"I DON'T THINK ANYONE ELSE IS DOING THIS. AND IF THEY ARE, THEY'D BE STUPID!"

Long ago, the Pixies blazed a trail for Nirvana and others to follow.But now, as before, there is no masterplan. As guitarist Joey Santiago says: "I still go by feel - and with my gut."

- Andrew Daly

N irvana. Radiohead. Weezer. All have the Pixies’ weird-out/ freak-out signature stamped across their foreheads. Formed in Boston, Massachusetts in 1986, Pixies changed the alt-rock game forever with the classic albums Surfer Rosa (1988), Doolittle (1990) and Bossanova (1990) with era-defining songs such as Where Is My Mind?, Here Comes Your Man and Debaser.

The mad scientist behind the bulk of that indie rock splendour is guitarist and lead vocalist Charles Michael Kittridge Thompson IV, aka Frank Black, aka Black Francis. A lyrical savant and a master of loud/quiet dynamics, Francis set the template for ’90s rock, which has been copied endlessly across the years. But he couldn’t have done it without his trusted sidekick Joey Santiago, who injected gain-drenched, off-the-wall, shards-of-glassmeets-sticky-pop guitar goodness into the mix.

As Joey tells TG, the Pixies’ approach as always been about “feel” in its purest sense. “I knew what was overdone,” he says. “And I knew what people could do better than I could, so I steered away. But now, I’m learning more theory, which has been interesting…”

Starting with the 2022 album Doggerel, Francis began to lean on Joey for not only guitars but also lyrics. Joey cautiously, if not jokingly, attributes this to Francis’s “thinking the way I look at the world is interesting”. The results on Doggerel were strong, but even stronger on the band’s new album The Night The Zombies Came, with the classically-inspired I Hear You Mary being a Santiago-penned standout.

Joey admits that the Pixies’ earlier catalogue looms large. And he’s not about to proclaim that The Night The Zombies Came is their best yet. Sure, he’s happy with it, but he still yearns to complete a magnum opus.