'Walk her every day. To a shady place.'
Whenever I think of Surfer Rosa I picture myself. I'm upstairs in my bedroom in a three story house in Teddington. Abour 23. I'm not well. I'm suffering from a mystery illness. A serious one. It's been diagnosed as Sceleraderma but the causes and effects are still shrouded in blackness. Dr Carol Black and her focused team are working on it a short bus ride from where I'm standing, in Hounslow, as the illness attacks me and tries to claim me as its own.
I'm listening to Pixies Surfer Rosa. My windows are thrown open and the dial on my NAD. amp is cranked up. 'This is a song for Carol...' Carol Black? Probably not. That riff. We haven't heard that guitar intensity that shaking the body free of its constrictions for years. Bowie knows. His antennae are up and he recognises fellow travellers.
I wrote a lyric about the illness I was struggling with. What it felt like. For a band I imagined being in. A song I wanted to sing called Howl. 'I'm living in an elephant skin. Shaken something loose inside. A thing apart from the skin I'm in. Scratching the skin of life...' It was powerful. I knew it was. But neither the song nor the band was ever realised. It was not a million miles from Pixies. Television. Feeling Gravity's Pull.I was feeding off other people's ideas. Greater talents.
Listening to Surfer Rosa now it's both deranged and profane yet also calculated and maintained. Like all great Rock & Roll debuts an incredible achievement for ones so young. I remember Frank Black, or Black Francis or whoever you want to call him saying he wrote lyrics as mathematical exercises. Equations. Pixies were a perfect formula of distressed sound and ideas.. Like all great bands.
I was young when I bought this record. I could have died from the illness I had. But I didn't. I'm sitting at my desk listening to the sme physical object that I listened to in my room in Teddington in 1988. My record is immaculate. Unscratched. I saw Pixies at the Doolittle stage. They were phenomenal. David knew. Kurt knew. Me and my mate Andy knew. It shouldn't have taken Fight Club to make the world sit up and pay attention. It was all here.
Ah, Bruce, that sounds horrible! Sounds like you were in good hands, though. Hope it didn't last too long, but must have been a worry for you and your family. It has reminded me of my daughter's current situation which, although not life threatening, has stopped her in her tracks and it's hard to see an end to it at the moment. Hopefully, she can look back on it later with your sense of perspective.
ReplyDeleteI was lucky to see the Pixies twice in 1988, so this is a very special album to me. So unlike anything I had heard before. Marvellous!
Oh gosh Darren. All the very best there. Illness when young is a difficult thing to deal with. My thoughts are with you. Tough. You can get through it. I did. Pixies I remember thinking at the time. That's a sound we need again. Same with MBV.
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