Listen to the ACTUAL audio of Frank Black and my chat here:
I’ve loved the Pixies since I was a teenager. I discovered their albums Surfer Rosa and Doolittle through my best friend’s older brother, and loved singing along loudly, imitating their energy and passion.
In my 20s, my love for the band cemented while working at 95bFM. The Pixies’ songs were constantly playing in the studio, at parties, in flats, or in cars on cassette tapes and CDs. During that time, I dreamt of interviewing the Pixies or seeing them live in concert. But there was no chance—the band had broken up in 1993. So instead, I listened intently to their albums, and when Frank Black Francis’ solo album came out where he reimagined Pixies songs and his solo songs—it felt like my own secret treasure. Time passed.
Fast forward to 2010: I was back at 95bFM, hosting Morning Glory, when I was told the Pixies were reformingAND playing shows in New Zealand. AND I had the f*cking pleasure of announcing the news to listeners. As you can imagine (for those who know my radio style) I was very excited.
The band played a “warm-up” show at the Powerstation ahead of larger gigs in Auckland and Christchurch. They were celebrating the 20th anniversary of Doolittle, playing the entire album and its B-sides.
NZ alternative music lovers united. The shows were brilliant. Mind-blowing.
When the Pixies broke up in 1993 after a hugely influential run, frontman Black Francis—real name Charles Michael Kittridge Thompson IV—embarked on a solo career under the name Frank Black. In 1994, he released Teenager of the Year, a sprawling, ambitious album that has since become a cult classic.
Now, 30 years later in 2025, I was offered an interview with Frank Black. You can imagine my excitement. For years, he rarely did interviews. I was worried he might be short, brash—impatient even. I was intimidated.
But when we finally spoke, he was awesome. He chatted to me from his home and, from what I could tell, genuinely enjoyed our conversation. Just me—a random person on the other side of the world, a fan who cared about his work. He was relaxed, open, generous, honest—and just pretty damn cool.
When I joined the call, he was in the middle of a friendly chat with the publicist.
As it turns out… he quite enjoys small talk.
FRANK BLACK: Well, it's a little bit like meeting someone in a park that you've never met before, like if you were a spy or something. And so at the start of the zoom, like I don't know if I'm talking to the journalist or if perhaps there's some sort of middle person, you know, like from a record company or whatever. don't, I don't ever know. You know what I mean? I just open my email and go, ‘Oh yeah, there's the zoom link for today’ - click it and something happens… so I think we must have been at least five minutes deep before I realized that she wasn't you, you know? And so I knew that we hadn't officially started the interview for whatever the reason, but then I realized you were still somewhere out there in the ether and now here you are. Welcome!
CHARLOTTE RYAN: Thank you. Do you often talk to people in parks? Do you go for walks and stop and chat to a stranger?
FB: Sometimes yes and sometimes no. And I don't know, I couldn't really identify what the conditions are exactly. You know, I suppose it depends on... It's funny, I feel like I have the most on the street sort of interaction with people for some reason in New York City,
CR: But New York people are known for being quite chatty, aren't they?
FB: Yeah, I like that the way that they kind of sort of pick up the existential thread that's going on in their head and they just kind of like, hello, welcome to my existential thread, And that's what we’ll talk about right now for the next 10 seconds. They don't mind talking out loud about whatever's going on. They don't mind being vocal for a few minutes. I think that if you're not from New York, sometimes you might misunderstand that sort of forwardness, for somehow being more aggressive than it really is. It's not meant to be aggressive. It's very conversational. But anyway…
CR: Charles, how are you? You've just come off a huge tour celebrating Teenager of the Year. How's it been? It must be quite crazy performing an album that you haven't really played, you know, that's 30 years on.
FB: Well, it was unusual that while we played the same repertoire with the same people 30 years ago, it was a different atmosphere. And the atmosphere was this. I was just some guy in a band that put out a couple of solo records. You know, I wasn't particularly well known or famous. I mean, I guess I made a living in stuff like that. I was successful in some regard, you know. I was still fairly young in my career. The record business was different then. I don't remember how many records teenager of the year sold when it first came out, but I want to say it sold about 200,000 copies, maybe something like that in North America anyway. And that would have been considered at the time to be quite mediocre, right? That would have been like, sorry that your record fell flat. know what I mean?
