The Breeders
Back with their first new album in 25 years, maybe alt.rock icons The Breeders will this time become the band they should have been first time around.
Back with their first new album in 25 years, maybe alt.rock icons The Breeders will this time become the band they should have been first time around.
In the office of a record company in London Josephine Wiggs, bassist with The Breeders, is on all fours in the middle of the room. Identical twin sisters Kim and Kelley Deal, the band’s two guitarists, dissolve into hysterical laughter, while drummer Jim Macpherson leans back and grins at the scene unfolding around him. On the floor, Wiggs is re-enacting an eyebrow-raising scene they once witnessed on the streets of San Francisco. “I remember that,” Kim says, laughing. “But everything looks so much better with so many years on it, doesn’t it?”
The Breeders, perhaps the most exciting alternative band to have materialised from the
90s, are back. As a founding member of alt.rock giants Pixies, it’s not hyperbole to assert Kim Deal’s place as one of alternative music’s defining figures. When we meet, she’s relaxed and open. She greets me with a warm smile, a glint in her eye and her trademark sharp wit intact. With
The Breeders, she channelled that sharp talent into innovative, invigorating songwriting, having grown bored of the creatively unchallenging role she occupied in Pixies.
During a brief Pixies hiatus in 1989, she hooked up with Wiggs and Throwing Muses guitarist Tanya Donelly, and The Breeders were born. With their 1990 debut Pod, they helped create a blueprint for one of alt.rock’s most referenced sounds.
But it was with 1993’s platinum-selling Last Splash, with its Top 40 singles and Spike Jonzedirected videos, that The Breeders found the album that would provide the focal point of their career. With Macpherson brought in on drums and Kim’s sister Kelley having replaced Donelly on guitar, the new line-up’s easy chemistry paved the way to that creative watermark – a record Kim describes today as “happy, joyful and exuberant”.
But in a familiar tale of life on the front lines of 90s rock’n’roll, the happiness captured on that record was short-lived. While Kelley spiralled into heroin addiction, Kim fought her own battles with alcohol, both of which took their toll on the band.
Looking back at The Breeders’ initial demise, Wiggs says: “Sometimes I think if I was able to do it over again, I would have tried to express the things I was unhappy about, instead of getting more and more pissed off to the point where it wasn’t worth it for me to carry on doing this. On the other hand, when I start doing that thought experiment, I realise that the people I was with wouldn’t have listened, that they weren’t in a state to be listening.”
Soon enough, the Deals found themselves “bottoming out, living over a garage in East Los Angeles”. The classic Breeders line-up was no more.
Although Wiggs, Macpherson and the Deals reunited for a Last Splash 20th-anniversary tour in 2013, new album All Nerve marks the first time they’ve recorded new music since that album’s release 25 years ago. For fans, it’s a big deal.
“We had a really good time in 2013,” says Kelley. “One of the things I learned on that tour was not only how much I enjoyed playing with these guys, but how happy everybody was to see us. The response was so good that it added to this idea of, well, ‘What else can we do now?’”
All Nerve provides an answer to that question. But what took them so long?
“We were touring in 2013, but we also began going in [to record] with [producer] Steve Albini,” says Kim. “So it does feel like there was a break, but there wasn’t. Jim still works full-time [as a carpenter]. He works from six-thirty in the morning till six-thirty at night, then he has to come over to our house, where we play until eleven. He works like a dog.”
“It’s almost like I need that chaos in my life,” says Macpherson. “When I don’t have it, I’m just at home, like…” he trails off and shrugs.
f Last Splash was The Breeders’ creative highwater mark, All Nerve is the successor it deserves. While Kim and Kelley have made music as The Breeders since ’93, those albums (2002’s Title TK, 2008’s Mountain Battles) tended to meander down a more experimental, explorative path. With Wiggs and Macpherson back in the fold, the chemistry that made Last Splash such a tantalising proposition is back too. It’s palpable, evident in the way the band interact with each other. It’s also evident in the new music they’ve created: punchy and melodic, it’s the sound of a band back to their best.
And the buzz around All Nerve has been significant, thanks in no small part to Last Splash’s legacy. Its cult appeal has grown since this line-up’s initial demise, earning the band a swell of extra fans with every new generation that’s uncovered it.
“It’s strange for me that people have grown up with the record just because it happens to be out there,” says Kim. “I wasn’t out there giving it to them by playing all the time, yet they’ve discovered it and grown up with it. I guess that’s what it feels like when you’re out there in the milieu, when your record becomes part of the lexicon of music.”
“I met somebody on this last month of shows we did who was super-excited to speak to me,” says Wiggs. “He said that he had loved Last Splash for a number of years, and he never thought he would have the chance to see it played live. He was super-excited, and I was like: ‘Oh my God. This is like being in Led Zeppelin or something!’ Because that’s how he was behaving, as if this was a classic record by a band from yesteryear he never thought he’d get to see live. It was a really special thing for him. It was special for me, too.”
There will always be some element of chaos among The Breeders, but with All Nerve the band have succeeded in recapturing the energy of their past and seem cautiously optimistic about their future. Could it be time for them to finally become the band they should have been first time around?
“And for it to all go horribly wrong again?” Kim asks, prompting the rest of band to erupt into laughter again. “We’re set up perfectly for it, aren’t we?” she says, joining in the laughter. “We’ll just cross our fingers and see what unfolds.”
All Nerve is out now via 4AD. The Breeders tour the U K in July (thebreedersmusic.com).
“It’s strange for me that people have grown up with
Last Splash just because it happens to be out there.”
Kim Deal