1990-xx-xx-Martin-Aston
MAR ??, 1990 – Telephone Interview
Interviewer(s)
Martin Aston
Interviewee(s)
Kim Deal
Tanya Donelly
Josephine Wiggs
Sources
| Medium | Publisher | Date of Issue |
|---|---|---|
| The Catalogue | 05/??/1990 |
Transcript
1) Why did you agree to join the Breeders?
Josephine: Having heard The Pixies only six months before we formed, coming to them rather late, I’d say, I thought they were a really good band, and if anybody had asked me what band I’d like to play with if I wasn’t already in a band, I’d have said them. I met Kim in the summer in Frankfurt and we ended up spending the rest of the evening together after The Pixies played and had a real laugh. When this proposition came up, it sounded really good. So it’s based on a musical and personal point of view.
Tanya: The conception of this whole thing was Kim and I running round the disco really drunk one night, saying we were going to write a disco song and make a lot of money, but it obviously ended up evolving a lot further than that. It took about 18 months to get it together because of our schedules but we’d always wanted to do stuff together. The format changed about a million times though but we finally did connect. Man. Kim’s one of my heroes and she’s an incredible songwriter and I wanted to see if I could do something else besides The Muses.
Kim: I don’t…know. I guess at the time, Tanya was there, and we thought it was a good idea. I don’t know that we really joined…we joined together. I’m a fan of Tanya’s, I like to sing more, because I have a lovely voice…it was a time off and I was really getting bored. And it was in the summer, you know how that is, you think you’re hot shit in the summer.
2) a) What’s the question you’re expecting everyone to ask?
Josephine: I suppose it would be ‘are they going to make another record, is it a one-off or is it going to continue?
Tanya: How it’s different from working with The Muses, for which I have absolutely no answer to, so please don’t ask that.
Kim: Why did I join The Breeders. The second one would be, ‘does that mean The Pixies have broken up?’
2) b) Now answer it.
Josephine: I can only answer it from my point of view and that is that I really hope that we do make another, but that it will depend on a lot of other things in the world, like other peoples’ commitments.
Tanya: No I won’t! Ah, I have more space with Kim to fool around. The songs are less structured so there’s more room to breathe, kind of, which is really nice.
Kim: No.
3) What did you do last night?
Josephine: I was writing out some backing vocals and making notes.
Tanya: I finished making these demos and then I went to a bar and drank some alcohol with my new bass player Fred Abong and drummer David Narcizio and this girl who’s name I don’t know.
Kim: I learnt a bass line for a surf song to record in the studio today for The Pixies. It’s a cover song off a CD of 20 of the greatest surf songs, called ‘Cecilia Ann’ by The Surftones. I shouldn’t be telling you this. We’ll do it on the album if it turns out good.
4) Your favourite Breeders lyric?
Josephine: (laughs) If I tell you, Kim will absolutely kill me. No, I can’t do it! We’re friends. Alright, just say, “it lives.”
Why would Kim kill you?
Josephine: Because it’s an in-joke.
Tanya: I’m always teasing Kim about, “it lives, despite the knives internal” because I think it’s hysterical, but I think my favourite one is, “your soft belly busts and glows.”
Kim: “Chime on, rain, wet and ankle, toes or two, sweep the other drops on your head, just like it did today”, cos she’s in heaven and I think that’s just so sweet. But I can’t have one that long! You’ve got to tell me? Did either of the other girls say, “it lives, despite the knives internal”? We’re going to name our music publishing company that if we can. It’s so bad, the worst lyric ever written by anybody in the world. It’s about an abortion that lives.
5) What were your first impressions of Steve Albini?
Josephine: My first impression was one of ambivalence which very rapidly developed into liking him a great deal. He had good ideas.
Tanya: Very good actually. He’s a perfect gentleman. He’s so much nicer than you expect him to be. There’s always tension with him at some point but the thing with Steven is that it’s gone immediately. there are no subtle tensions that hang around the studio for days. It’s so nice to deal with somebody like that. He’s pretty goofy sometimes, like he makes fun of people a lot and makes farting noises with his hands and stuff.
Do you mind him calling women ‘pussies’?
Tanya: He’s never called me a pussy, personally. I never heard him refer to a woman like that. He says that certain guitar parts are pussy…he uses it to describe bad music. Maybe he’s on his best behaviour around us, us being pussies’n’all.
Kim: Nice guy. Kinda dorky, geeky looking.
6 a) Are you intimidated by questions that compare The Breeders to your permanent/full time group?
