1989 - HA-HA-HA-HO
Pixies, 'Debaser'
Travel sharpens the senses: food tastes better. The sun shines brighter. And in every new musical discovery we make in this heightened state of awareness, the notes ring out more beautifully.
That’s why some of my favourite memories of family holidays to the seaside are based around music. Like the year when we couldn’t go five minutes at the resort’s family nightclub without the DJ playing Snap!’s ode to rhythm. And the year when all the stress and tension caused by careful navigation into a town-wide traffic jam melted away, with just the first few soothing bars of Billy Joel’s ‘The River of Dreams’.
And then there was the year I found a curious compilation called Corrosion. Here’s a full tracklisting if you’re interested. I was probably 16 years old, and almost certainly on my last ‘family’ holiday – my older brother would have tapped out a year or two before, to stay at home, not invite his friends over, and not break anything while we were gone.
(Quick observation: at least four songs on here are cover versions. For some reason that feels quite excessive. Along with the Suicide Machines’ attempt to ska up an old standard (which is par for the course in the early 2000s), there’s god-rockers P.O.D. having a crack at some U2. Now there’s a sentence I never want to read again.)
There’s a good UK representation on here, with the likes of Queenadreena, My Vitriol, and Pitchshifter – the makings of a decent all-Brit festival headlined by Muse and the Manics. Oh, and Feeder make an appearance too – spoilers, we will be coming back for them in a decade or so.
A quick scurry through the tracklisting, and I don’t think we can quite nail down the year it’s from. There’s nu-metal in all its better and worse flavours, more than a sprinkling of ska, and only a couple of songs more than five years old at the time. (Not like the compilations of a few years later featuring all the best and brightest British indie that can’t not have been released in precisely September 2006.)
I can’t say this double cassette became one of the all-time formative experiences of my music tastes, but one of those older tracks has caught my eye during this nostalgia fest; and it begins with another of my all-time favourite basslines.
I’m fairly sure I’d have seen the TV special on the Pixies at this point; I had a habit of doing most of my TV viewing between the hours of 11pm and 4am at this age, so I’ll have caught that documentary where David Bowie, future ‘Cactus’ coverer, gushes over their lyrics and sound.
But aside from the tracks featured on this programme (live versions of ‘Bone Machine’ and maybe ‘Levitate Me’?) I couldn’t find any trace of the Pixies in local music sellers. So by the time Kim Deal’s searching bassline struggled out of my tinny tape player, in a seaside chalet with walls so paper-thin I could hear my dad snore, I was entranced.
The song is...bizarre, but by Doolittle standards it barely hits mid-table in its bizarreness. Songwriter Black Francis rattles through references to a Dali/Buñuel short film from 1929, in various degrees of raspy yelling, before the song lets loose with jangling guitars and urgent drums surging to the conclusion.
(I never really watched Un Chien Andalou. Once when I visited the Dali museum in Berlin, I stood watching a screen playing the film without knowing what it was. That is, until you get the shot of a sliced-up eyeball, and I genuinely made a noise something like “ha-ha-ha-ho” with a weird realisation/mental connection made. Maybe that’s why Black Francis makes that sound too, equal parts disgust and fascination.)
Looking over the tracklisting again and I’m a bit surprised even to see ‘Debaser’ on here; it’s very much an outlier in the baggy-shorts, hate-my-parents vibe given off by the majority of the other bands contributing to Corrosion. Here, it’s been plonked alongside one of the more random (but admittedly stronger) nu-metal efforts and the third-rate yarling of Scott Stapp, at the start of side three. Where’s the thought? I could never make a mixtape so scatter-brained.
(Speaking of which, let me know if you’d actually like to listen to a Spotify/Apple Music playlist of these songs as I assemble them.)
‘Debaser’ goes on the list because I have a very strong memory of that tape player, in that chalet, on that holiday. As would any song with that sort of staying power.