“A big piece of jagged glass stuck me right in the arm”
jim macpherson
what became their only album, Pacer. “I went to the same hospital twice in one week,” Macpherson recalls. “I was with Kim at a bar, and there was a big piece of jagged glass sticking out that stuck me right in the arm. That was on the last day of recording…”
“Good timing, huh?” laughs Kim. “I was drinking a lot, smoking a lot of pot.”
“Then we did a show there in Dublin, after we recorded,” continues Macpherson. “I trashed my drumset, then I went to throw the floor tom down, and the leg was sticking out and it ripped my head open. At the hospital, they did not wanna work on me, because it was the same doctor who knew me from a few days before. And I was wasted. I ended up getting 14 stitches.”
After touring the album, Macpherson told Kim he was leaving. “I don’t remember him saying anything,” Deal admits today. “I probably just came to – ‘Where’s Jim?’”
News of these events was trickling back to Wiggs – seemingly the most sensible of the quartet – and she didn’t like what she was hearing. “Kim was, I thought, blowing off steam, doing a punk record or whatever,” she remembers. “But of course, titbits of information were filtering back to me in New York. And then when I got a call from The Breeders’ management saying that Kim wanted to resume doing Breeders stuff; it just sounded like a nightmare to me, and I said I didn’t want to do it, because life is too short to spend it like that.”
Wiggs said she’d sit that album out. Macpherson joined Guided By Voices for 1999’s Do The Collapse and 2001’s excellent Isolation Drills, but was told to reduce his drinking by GBV’s leader Robert Pollard. “When Bob Pollard is telling you you should not drink so much, you know…” Kim comments.
After a few years of false starts, the Deals regrouped, with guitarist Richard Presley and an LA rhythm section – Jose Medeles on drums and future Morrissey bassist Mando Lopez – for 2002’s Title TK, produced by Steve Albini. A fine follow-up to Last Splash, it contains some of Kim’s best-loved songs, including spectral ballad “Off You” and the grooving, psychedelic “The She”.
“I thought, ‘You know what, it’s weird that we can only play Amps songs live’,” Kim says. “‘This is not working for me, I need to be able to play under The Breeders, because I can’t not play Breeders songs…’ It was just confusing.”
“Kim was coming off a troubled personal period, then wasted a year or so trying to record a record that went nowhere,” says Steve Albini. “I was both pleased and surprised when she contacted me, because I kind of assumed she was through with me. The sessions were slow, she wasn’t sober yet and she was basically rebuilding a lot of parts of her life simultaneously.”
The eclectic Mountain Battles, another strong set, appeared in 2008, with both sisters now straight. These albums’ appearances were less pleasurable for the band’s former members, though. “Hearing the new Breeders records coming out was like a knife in my gut,” recalls Macpherson. NeW decade eventually offered renewed promise for The Breeders – although it didn’t start off that way. By 2010 and 2011, Kim’s time was taken up by extensive world tours with the reunited Pixies, and there were no plans for her other band. In early summer 2012, however, the Deal sisters, sitting on the couch in Dayton, realised that the following year would mark two decades since Last Splash’s release. They tentatively contacted Wiggs and Macpherson. “To be asked to do the anniversary of the album was a highlight,” says the drummer. “I was just so happy.” Wiggs had filled in briefly for Lopez a few years before, and had had “a little taster of recapturing the past… It was so delightful to play with them again, and to play those songs again. So when they contacted Jim and I in 2012, I had already had the experience of playing with them sober, and it was really fantastic. There’s something special about The Breeders, it’s not like anything else. So because of that, I was like, ‘It’s worth talking the chance of it turning into a nightmare.’” By autumn 2012, Jim had his drums set up in Kim’s basement ready for rehearsals in November, but Kim was in Rockfield Studios in Wales recording with Pixies. “It was all confusing, the timing of everything,” she remembers. “It was a beautiful place in Wales. But outside at night it was so dark – it was the darkest dark I’ve ever darked before in my life!” After five days, Kim walked out of the sessions and flew back to Dayton. She denies it was a matter of choosing between Pixies and The Breeders, though. “I can’t necessarily say that if The Breeders thing wasn’t happening I would have stayed there, so it would be kind of misleading to say, ‘Yeah, I had to make a choice…’ But it would be tidy and probably put an end to the conversation if I said, ‘Yeah, I needed to make a choice.’ But that feels a little not real. I did make a choice, though, so in a way it is true.” Finally, in March 2013, the group embarked on their anniversary tour for Last Splash, adding material from Pod to the setlists, then a few tracks from Title TK and new songs such as “All Nerve” and “Blues At The Acropolis”. “When the Last Splash tour was coming to an end,” says Wiggs, “we had all had such a great time, being together again and playing those songs and feeling like we had something that was worth continuing. We thought, ‘Shouldn’t we carry on past it just being the anniversary year?’ In order to carry on you have to have new material, so we started the process of kicking around ideas.” “There was no talk of doing any new music together,” says Kelley. “Until we started playing together and doing shows. And then it was like, ‘This is so fun, it sounds so good!’” Although Kim has her own 16-track tape machine, they went further afield to record All Nerve, tracking a couple of songs at Albini’s electrical Audio studio in Chicago. Most of the album, however, was done at Candyland in Dayton, Kentucky, owned and operated by Mike Montgomery, the band’s live tech and Kelley’s partner in the group R Ring. “It was a classic analogue record,” explains Montgomery. “Get a bunch of reels of tape, do takes until they’re happy with it, and just go from there. Their workflow is so different to a lot of bands out there.” “Kim’s pretty steeped in the traditional methods,” says Albini. “That is, you write the song, rehearse