Kim Deal: a.k.a female vocalist of The Pixies
Kim Deal has never won any prizes for being the sexiest female vocalist alive, or even the best, but Pixies fans will know her as the female driving force behind one of the most pioneering rock bands of the last fifty years.
Deal, like the rest of The Pixies, didn’t dress to impress. As was the band’s indifferent stage-style—not confined to the stage, it has to be said, that was just how they did things, as if a huge stadium gig was as casual as a trip to the shops to buy milk—she regularly turned up to gigs in her baggy T-shirt and old jeans, approaching the mic as if singing was just something to do to curb the boredom. Then she’d open her mouth and the crowd would fall first silent, before quickly turning hysterical. From that point on she’d be in her own world for the entire gig—not that the crowd was excluded from that world: what marks her above the rest is that she was never less than fully committed. For Deal it wasn’t about the image, the marketing, the ticket sales or the fame; she just loved to sing and did so in a way that sank the hearts of a million men and women.
Deal’s trademark song has to be Gigantic; a remarkably up-beat Pixies number which sees the bands usually unrelenting beats almost entirely suppressed to allow Deal’s vocals to shine through. What is always apparent in her singing is this: she’d be doing it whether anyone was listening or not.
Although it’d be fair to say that in many Pixies song Deal seems close to absent, you can’t get a proper sense of where Deal was coming from without listening to all their albums; there are surprises from Doolittle to Surfer Rosa and everything in between.
The only other thing, I have spent the remaining part of my weekend going through home information packs with my sister. Last week her place in London was broken into and it was kind of the last straw for her, so she decided it was finally time to find a new place. I am really looking forward to her finding a new house, I mean I love Cristina, but sometimes I find it rather difficult to deal with her when she is worried about something
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