‘I blamed everyone else but I was the problem’: The Breeders on fallouts, reunions and 30 years of Last Splash

Despite decades of drugs and estrangements, the playful pop-grungers are back with new clarity and purpose. They discuss how a mutual appreciation of their 1993 opus made them put aside their differences

In any successful band, the proof that they’ve crossed from cultish acclaim to overground recognition hits each member differently. For the Breeders’ English bass player, Josephine Wiggs, it was when her sister and mother were visiting her in New York. The three were at the top of the Empire State Building and somebody tapped Wiggs on the shoulder to confirm her identity. It struck drummer Jim MacPherson suddenly at a sold-out show in Paris. “I was just totally blown away by being in a band that had catering following us around, because we actually had a crew now,” he recalls, a note of wonder in his voice three decades on. “I was so green compared to Kim and Kelley and Josephine – it was all so new to me. And when I saw the video for Cannonball on TV, that’s when I thought: ‘This is really special, this song is affecting people’.”

The infectiously gleeful Cannonball, released exactly 30 years before the day of our Zoom call, was the first single from the Breeders’ second album, Last Splash. The Dayton, Ohio band – fronted by singer, songwriter and guitarist Kim Deal (formerly Pixies’ bass player) and featuring her twin sister Kelley, also a guitarist – are in Nevada, on tour supporting Foo Fighters. September sees the second reissue of Last Splash and the start of a headlining US tour during which they’ll again play through the album in its entirety. It’s won the status of a modern classic marked by eccentricity: a disarming mix of art rock, grunge, guileless pop and punk noise, where opaque, often dark lyrics are cut with sardonic humour and both melodic and vocal sweetness. The sound of Kelley’s mic’d-up sewing machine features, while some of Kim’s vocals were recorded in the studio toilet. None of which sounds much like the makings of a UK Top 5 and US Top 40, platinum-certified hit.

“It encompasses everything,” agrees Kelley of the record. “It is legion. As we’ve been preparing to do the shows, one of the things I’ve discovered is that it sounds so effortless; [it’s as if] we went into a room and just jammed some stuff, then it was like, ‘There’s our record!’ It took a week and a half and we were so pleased with it. I love that that’s how it sounds. That’s not what happened: everything on there is highly curated, every ‘accidental’ thing …” she trails off. “It is, isn’t it? Do you not think it is?” she asks, catching her sister’s doubtful look.

“It’s the way you say it,” Kim replies, wary of any suggestion of a grand plan. “I’ve seen bands who have said: ‘We had a group meeting and decided we were going to make this album the sound of the global happiness that we wish the universe would live in.’ People have mock mantras and stuff, you know,” she scoffs. She reckons it’s partly the band’s resistance to using any sound that was then fashionable that has preserved Last Splash’s freshness. Although they’ve always been keen to experiment, the Breeders remain committed to analogue recording and all use the same vintage gear today as they did back then. MacPherson is still playing the drum kit his parents bought him in 1982, though he’s chewed through a few cymbals since, and Kim still works on her most promising lyrics using paper plates and an orange Sharpie.

In interview the Breeders are an entertainingly unguarded bunch, trading jokey slights and feigning outrage with an ease that comes only through years of closeness, though theirs is a chequered history. After a three-year high that included opening for Nirvana’s European tour and playing Lollapalooza, the band disintegrated around the time of Kelley’s arrest in 1994 for heroin possession and her subsequent spell in rehab. It was 24 years before the four made another record together, the triumphant All Nerve.

In the interim, Kim released an album as the Amps in 1995, with MacPherson and others, then revived the Breeders’ name in 1997 and put out two LPs with a different rhythm section and contributions from Kelley. Kim also spent some time in rehab and, in 2004, rejoined Pixies for their reunion tour before quitting for good in 2013. Along the way, she and MacPherson became estranged and ended up not speaking for 15 years, despite living in the same town, though neither can identify a specific trigger point. Her explanation is “individual psychological implosions”, but MacPherson now admits to “almost having a breakdown. I could blame everybody else but, really, I was the problem. I couldn’t handle things and that was a result of drugs and drinking.”

It’s been a bumpy ride, which raises the question as to what has drawn the “classic” Breeders lineup back together for two Last Splash anniversary tours, especially given that all members now have their own independent music projects. Kelley is half of the moody alt-pop duo R Ring and also plays with Protomartyr; Kim has her solo songwriting (an album under her own name is due next year) and seven-inch single series; MacPherson plays in an instrumental surf band called the Mulchmen; while Wiggs is tinkering with a backlog of music she recorded with UK drummer Jon Mattock. It was a combination of the band’s ineffable chemistry and the twins’ sobriety that convinced Wiggs to jump on board again in 2012. “I had played with Kim and Kelley in 2005, when we went to London to do the 25th anniversary of [record label] 4AD. They put on two nights of events and it was unexpectedly magical – first of all to be playing with Kim and Kelley being 100% present and second, just playing those songs. I thought that it would be a great opportunity.”

MacPherson agrees: “We had such a great formula together and I missed it so much. I deeply love that album and I wanted to see if that specialness between all four of us was still there.”

As Last Splash notches up its third decade, the band’s memories and emotions connected to its heyday are inevitably mixed. “It was a blast,” enthuses Kim. “We toured and went to different countries, people were so excited to see us play – it was so much fun. We were playing a lot with Teenage Fanclub at the time and quite a bit with Nirvana, we played with Luscious Jackson, she [Kim nods at Wiggs] fell in love, Urge Overkill … all those people.” If she could go back in time, Kim admits she would “stop drinking so much beer and smoking so much pot. It really amped up because of the touring cycle. If you’re working all the time you just have a certain amount of coffee and it’s not how much you drink when you’re not working. But when you go to work, you drink more coffee. Do that with beer …” Wiggs’s regrets are mainly sartorial, relating in particular to a pair of pleated trousers (“my ‘show pants’”) from a San Francisco charity shop. “My other cringe moment is when I see photographs of Lollapalooza and I’m wearing short shorts,” she winces. “Drummers are allowed to wear them but if you’re upfront, you shouldn’t be wearing shorts.”

So much for the Breeders’ unchangeable past. Beyond their 30th anniversary tour dates, the future lies open, as does the question of a new album. MacPherson readily admits he “would love to do another record with the girls” though Kim’s upcoming solo release (which features contributions from the other three) and touring commitments would have to be considered. Asked if she reckons there will be a follow-up to All Nerve, Kim looks expectantly around at her bandmates: “We’re still playing music together so I assume there will be. I mean, I hope. Do you?”

The 30th anniversary reissue of Last Splash is out on 22 September.

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