(Credits: Far Out / Roger Woolman / Alamy)
Fri 17 October 2025 23:30, UK
“Look at a band like Nirvana,” Bruce Springsteen once said. “That’s a band that reset the rules of the game. They changed everything, they opened a vein of freedom that didn’t exist previously.”
Spilling out from the rain-slicked streets of Seattle, the grunge group grabbed youth culture by the lapels and shook it like a flatpack wardrobe on the San Andreas faultline. Kurt Cobain had a voice that could stir honey into tea from a thousand paces. Dave Grohl had a rhythm that could start a party in an empty house. And together, with Krist Novoselic, they wrote tunes that rewired the circuitry of modern pop.
As Springsteen continued regarding their raucous influence in his remarks to Guitar World in 1995, “The singer did something very similar to what Dylan did in the ’60s, which was to sound different and get on the radio. Your guitarist could sound different and get heard. So there are a lot of very fundamental rules that they reset, and that type of band is very few and far between.”
That sense of inspiration and seizing the zeitgeist is perhaps what crowned them as manna from heaven in a wayward age more than anything else, because musically, they’d be the first to tell you that they were simply ripping off a great that had some slightly before them, and suffered from the artists’s accountant’s most dreaded adage: being too far ahead of their time.
As Sam Fogarino of Interpol once told Q Magazine in 2011, when declaring the Pixies the most influential band of the last 25 years: at first he “felt vile” when he listened to their darkened sound, then he “felt violated”, before arriving at the conclusion that they were “the most brilliant fucking thing since sliced bread”.
The guitarist, whose scything style is comparable to Joey Santiago’s playing – if it’s comparable to anyone’s at all – proclaimed that the level of the Pixies’ influence “hasn’t changed because it’s ageless music and that’s a very rare thing to stumble upon.” From the very get-go, before the rest of the world had recognised the magic of the Pixies, this same sentiment united Dave Grohl and Kurt Cobain, and cemented the sound of Nirvana.
In both Grohl’s ten favourite albums of all time list and Cobain’s hand-written list of the 11 records he admired the most, Surfer Rosa sits pretty. It gave them a glimpse of the future, with Grohl commenting, “It was so necessary at that time for someone to incorporate elements of quirky, weird punk into sweet pop.”
Pixies’ debut album, Surfer Rosa, from 1988. (Credits: Album Cover)
Adding, “It influenced a whole generation of bands, which then influenced a whole generation, so this album is probably one of the most influential albums of the last 15 years. It probably made Steve Albini most famous for his production, too. Nirvana always made sure everyone knew we were just ripping off the Pixies.”
Cobain practically took up a position on their PR team every time the late frontman gave an interview. When discussing ‘Smells Like Teen Spirit’, he famously told Rolling Stone, “I was trying to write the ultimate pop song. I was basically trying to rip off the Pixies.” He also told them that he “should have been in that band, or at least in a Pixies cover band.”
He’d often joke that he just about was. “We used their sense of dynamics, being soft and quiet and then loud and hard,” he said of how they set the blueprint with Surfer Rosa’s scything style. They also borrowed their sense of truly being grounded in pop. Beyond the roaring weirdness, Surfer Rosa, in particular, was so perfectly grounded in typical structuring, hooks and catchiness that its waveform could just about mirror a Hoagy Carmichael effort.
Which is partly why Grohl later commented, “We were all kind of blown away that [the Pixies] never made it big.” It was these two points – their lack of true commercial success, and the pop core that made that flopping unfathomable – that David Bowie conflated when he mused that they were the “psychotic Beatles” who sadly never cracked the charts.
“In America, they just didn’t ignite people the way they ignited them in Europe. There was such a lot of sludge in America at the time and I think the Pixies had a real hard time pushing their way to the surface,” Bowie said in glowing terms.
The debut was even released exclusively in the UK via the ever-reputable 4AD label and was only available in their native US as an import. In the States, they were as much of an unknown entity as The Velvet Underground were in their pomp despite the fact that Surfer Rosa was a glimmering reimagining of modern music in many people’s eyes.
But as Brian Eno once said, “The first Velvet Underground record sold only 30,000 copies in its first five years. Yet, that was an enormously important record for so many people. I think everyone who bought one of those 30,000 copies started a band.” Something similar happened in the US with Surfer Rosa, and one of those turned out to be Nirvana, with a mutual love uniting the drummer they needed, with the singer set to be an unlikely star, when nothing seemed certain beforehand.
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