This is the second version of Pixies’ song Wave Of Mutilation (aka the “UK Surf” version) that appeared on the B-side of Here Comes My Man.

When I was driving across America in 1989 this song entered my life and introduced me to The Pixies – though not in this version.

I doubt I heard it on the car radio; my main memory of the radio stations as I drove along I-40 from east to west is of country music and, when we got closer to the border, Mexican music.

After stopping off to see the freakish scenery of White Sands – scene of the first atom bomb test – I bought a cassette of Doolittle in a little shop on the town square in Las Cruces, New Mexico.

So it was my soundtrack as I headed to the border before crossing the border from El Paso to Juarez, and for much of the rest of my journey through New Mexico, Arizona and Southern California ’til I hit the Pacific at Long Beach.

So many of the songs stuck in my head immediately: Debaser and the two singles – Here Comes Your Man and Monkey Gone To Heaven – and this one, Wave Of Mutilation.

It came back to me last night while watching the excellent new Netflix drama The Beast In Me, with Claire Danes pulling many of the same twitchy faces she pulled in Homeland and Matthew Rhys rocking the high-contrast black hair / white teeth vibe required of every over-50 actor in Hollywood.

It soundtracked a scene involving a car and a drowning (no spoiler): apt placement for a song initially inspired by a wave of Japanese men committing murder-suicides after their business failed, by driving their families off piers into the ocean in the 1980s.

There are two very different versions of the song: this is the gentler “UK Surf” version used in the programme, and on the B-side of the single Here Comes Your Man – and I think it may be the first time I’ve heard it.

And this is the album version: