Mew 'Excited' to Support the Pixies

Danish trio Mew are set to kick off a stateside jaunt next week in Philadelphia, but they'll take a break from their headlining trek to support one of their favorite bands of all time, the Pixies.

"I'm really excited for the show," Mew frontman Jonas Bjerre tells Spinner from the UK, where his band is currently on tour. "You know if I could travel back in time and tell my teenage self that I would be supporting the Pixies, I probably wouldn't believe myself. Too bad it's only one show, but it's going to be fantastic."

Surprisingly, Mew have never crossed paths with their heroes -- they've appeared on the same festival bills, but never on the same days. And although the Danes have caught the Pixies live, they never actually met the group that they are about to support on the Dec. 1 date of the 'Doolittle' tour in Washington, D.C.

"I got to know the Pixies through a friend of mine. I had this older friend when I was a teenager who introduced me to cool music," Bjerre explains of his early love for the group. "He actually lent me all the albums at once. 'Trompe Le Monde' was probably the first album I heard by them, but 'Doolittle' was probably my favorite."

As for their own support acts stateside, Mew will be giving the slot to different openers, chosen via a contest they are running on their website.

"We didn't really know what to do about the US tour and who was going to support and we just thought it would be a fun idea to give people a chance to send in their music and maybe we could discover something really interesting and bring it on tour," Bjerre says. "It'll be a different band every night and that's going to be fun for us."

The band won't have much time between their last European date -- a hometown show in Copenhagen on Nov. 28 and the American opener Nov. 30 at Philly's Trocadero -- but Bjerre does have a secret weapon.

"Actually I was introduced to these minty eyedrops you can only get in Japan. I have no idea what's in them because it's in Japanese, but you can buy them over the counter," Bjerre says of his stay-awake secret. "Basically what they do is they sting like hell in your eyes for like a minute and then afterwards you're just like completely awake, even if you're tired. I've used them a couple of times just before I went onstage."

So does that mean Njerre's eyelashes smell of mint?

"Yeah, they kind of do," he laughs. "It's kind of like putting Tiger Balm in your eyes."