The Real Deal

Is it any coinicidence that two of the coolest people in rock are called Kim? We’re talking about Sonic Youth’s bohemian rhapsodist Kim Gordon and the Pixies’ divinely gifted Kim Deal. After a few years of touring with Frank Black and the chaps, Deal is playing again with her own celebrated indie-rock outfit The Breeders, who recently released Mountain Battles, their first album since 2002’s Title TK.

Was Kim happy to get back to working with The Breeders following the Pixies’ acclaimed reunion shows?
“It was, although we never really left it,” she replies, speaking at home in Dayton, Ohio. “Even in 2002, the year we released Title TK, we demoed a few new songs, and in the summer of the following year we did some recording, which actually ended up on Mountain Battles. It was in the fall of 2003 that Joe (Santiago) called and asked if I wanted to do some touring with the Pixies, and so that winter myself, Joe and David (Lovering) got together at The Breeders’ rehearsal space in East Los Angeles, while Charles was away on his solo tour.
“But even then, The Breeders managed to fit in some touring and recording the following year. (Laughs) I’m really good at remembering all this since I quit drinking, aren’t I? Listen to me go! The point being that while the Pixies toured, say, Australia last winter, in the summer I was working on Breeders stuff. So I’ve been doing them both in and out over the past few years.”
Was there anything stylistically different that Kim wanted to achieve with Mountain Battles, as opposed to previous Breeders albums?
“You know, it was the first one in a long time that I wasn’t getting absolutely trashed in the studio working on.”
So she had a clearer head recording it?
“Right! Which I was always really frightened of, because I thought people who were un-trashed got really sucky. I’d always assumed that was true, but then when I sobered up I couldn’t really come up with an example. I mean, can you can come up with an example? I was so sure about it before, but it’s hard to think of a person who consistently produced great work while they were getting wasted.”
Mountain Battles also finds Kim’s sister, Kelley, singing in Spanish on the track ‘Regalama Esta Noche’. How did the group end up recording the song?
“Well, I’d moved out to East LA,” she says. “That’s the barrio where I was called ‘guera’. Fucking white girl. But with a hug! So I went to this particular bar in the neighbourhood where you could smoke. The reason why you could still smoke there was because it’s right across the street from the East Los Angeles Sheriff’s Department, and all the sheriffs used to leave their duty and go across to the bar for a cigarette. It didn’t matter about the California state ban on smoking.
“So we went to the bar that the cops went to and smoked, and on the jukebox was this song called ‘Regalama Esta Noche’. The lyrics go, ‘Give me the gift of this night/Or give me death’. It was like, ‘Oh my God, it’s so beautiful’. Of course we were going to try it in English, and in fact I wanted to sing it. But there was one particular line that didn’t translate, so Kelley tried it. Armando Lopez, the bass player, lives in East LA and speaks Spanish, and he went through every word with her.
“I feel like we did it justice, because when Armando hears it, or his girlfriend or his mother, they say it sounds like Mexican blues. It’s a traditional song, and it moves them.”
Did Kim enjoy the Pixies reunion?
“Oh yeah, I especially remember the gig in Ireland with Red Hot Chili Peppers, that was so much fun.”
Is the reunion now officially over?
“I think the main reason that we’re not doing anything is that things cycle out, and you don’t get asked again, honestly. And you don’t want to overstay your welcome. It’s like, ‘Well, we played there’. You know, it would be cool to go to China, but I don’t think that’ll happen.”
Kurt Cobain was famously a huge Pixies fan, and described The Breeders’ debut album, Pod, as one of his favourite albums ever. Indeed, The Breeders toured extensively with Nirvana in the early ’90s. How did Kim find the experience?
“I remember The Point show,” she reflects. “That was the first gig that Jim McPherson, the drummer from Dayton, played with us. He went backstage and looked at the table with the food on it, and he said, ‘Golly, look at all this! Who’s it for?’ And Krist Novoselic said, ‘It’s for us, we can eat it’. He was explaining the whole rider concept to Jim! They really liked Jim, and they were so sweet to us.”

Mountain Battles is out now on 4AD