Nowadays, if someone were to sell 100,000 copies of something, it's sort of like, it's big news, you know, because Music doesn't really move through those streams anymore. It doesn't work like that, you know? So anyway, at the time, nothing was really happening. It wasn't like it was a happening time in my career. It was more like a sort of, I don't know, more humble season, shall we say, of my career. Tours then weren't really, you didn't really feel like you were on the big campaign. You know, like sometimes a record could be like, Ooh, he's doing the teenager of the year. It's the big teenager of the year. It's a big campaign. He's going to go all over the world all year long telling everyone how great it is. And, you know, it's just a big, you know, we're going to work the campaign. so if your campaign doesn't take off, right. Then what happens is, you start other campaigns and you jump onto more minor campaigns and you.
So you do tours that are kind of broken up and they don't, it sort of becomes less about like the banner. In this case, it was the teenager of the year banner, right? And it just becomes, you just become a working musician. So you just play shows and it's like, yeah, I guess we played shows that were technically flying the flag, but mostly we were just like working, playing gigs and. you know, I don't know how to describe it now. It's like, okay, for years, teenager of the year, the celebration. It's like this. Here we come. We're very old now, but here we go. One more time. Encore. It's like, even though it's kind of how do I put it?
Look, let's just be straight here.Yeah, it was a nice little tour. We played theaters and stuff. I looked my favorite place to play is theaters, you know, but I'm not fucking Bruce Springsteen here, right?
I'm not like, oh the big let's just call it what it is.
It's a nice, you know, cabaret show that, know, went around.
We did a little encore presentation of something we did 30 years ago. But this was the first time I'm trying to say that it sort of felt like we were on a kind of a weird campaign, know what I Because, and who were we in service of? Well, we were very much in service of Teenager of the Year. More so than we were the first time around, if you know what I'm saying.
Because now it's all about, oh, you're gonna do a legacy LP rec, you know, performance.
So you gotta do the songs in order and you make sure you gotta get them all right. You know?
And like, can you get the original people to do it? Well, good, because it'll sound that much more, you know, like the original thing, et cetera. And it sort of, turns into its own.
It's the same thing when the Pixies do one of their so-called legacy LP shows. Will we do those sometimes? And I enjoy those shows because it sounds really hokey to put it like this, but the event becomes bigger than us. It sounds really pompous to put it like that, but it's really about this record, right? Okay, so that's the schtick, that's the hook, that's the angle. Beloved, we have all gathered here tonight, you know what I mean? To hear the precious record and the precious sequence. You know what I mean? It's like we're putting a particular record up on a pedestal, right? And so...
CR: I was gonna say with Teenager of the Year, as you mentioned before, it was never put on a pedestal back in the day. Do you ever think about what would have happened if it had been celebrated as much as it is now? Cause it's kind of like a bit of a cult album now. Like, do you think you would have focused maybe on more Frank Black music?
FB: I don't know. Maybe I would have, it's interesting. That's a good question because if I had had more of a budget, what sort of records would I have done? Right. Where could I have really gone with that? You know, yeah, I don't know. It's nice if you get there honestly, or, you know, or not a lot of times, of course, one has to learn in art when you make art of any kind, of course, you know, sometimes there is an epiphany within the art form, right? An epiphany of the artist that declares less is more, right? And we need to get down to what it's really all about. We need to boil it down, simplify, minimise it somehow, strip it down. You can let the art form get more and more...complicated and more sophisticated and more complex, but you could also go the other way, you know? And so, you know, sometimes when you don't have a big budget, of course, you're okay. Well, I guess we're not going to do the strings. The orchestra's out. That's the first thing that's going out of the budget, right?
And so you work with whatever you work with different people or you work with a different type of entourage or you work a different kind of recording studio, you work a different, but you're still doing it. know what I mean? And so anyway, I guess sometimes what I'm saying is when you have to go through a more humble season, you sometimes have to strip it down and it becomes stripped down just because you have less to work with, you know? But Teenage of the Year was definitely, I was still riding high.
From the sort of the 1990s, the record business, we have lots of money and people sell lots of records and now, pop music is still held to a very, you know, it's one of the main things that people do with entertainment, you know what I mean?
I listen to popular music. It's sort of, it's not quite pre-internet, do you know what I mean? But you know, it's kind of pre-internet still, you know what I mean? People aren't. People don't have smartphones and cell phones and all that. And they didn't have streaming music and all that.
CR: How do you feel about cell phones at gigs? Because you must have quite a diverse audience. And sometimes we notice that an older audience will pick up their cell phones and just film the whole concert. Does that affect you at all on stage?
FB: Not really. We tend to...be not aloof, we're not interacting with the audience in a way that some artists do. Another artist might be conversational, you know what I mean, with their crowd, not only with their music, but with the immediate interaction. Hey, how are you doing tonight, everybody? Hey, we are all having a good time tonight, right? Hey. Right. There's that it's very instant, right? We don't really do that. And so it's much more preferable for the band to just play music, you know, and kind of focus on that and not tune the audience out. It's like, we're trying to do a good job. I want to get their approval. The way that we're gonna do it is we're not gonna go: ‘hi’.
The way we're gonna do it is we're gonna fucking dig in and try to do a really good job playing the repertoire. And so we dig in and sometimes it takes us 15 or 20 minutes, but then once we play for 15 or 20 minutes, we settle into some kind of a groove or whatever.
It becomes elevated and it becomes a better night even. turns a good evening into an excellent evening. Not only for the audience, but for the band.
It's at the same time, see what saying? And the only way we can achieve that, the best way to achieve that is to get the music happening.
And the best way we can get the music happening is to play the music.
And so we forgo a lot of the banter. But anyway, I don't know how I got on all of that.
CR: I love it. I love it. Because a lot of fans get upset when people don't talk to the audience or acknowledge them much. Which is quite funny because you were speaking about celebrating amazing albums - because Pixies are returning to Auckland and Wellington, even though you were just here with Pearl Jam. But you are doing two nights in each city and playing bossa nova on the first night and then trompe l'amande the second night. I'm so looking forward to that.
FB: Yeah. As a matter of fact, I think what we're going to be doing is we're playing bossa nova and trompe l'amande together on the same night.
CR: Oh, yay.
FB: Then the following night we will play a regular show, so to speak, that is whatever, whatever we want to play basically. But the one evening is dedicated to playing those two records, we do them back to back. And it's about an hour and 15 minutes, an hour and 20 minute show, maybe an hour and a half. Because we do, that's one of the few times that I'll chat to the audiences on those shows. Because again, it's not really the Pixies in concert. It is, we're there, we're doing a concert, but it's the Pixies in concert doing a particular scene from the movie. You know what I mean? It's like we're, it's more like we're in a theatrical kind of a production. You know what I mean? And we're just actors. We happen to be the original cast, but we're here to serve, we're here to serve the libretto. We're here to serve the songs or whatever, the experience, whatever it is that we associate with the so-called legacy LP that is being performed.
CR: What do you think of the word legacy? I use it, but I've got a funny thing with it. Do you mind the word legacy?
FB: No, I don't mind at all. no. I mean, if it's because it indicates age, you might avoid it, I suppose. From my point of view, it has the ring of, oh, you're still you're still selling tickets. You're still putting on a show. You know, you're still throwing down at the old nightclub. You're doing something. You're doing some song and dance. You know, if it's Chubby Checker, you know, performing somewhere in the world this evening. And actually he still does perform. I don't know how old he is. He's in his eighties, but you know, if it's Chubby Checker, uh, chances are this is going to be something going on to do with the twist. He's going to dance the twist or something and he's going to somehow do his job, right? The job that we know him for and it's the same thing. Same thing with what I do.
CR: Are you known to change any lyrics at all to your songs that you wrote 30 years ago?
FB: No, but I'm much more interested in trying to write a new song.
CR: Wrapping up Charles, when you come to New Zealand, you'll be in each city for two days, so you've got some time to potter around. When I interviewed David Lovering, your bandmate, a couple of years ago, he talked to me, and I was so fascinated about his metal hunting, and his metal detecting instruments that he takes along beaches to try and find rings and stuff. Do you have any hobbies like that that you do when you travel around the world?
FB: No, no, I don't travel with hobbies usually. Occasionally you can do artwork when you're traveling. Sometimes it's a little bit messy, but you can do it though, especially if you use water soluble in painting anyway, if you use water soluble paint, even in a nice hotel room, you could kind of mess around with paint and you wouldn't destroy your room. Yeah, I mean, like maybe one of your towels would get a little bit of paint on it and stuff, but it was water soluble. It would wash out of those other words, you know I mean? So that was about as messy as I got doing a hobby in my touring, traveling around with an extra suitcase with a bunch of art supplies, like small canvases and things like that. But yeah, that's the most I've ever done, but mostly I don't do that though. I mostly just like to walk around and pretend that I live there, you know, go to the grocery store and stuff like that.
CR: I love that. I hope I see you at the grocery store when you're here in Auckland, Charles. Thank you so much for your time and thank you so much for your music.
FB: Pleasure. Any old time
CR: Talk soon
Tickets for The Pixies in Auckland and Wellington here:
https://www.ticketmaster.co.nz/pixies-tickets/artist/906179
LOVED your chat with Frank Black! Nice to be able to read it too 😊. Thankyou
Thanks so much for this Charlotte - it is a great read, and sounds like it would have been a super fun chat!