Born on June 10th: Kim Deal (Pixies), a magnificent form of dissonance

The life of the 1961 native of Dayton, Ohio, has always been fascinating but somewhat chaotic.

Along with her twin sister Kelley, to whom she has always been very close, Kimberley Ann (her full name) had a boundless passion for hard rock bands like AC/DC and Led Zeppelin when they were both kids. Always a little resistant to authority, she was nonetheless one of the cheerleaders at school, and got pretty good grades. "We were pretty much part of the popular girls, but for my sister and me, Dayton was like living in the Soviet Union. We were bored to death!" Kim Deal said, recalling her early years. As teenagers, their interest quickly turned to artists such as Siouxsie & The Banshees and Elvis Costello, whose tapes (pirated, of course) they received from an older friend. However, her very first band, formed of course with her twin, flirted more with folk rock. Kim immediately found it easier to write her own songs than to clumsily reproduce the choruses of other artists. "I wrote a few hundred back then. Musically, it was more or less all right, but the lyrics were very flowery!

The idea of trying her luck professionally in music was always present. In January 1986, she answered an anonymous ad from a band looking for a bassist who "appreciated both Husker Dü and Peter, Paul & Mary", and joined the still fledgling Pixies. "I was the only one to reply," she says, "and they didn't know that my instrument of choice was the guitar!

For the band's first album,"Come On Pilgrim" (1987), she chose to present herself under the pseudonym Mrs John Murphy, an ironic (and feminist) foil to women who wished to be known to society only by their husbands' names.

Faced with the strong personality of Black Francis (a.k.a. Frank Black), the Pixies' authoritarian singer, Kim nonetheless won a few pledges. She co-wrote and sang "Gigantic", the only single from "Surfer Rosa" (1988). She tried to repeat the feat later, but the increasingly obvious tensions between the two strong heads and the bassist's penchant for alcohol led to the band's first split after the very average "Trompe le monde" (1991). Twenty-three years would pass before the Pixies returned to the studio to make "Indie Cindy" (2014). But Kim Deal, who was back on stage with them, had already slammed the door for good.

It has to be said that she has never put all her eggs in one basket. At first, she saw The Breeders as a side project with her girlfriend Tanya Donelly (Throwing Muses). Their second album "Last Splash" (1993), before the project collapsed, even brought them an almost unhoped-for commercial success with "Cannonball". Joined by her sister, Kim continued the Breeders' adventure to the present day, with no less than five studio albums and influences ranging from folk, as on "Drivin' On 9", to surf, as on "Do You Love Me Now?

While in the past she had attached her name alone to a small handful of singles (some of which, like the superb "Are You Mine?", have been given a second life), in 2024 Kim Deal decided to release "Nobody Loves You", her first album on her own. Her sister Kelley is obviously present alongside her, as are, for example, Jack Lawrence from Les Raconteurs and a few members of Teenage Fan Club.

Photo: Kim Deal with The Pixies at the Torhout Festival (Belgium), July 8, 1989