Josephine: Not at all.
Tanya: No.
Kim: Are you saying I’m intimidated by people saying we sound like them or just bring it up? You know what’s going to really suck? People who write, ‘Kim should just shut up and play the bass in the band because The Pixies are so much better…’ That’s the interview that I’m going to really hate. That’s my paranoid line.
b) What do The Breeders allow you that the other doesn’t?
Josephine: It’s an enjoyable opportunity to be playing in quite a different style. It’s more colours to one’s palate, as it were, from the point of view of working with other people who have a lot of good ideas that are quite different from the sort of things I’ve worked with before, especially bearing in mind the directions Kim and Tanya are coming from, because, as I was saying, they were about the only what you might call contemporary things that I was listening to all of last year, the first two bands I’d heard in about ten years that I thought anything of at all. Usually, when you hear a new record, you can list four or five things they’re quoting or taking references from, and if they’re doing something really exceptional with it, why not just listen to the original, rather than the rehash? I don’t know what these two have been listening to so it came as something really fresh. It’s incredibly hard to do something new and fresh with bass, drums and two guitars. I hope The Breeders do.
Tanya: The thing with The Breeders is that it was such a completely different thing. it was like this little capsule band. it had a beginning, middle and end, at least this record. That’s something completely different than the Muses. They’re like my dinosaur band! That’s not to say The Breeders are never going to do anything again because we are. What I meant was The Breeders was like this perfect little episode. I don’t have as much control over my time and fate as I wish I did. I’m entangled with three other people.
Kim: We take it seriously and stuff but everything that The Pixies do nowadays is like a big deal. When we started out, we just did it. Like, we played a show the other night, and it was just this little show to try new songs, right, but somehow we ended up selling out a 2200 capacity club, so then it was like, ‘we can’t just wing out these new songs because we don’t know them that well’. It was a big deal, we had to have road managers, guitar and drum technicians…it just seems like this is more like before, when nobody cared what you did. I like that a little bit. But it’s kinda nice that everybody gives a shit too. And I get to sing more, write the songs, play the acoustic guitar, all things I can’t do with The Pixies.
7) What would you like me to ask the other two Breeders?
Josephine: Have they got the plane tickets for the elopement?
Tanya: Don’t forget to ask Kim about Pixies versus Muses. You’ll get an essay! Ask Kim how much she misses me.
Kim: I don’t know… How are you doing? What’yer doing?
8) What would you like to eat tonight?
Josephine: Tinned raspberries.
Tanya: Fish, probably. I haven’t eaten it in a long time. I’m getting really dry skin because of it.
Kim: Mexican, as always.
9 a) Do you believe in reincarnation?
Josephine: No.
Tanya: I believe in anything that I read. The last reincarnation book I read was about a year ago and I completely believed it.
Kim: I don’t know, I’m not at that level yet.
b) If not, what do you believe in?
Josephine: I think that people are destined to carry on making the same mistakes unless they do something about it.
Kim: You know, several months ago, my horoscope said, ‘in the summer, Geminis,’ which I am by the way, ‘are going to have trouble, they’re not going to have anything to believe in’. That’s what it said. And since it’s getting kinda close to the summer, I don’t have anything to believe in.
c) What would you like to believe in?
Josephine: Human nature.
Tanya: God
Kim: Magic.
10) A great record recommendation for the Catalogue readers?
Josephine: The B-52’s “Love Shack”.
Tanya: The Breeders. Do you know who Irma Thomas is? God, I love her! Go for the big hits on some New Orleans label.
Kim: Does it have to be timely? I’ll try to think of one that’s timely… The Breeders. I like The Bad Seeds’ “Mercy Seat”. No I mean the album.
Josephine: I wish I could have had these questions written down in time to think about them. Lack of spontaneity is one of my faults.
Tanya: Too many. You know, you wake me up in the middle of the coolest dream I’ve ever had. I guess I’d been abducted or kidnapped or something, and they took me to Mexico, I think, but I can’t tell because there were beings that don’t really exist in Mexico or on this planet, and there were these houses in the middle of this silver water and you walked along this long pier. It was beautiful and I can’t really explain why.
It could represent The Breeders, spiriting you away.
Tanya: It’s probably just me not wanting to take decisions!
Kim: Have you heard the album? Did you like it?
Yeah, but I just wish you’d shut up and play bass with The Pixies
Kim: Very funny. I wonder if Tanya’s still in England visiting. Those are my famous last words.
There must be something else
Kim: Why are you so fucking rude? That’s my last comment.
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