Songfacts®:

• Like many songs written by Black Francis, "Cactus" takes a familiar musical form - sun-bleached surf rock - and warps it into something unsettling. Beneath the twang and snap is a dark, slightly sordid narrative that feels closer to "Bone Machine" than the carefree sound suggests.
• The song is narrated by a man separated from his lover, often interpreted as a prison inmate, though Francis leaves the details deliberately vague. A letter isn't enough. The narrator wants something physical, something that hurts.
  
  He asks his lover to walk into the desert, bloody her hands on a cactus, wipe the blood and sweat onto a dress, and mail it to him. The request turns longing into something obsessive, even fetishistic. This isn't romance - it's craving stripped to the nerve.
• Between the second verse and the chorus, the band spells out "P-I-X-I-E-S," a nod to T. Rex, who spelled out their name in "The Groover." Bassist Kim Deal refused to take part, calling the moment "trite", so her voice is conspicuously absent.
• Recorded by Steve Albini, the track features his characteristically natural, room-driven drum sound and tightly wound guitars. The stripped-down production heightens the song's desperation, much as on "Tame," where sudden space and near-silences hit as hard as the noise.
• David Bowie, a longtime Pixies fan who once called them "the most influential band of the late '80s," covered "Cactus" on his 2002 album Heathen. Bowie kept the arrangement close to the original but changed the spelling break to "D-A-V-I-D," turning the moment into a sly self-reference.
• On his version, Bowie played nearly all the instruments himself, including drums. "That was a later addition, recorded right at the very end when there was just David and I in the studio," his producer, Tony Visconti, told Uncut magazine. "David played the drums, not continuously but I made a decent loop on Pro Tools. I played bass, he did guitar and I did the backing vocals with my T. Rex voice, which David always liked, where I sang falsetto. We had a ball making that song, and Frank Black was thrilled about it."