The couple walked into a bar

Shortly after he formed The Pixies with college roommate Charles Thompson (a.k.a. Frank Black), Joey Santiago was drinking in a Boston dive when he spotted Linda Mallari sitting up at the bar. He thought he might try to pick her up.

She takes up the story: “Joey was sitting right at the side of me and we were both looking at each other through the mirror. I look over at him and I go ‘Oh my God are you Filipino? Oh my God, I’m Filipino too!’ He said, ‘No you’re not!’ He was sorta right - I’m actually half Filipino - my mother is Czech but it turned out that Joey’s father and mine went to the same medical school and they knew some of the same people, which our families found interesting.”
They swapped phone numbers and got together soon after that initial encounter. Mallari, a classically trained singer, guitar and keyboard player subsequently offered her talents to the then-embryonic Pixies (who hadn’t even played a show up to that point), to which Joey apparently replied, ‘Oh, we already have a chick in the band’.”
“That’s exactly true,” Santiago laughs down the phone line from their home in LA, where he is taking a break from the hugely successful Pixies reunion tour. “I really wanted to make some music with her at the time but I was kinda busy with the other band, you know.”
Seventeen years after that first meeting, the pair have finally gotten around to releasing a record together. Travelling under the banner of The Martinis they’ve just put out Smitten, an impressive collection of indie/ power-pop love songs, mainly written and sung by Mallari but with Santiago’s distinctive guitar playing stamped all over it. Mallari whose voice has been compared to everyone from Chrissie Hynde and Bjork to punk priestess Lene Lovich, perfectly complements Santiago’s textured guitar lines. But why did it take so long to get it out?
“The powers that be and red tape,” Mallari says. “We’ve had some stuff out on MP3.com before and we did some movie work but this is our first album proper. We ended up offering it all over the place and trying to find people to put it out. Finally, we met these people from What’s-it Records who wanted to do it.”
The couple already have a 20-month old baby girl and are expecting their second child in precisely 32 days from the date of this conversation – not exactly great timing when it comes to promoting a debut album?
“We had hoped it was going to come out a little earlier than it did. But even with the news that we’re having another baby the record company still wanted to put it out so I guess they know what they’re doing,” offers Mallari. “By the way it’s going to be a boy – a little Joey,” she laughs.
Meanwhile “big” Joey comes back on the line to give his take on the Martinis album:
“It was a lot of fun to make,” he says. “She wrote most of it and I took care of all the guitars. On occasion when it needed a bridge or something that’s where I came in and I might have substituted a couple of different chords here and there. But it’s really her songs and she was kind enough to include me in the credits (laughs). But we were always confident that it was going to sound alright. We did a lot of prep work before we went into the studio, we had it all demo’d out and it was recorded pretty quickly in the end.”
How different is working on a project like this to The Pixies?
“The way I work it’s not any different,” he explains. “The process is usually I get a song that I’m presented with and I figure out what I’ll do with the guitars. It’s the same process I go through with each project. Basically, my guitar goes straight into the amp and I try not to use too many effects. Occasionally I’ll use a distortion box.
“After the break-up of The Pixies I’ve always been juggling a bunch of stuff. I recorded a great record in Vancouver with a Canadian artist called Holly McNarland. I don’t know if she’s well known in Europe but she won a Juno award, which is the equivalent of a Grammy up there. I really like my guitar playing on that album. The producer left me to my own devices and I was allowed to be me which is a blessing. For a long while I used to think people were looking for that certain guitar sound and it was ‘here we go again they only want me for that trademark Pixies sound’. But I’m starting to embrace it and accept it now.”
Meanwhile The Pixies reunion tour rolls on for more dates across the US following their ecstatic reception in Europe including the mega-gig in Dublin’s Phoenix Park with the Red Hot Chilli Peppers. .
“That was quite a crowd out there,” Santiago recalls “It was insane and all that traffic as well, which we got caught up in. But it was a great gig especially playing with The Thrills who are really nice guys. We were hoping they’d do some dates with us in the States. They are? Oh I didn’t know that! I knew we’d asked them but I wasn’t sure if they’d accepted. That’s great! I’ll look forward to that.”
Finally, will the reunion be permanent and will there be another Pixies album?
“I got to be honest with you and tell you that we don’t know yet. We haven’t discussed anything together other than doing these shows.”

The Martinis’ Smitten album is out now on Cooking Vinyl