It was the name, and it was the way they seemed to come out of nowhere, and it was the surreal amped-up catchiness of their rock and roll, but mostly it was the name. After Kiss, no band has/had a cooler name, and the name alone had enough steroids in it to feed and balloon the mystique even before I heard a single note.

The day I would at last hold in my hands, all the way from some boondock record store in New Zealand a brand-new cassette (yes, a cassette) of Doolittle, was bound to be momentous, but I never factored in how prickly with chemical displacement it would be. There was nothing about the Pixies I hadn’t heard before when I first listened to them. They embodied their flippant sum-up: Husker Du meets Peter Paul & Mary, and also surf pop, oddball sci-fic, the Old Testament, Tex-Mex, and flying saucers - except there was something about them I sort of hadn’t expected: equal parts sui generis, cosmic accident, and alchemy.

That ‘loudquietloud’ dynamic of theirs may have been housebroken by Nirvana, inadvertently brokering alternative rock from a code to live by into a marketing category, but the whiny humorless subcategory of guitar rock that was the house style of the movement had fuck-all to do with the Pixies’ looseness and flippancy and gift for catharsis. They may have come and gone and come again, but that beautiful noise

they made/make -unease eventually crossing into delight without dissipating entirely - has remained inviolate, fresh, and yeah, fun. It was, for me, from the get-go and to this day, all about love - a big, big love.

1. Debaser (Doolittle)

Being the first track on the first album of theirs I heard, it makes sense that this would be the number that embodies their aesthetic. Even without those biases, it sort of does: the gutful scream-singing, the up-all-night bass, the guitar jetstreams, the abstract lyrics. The name-checking of ‘Un Chien Andalou’ would later titillate the Bunuel nut I became, but it was always the way this made the grafting of Mission of Burma on a chassis of cranked-up, smelted Cure sound like something God intended that would dig hooks in me.

2. Dig for Fire (Bossanova)

Of course, it turned out to be a hommage. But even before finding that out, the phrasing already had me flashing back to my old Talking Heads records, more than the words really, but they sort of had me flashing back, too. ‘There is this old man, who spent so much of his life sleeping that he’s able to keep awake for the rest of his years…’ Bassist Kim Deal sounding like Tina Weymouth on that lovely refrain (‘No, my child, this is not my desire…’) clinched matters, as well as cut through the coy weirdness like a blast of helium with which everything lifts.


3. Gigantic (Surfer Rosa)

Provisionally known as Kim’s Song - a minor hit single and major fan favourite - it effortlessly, gorgeously claims the spot held previously by Led Zep’s ‘The Lemon Song’ as rock’s touchstone of horny (or would that be Donna Summer’s ‘Love To Love You Baby’?). Until ‘Here Comes Your Man’ is rescued from 500 Days of Summer, this remains their hit to revere, and maybe even after.

4. Planet of Sound (Trompe le Monde)

On an album bursting with compact and propulsive retro-futurist rock-and-rollas, this one was a jetpack of sleek - and that’s a rock and roll end-all, be-all with road to burn.

5. Wave of Mutilation (UK Surf) (Pump Up The Volume OST)

The version on Doolittle cooks too, sure, but this one, slowed down to a surf-goth simmer, gains an eerie, pained elegance that not only wouldn’t seem out of sorts if you stumbled onto it tucked away inside, oh, say, the Beach Boys’ Surf’s Up, but also has the strange yet familiar sheen of a golden oldie from some parallel universe.

- Dodo Dayao