate their mission so perfectly, can only end up with the body full of gun shots or as national heroes, often both" (JD Beauvallet, Les Inrockuptibles, 1991) - translated from the French


And Then...

"The Pixies are natural fluid chaos" (Chris Roberts, Melody Maker)

"The Pixies are quite simply a fantastic coincidence...a flight into insanity" (The Stud Brothers, Melody Maker)

"The Pixies go beyond their strange and esoteric trappings to express a unique, ardent vision that is both serious and a lot of fun to listen to" (Laura Demarco, Alternative Press, 1995)



Last Updated 07-07-97