THE 12″ LUCKY DIP (40): Pixies – Digging For Fire

Here’s one that might be a wee treat…….

mp3: Pixies – Dig For Fire (single version)

It was the follow-up to Velouria, which in July 1990 had given Pixies their first ever Top 30 hit in the UK.  It was the second single lifted from the album Bossanova which itself had gone Top 3 in August 1990.

Rather strangely, given the band were at the height of their commercial success in the UK, Dig For Fire stalled at #62 when it was released in November 1990.  I suspect many fans chose not to buy the single as they’d already shelled out on the parent album – I’ll hold my hand up as being that type of fan at a time when money was a bit tight.

What I didn’t know, and indeed didn’t find out until decades later when I picked up a second-hand copy, was that the version issued as a single was a very different remix from that found on the album.  I’m not sure if it’s ever been made available elsewhere  – certainly the version to be found on the Death to The Pixies compilation that was released in 1997 contains the album version, and judging by the timings provided on Discogs for the 2004 compilation Best of Pixies (Wave of Mutilation), it again appears to contain the album version.   But then again, I’ve never bought any of the re-releases in recent years, and it might well have popped up somewhere.

I’m kind of kicking myself that it’s taken so long to post this version.  It was probably about 15 years ago that I picked up my copy and I remember playing it and going ‘oh!!!!’.  But I don’t appear to have ever converted it to any sort of mp3, and that was probably as much to already having the other three songs via my copy of the Complete B-sides CD that had come out in 2001.

Better late than never!!!

mp3: Pixies – Velvety (Instrumental Version)
mp3: Pixies – Winterlong
mp3: Pixies – Santo

As Frank Black explains in the notes that came with the 2001 b-sides compilation, the title Velvety (Instrumental Version) implies that there was a version with lyrics, but there never was, and he thinks he wrote it when he was about 15.  Winterlong was always one of his favourite Neil Young songs, and was probably recorded at 5am, like most Pixies b-sides.  As for Santo, this was a track, among a handful of others, recorded at a little studio in the basement of a hairdresser shop, presumably in Boston.

JC