Black is back The Pixies leader talks about the break-up, the reunion, and the band’s return to Boston BY MATT ASHARE

There are good ways to begin an interview and bad ways. Forgetting the name of the lead singer of the Verve (’member them?) when you’re talking to the lead singer of the Verve and they’ve got the hottest single in England falls into the latter category. Waking up the occasionally grumpy Charles Thompson, who you might know under his Pixies nom-de-rock Black Francis or his post-Pixies stage name Frank Black, from a pre-gig nap in his Minneapolis hotel room could also have been a minor disaster. Then again, Thompson has a lot to be happy about these days thanks to a prolonged Pixies reunion tour that, along with netting him and his cohorts the kind of money they never saw the first time around, has been one of the bigger stories of the year. (They’ll finally hit the Boston area this week with two shows at the Tsongas Arena, in Lowell, on Wednesday and Thursday, December 1 and 2.) And, while it’s a groggy Thompson who greets me on the other end of the line, it turns out he was counting on me to wake him up.

"You’re my wake-up call," he says without a hint of sarcasm. And, without even pausing to throw some water on his face, he pulls himself together to answer the one question he must be absolutely sick of hearing. What finally brought the Pixies back together after a 12-year hiatus and a break-up that was reportedly messy? "Hmmm ..." he pauses to collect his thoughts, "Well, here we go ... it was my idea. I made a joke on a radio show. The joke was taken seriously instead of sarcastically. The joke was reported in magazines and newspapers over the following days. So everyone just assumed there was a reunion in the works. And rather than fight this wave of silliness, I just called Joey and said, ‘What the hell.’ There you go: that’s the whole story."

Simple enough. But after a decade that had seen the rise and fall of the kind of alternative rock the Pixies represented, accompanied by decreasing record sales for Black’s numerous solo albums and the seeming inability of Pixies bassist Kim Deal to get her once-very-successful post-Pixies outfit, the Breeders, back on track, it wasn’t as if the world were screaming for a Pixies reunion. Indeed, as Thompson himself points out, there were a number of indications that nobody really cared anymore, beginning with the relative lack of interest the public had shown in the Pixies retrospective and rarities discs Elektra threw together after the label finally got word that the band had been one of Kurt Cobain’s favorites. "None of those things ever sold very well," Thompson concedes. "They always sold less than expected. But people were continuing to buy the whole back catalogue. You have to remember, Doolittle came out in 1989, and we all received gold discs for that five years later. So it was slow going. We’re an acquired taste."

Nevertheless, by the time I caught my first Pixies reunion show, last spring at the giant Coachella festival in the middle of the desert somewhere near Palm Springs, there was little doubt that demand for the Pixies had expanded exponentially in the band’s absence. Around 40,000 people crammed their way into the space before the festival’s main stage for the Pixies, and proceeded to sing, shout, and pump their fists along to such obscure nuggets as "Bone Machine," "Where Is My Mind," and "U-Mass." Coachella made it clear that the Pixies had picked a great time for a comeback, and that the band were going to spend the next several months playing arenas, not clubs. Says Thompson, "After Coachella, our manager called up the promoters and asked for more money. They didn’t even blink. They gave us more money."

Now that’s not the kind of thing that happens every day in the greedy concert business. And yet Thompson, who at 39 has been around the old rock-and-roll block a time or two, remains circumspect about the events of the past year. I wouldn’t characterize his tone as blasé or aloof. But he approaches the Pixies’ newfound popularity with a bemused reserve. "I’m very accepting of these events," he says. "But I’m never going to be amazed. We’re just not the kind of band who do jigs backstage. It’s all little winks and nudges, but it’s never high-fives. We just don’t take ourselves too seriously. That’s not to say there’s some big façade or that there’s nothing driving us. It’s just, you know, we have a gig Thursday night, we hope some people are going to come, and we’re going to try really hard. I’m not talking literally about a gig next Thursday night. I’m talking about our gig in 1986 at some club. That’s where we’re at. And that’s where we’ve always been."

Thompson won’t even concede he heard echoes of the Pixies in Nirvana. But he doesn’t suffer from low artistic self-esteem. "I wasn’t surprised by what Kurt said. My fans are many, including other rock musicians. You could say we’re kind of a musician’s band. Or an active listener’s band. Our only hit song was ‘Here Comes Your Man,’ and that was simply the luck of a simple chord progression and a catchy melody. It had nothing to do with the lyric because it’s not a romance song. The lyrics are totally abstract. In fact, it’s not a typical pop song in that regard at all."