The Pixies proved so influential that it’s now almost impossible to imagine how bizarre they seemed on arrival in the late 80s. Their second full-length album, Doolittle, was released in April 1989, towards the end of a startling 18-month period for experimental US guitar rock. It had seen the release not just of Doolittle’s predecessor, Surfer Rosa, but Sonic Youth’s Daydream Nation, Mudhoney’s Superfuzz Bigmuff, You’re Living All Over Me and Bug by Dinosaur Jr, Bongwater’s Double Bummer, the Butthole Surfers’ Hairway to Steven, debut albums by Royal Trux and Fugazi, Soundgarden’s Ultramega OK and Galaxie 500’s Today; a few weeks after Doolittle came out, it was followed by Nirvana’s Bleach.

It was all happening, but somehow the Pixies seemed apart from it all. They were not arty New York hipsters, nor part of the burgeoning Seattle scene, nor graduates from the punishing US hardcore circuit, although their songs occasionally careered along with the breakneck pace and lockstep rhythm of Hüsker Dü’s New Day Rising. Their other influences were hard to place, which was unsurprising, given that frontman Black Francis’s tastes ran to Christian rock pioneer Larry Norman, author of Forget Your Hexagram, No More LSD for Me, and Why Should The Devil Have All The Good Music? They didn’t look like a hip US alt-rock band with a penchant for screaming about weird sex and Biblical violence (like his love of Larry Norman, the latter was a legacy of Francis’s upbringing, in a Pentecostal household big on divine healing and speaking in tongues). Black Francis was chubby and balding, and the only member who looked like they belonged on stage was the bassist, who preferred to go under her married name of Mrs John Murphy. For reasons unexplained, their lyrics occasionally lapsed into Spanish and their promotional T-shirts read Death to the Pixies.

Doolittle was an album audibly intended to push the Pixies into the big time, or at least as close to the big time as a US indie band could hope to get in 1989, an age when mainstream rock meant Phil Collins and Tina Turner. Out went producer Steve Albini, who’d recorded Surfer Rosa in 10 days, occasionally in the studio toilet; in came Gil Norton, who’d worked with Echo and the Bunnymen and Del Amitri. The previous album’s biggest hit had been Gigantic, a song on which Mrs John Murphy, or Kim Deal as she was later known, spent four minutes admiring the size of an African-American man’s penis. By contrast, Doolittle’s lead single was Monkey Gone to Heaven, a richly melodic take on voguish environmental concerns, followed by Here Comes Your Man, a toothsome love song in which the size of anyone’s genitals went unaddressed.

But the sheer weirdness of the Pixies still seeped through. You could tell from the tracklisting that their notion of a lunge for mainstream acceptance didn’t involve toning down Francis’s obsession with violence: Gouge Away, Wave of Mutilation, I Bleed. The album lasted approximately 20 seconds before confronting you with a reference to Luis Buñuel; Dead, meanwhile, offered a retelling of the saga of David and Bathsheba set to a one-note riff. Indie music of the time tended to avoid the more visceral aspects of sex in favour of yearning romantic longing: by contrast, the Pixies were, to borrow a phrase from their erstwhile producer, very obviously singing songs about fucking. You didn’t need to be an expert in musical semantics to work out what all the gasping and grunting that punctuated Francis and Deal’s vocals on Tame or Hey was meant to signify. When the topic of the Pixies comes up, you tend to hear a lot about Francis’s ability scream (heard to pretty devastating effect on Debaser) but less about his ability to leer, his way of delivering an apparently innocuous lyric – “fall on your face in those bad shoes”, “six-foot girl, gonna sweat when she digs” – in a way that suddenly made it sound like the filthiest thing imaginable.

At its best, Doolittle was almost impossibly thrilling, packed with evidence of why alt-rock shifted in the Pixies’ wake. As Gouge Away roars into life, or during Tame’s series of barely-controlled explosions, or at the moment, 30 seconds before the song’s end, when I Bleed suddenly spins off on a completely unexpected melodic tangent, they seemed completely imperious: what rock band wouldn’t want to sound at least a little like that? Nevertheless, with the benefit of hindsight, you can hear the first seeds of the Pixies demise being sown. Everything that happened over the course of Surfer Rosa’s 32 minutes had seemed utterly gripping and essential; by contrast, Doolittle boasted an admittedly scant handful of longeurs. Some of them may have been a result of the burgeoning power struggles within the band. Kim Deal got only one co-songwriting credit on Doolittle, the parched and eerie country drone of Silver – in an act of astonishing pig-headedness, the Pixies declined to perform any of the Deal-penned songs that ended up on the Breeders’ fantastic debut album, Pod. Blessed with two fantastic songwriters, they made the demented decision to gag one of them, rather than accommodate them both, at precisely the point when Francis’ own writing showed the first signs of faltering: the sneaking suspicion that a song like La La Love You amounted to filler was hard to avoid.

And as the extra discs of Peel Sessions and demos in this deluxe edition reveal, others stemmed from the band’s attempts to bridge the gulf between the way they actually sounded and something that might conceivably be acceptable to a mainstream audience. On Doolittle, There Goes My Gun sounded pleasantly inconsequential: taken at white-knuckle speed in the BBC studios, the guitars on the verge of chaos, it sounded vital.

In fact, they would never sound quite as vital again. Doolittle’s push for the big time worked, at least in Britain: improbably enough, it made the top 10. There were fantastic songs afterwards, but also a feeling that diminishing artistic returns had set in. It was a shame, but as it turned out, the Pixies had already done all that they needed to do.