9.
Pixies – Trompe Le Monde
I love a lot of the Pixies albums but I think people dismiss the final one. So put it in, it’ll spark debate!
Basically I’m a big Pixies fan and I don’t think the original incarnation made a bad album. The lesser one is Bossanova. Surfer Rosa and Doolittle are unparalleled; those two albums are extraordinary and so unique.
I was around 13 or 14 when The Pixies were coming on the scene. I’m not going to claim to be hip enough to have bought the first albums on initial release. My first experience of watching Indie acts was The Chart Show on ITV, when every other week they would have the Indie Charts. This is how I was exposed to ‘Monkey Gone To Heaven’. I remember thinking, “What the hell is this?” At that age I was intrigued by it, but also somewhat scared by it. It definitely felt like dangerous, different, alternative music and at that point I definitely wasn’t a fan just yet.
When I used to work at a supermarket, a friend of mine, Julian, who was a bit older and knew I was a big David Bowie fan, used to make me these tapes with a Bowie album on one side and a Pixies album on the other, so I got into them like that.
Trompe Le Monde is the first actual album of theirs I bought. It came out the same week as Nevermind and it felt like the British music press had decided to move on from the Pixies. As well, by this point, they were already in semi-break up. The first Breeders album had already come out, I think, and Kim Deal is sort of side-lined on Trompe Le Monde. There’s not a song she sings solo on it, which is another reason people feel weirdly about it. Yet when you listen to Trompe Le Monde now, it’s such a confident, epic, brilliantly produced record. I had it on audio cassette, so I still think of the two sides and the songs that end them. ‘Letter To Memphis’ – what a song – ended Side One. ‘Motorway To Roswell’, which is an enormous, epic track, followed by the slinky ‘The Navajo Know’, ended Side Two.
I heard the first single ‘Planet Of Sound’ on the Radio 1 Top 40. Can you imagine Bruno Brookes Introducing that and then that song coming out of the radio? Holy shit! That’s a deeply angry, aggressive choice of first single. I really admired them for that.
When they first toured again, I saw them three times, the best of which was Brixton Academy. And when they played the Trompe Le Monde songs, it solidified the place of those songs in the canon. Something like ‘U-Mass’ sounded just as great as the Doolittle and Surfer Rosa songs live.
I’m happy to being going against the tide on this one. This album is fucking killer!
