Pixies vocalist/guitarist Frank Black isn't quite sure which studio his late group was in when it recorded the 15 tracks that have become The Pixies At The BBC.

But he has no doubts that recording music for the venerable British rock radio-program "The John Peel Show" wasn't your average session.

"You've got a studio for a day. There's an engineer and a producer -- the producer is usually the drummer from Mott the Hoople or something," said Black, 33, of recording for the popular show. "There's an aging, rocker-guy producer and a young, up-and-coming BBC engineer. You only get to do the show if John Peel likes you. It's his show and that's the only criteria; there has to be some mental connection. He's the gatekeeper over there."

The studios Black said he remembered from the sessions ranged from "a cool building, an old theater" to "an old building they closed down for Legionnaire's Disease and now it's open again. It's a scary labyrinth of a studio, very kind-of Soviet in layout," he explained.

No matter where the music was recorded, Robin Hurley, CEO of the Pixies' 4AD label, said that Tuesday's release in tandem with last year's retrospective, Death To The Pixies, should satisfy fan cravings for more Pixies tunes.

"Last year, we released Death To The Pixies, which featured the best tracks taken from their official albums," Hurley said. "To fill the fans' need for new material, we decided to delve into the BBC archive. When they were active, they released everything they wrote, so this is the last exploitation of the Pixies we have planned at the moment."

Before their split in 1993, Black, bassist Kim Deal, guitarist Joey Santiago and drummer David Lovering cultivated a faithful underground following that hung on Black's every opaque word and embraced the schizophrenic dynamics that marked albums such as 1988's Surfer Rosa and 1989's Doolittle.

Spanning six sessions and three years, beginning in October 1988 and concluding in June 1991, The Pixies At The BBC features the Boston-based quartet working through songs from its creative heyday such as a sweetened "Monkey Gone To Heaven" (RealAudio excerpt), "Wave Of Mutilation" (RealAudio excerpt) and a raucous updating of the Beatles' "Wild Honey Pie" (RealAudio excerpt).

Peel gave the band complete freedom to select its own material, Black said, to the point of not attending most of the sessions.

Left to their own devices, the Pixies didn't dig into the vaults and unearth any unheard music, mostly because there really wasn't any, the baby-faced singer added.

"Pretty much everything we recorded got released. 'Wild Honey Pie' was part of our show and one of the few covers we did know," Black said of the Pixies' punked-up version of the tune.

"It was a quirky selection, obviously, and I mean it was quirky as far as the Beatles were concerned," Black said. "We quirked it up even more, because we were such fabulous musicians. It was like, 'I think I sort-of learned how to perform the song and now I'm going to perform it for you.' I'm sure there were a lot of subtleties we kind-of skipped over."