‘We should be bigger than U2!’
Critically acclaimed and always inventive, Pere Ubu never reached the fame they might have deserved. Grant Smithies chats to their singer, the infamously cantankerous David Thomas.
Ican remember the exact moment my brain exploded. It was 1981, in Edinburgh, and I was in the basement bedroom of my flatmate Colin, who played drums in a local punk band.
A hyperactive stoner with excellent musical taste, Colin seemed to own only one T-shirt (sky blue, with the words ‘‘Hi Anxiety’’ on the front), and made me mix tapes jammed with lifechanging tunes by The Fall, This Heat, Wire, and The Feelies.
Then one night he dropped the stylus on The Modern Dance, the 1978 debut album by Cleveland, Ohio, rock band Pere Ubu. Between my ears, I felt a warm, wet thud as my grey matter detonated. It was music that sparked a thousand questions, which boiled down to just two: Who would possibly think of recording sounds like this? And what was it about Cleveland that made this sort of thing seem OK?
The music was a mix of harsh keyboard noise, surf guitars, and obscure pop reference s, and the main guy yowled out his vocals in a high, sing-song warble many would struggle to accept was even singing. Under screaming synths, opening song Non-Alignment Pact sounded like Chuck Berry and a band of punks on acid. I was smitten. The Modern Dance made most other albums sound hopelessly pedestrian, as if the makers simply lacked courage.
So you can imagine the mix of delight and terror I felt last week, 35 years after my brain blew up, to finally get hold of lead singer David Thomas on the phone.
Delight, because this is a band that still means a great deal to me. Terror, because Thomas – now 62 – is a notoriously tetchy interviewee.
‘‘Oh, no,’’ he protests, that odd high-pitched voice echoing down the line from his home in Brighton on England’s south coast. ‘‘You have me all wrong. People always make me out to be this easily irritated guy, but they just don’t get my sense of humour. I hope you let people know that I’m a charming and funny fellow.’’
This is half true. He is certainly funny, his conversation studded with punchlines as dry as the desert sand, the curmudgeonly persona quite possibly something he just slips on as a comfortable disguise, like an old overcoat.
But charming? Perhaps not. He groans. He sighs. If he thinks questions are beneath him, he waits in silence for a more acceptable one to be asked, and answers others with a simple ‘‘yep’’ or ‘‘uh-huh’’.
Raised as a Jehovah’s Witness, Thomas is a former music journalist who decided to stop writing about music and start making it instead. Thomas has written several books, and two operas, scored films, and lectured on ‘‘The Geography of Sound’’ at Oxford University. The South Bank Centre in London once hosted a three-day festival solely devoted to his music and writing.
He’s talking to me because a vinyl box set, Architecture of Language 1979-1982, has just been released, following set Elitism For The People, which rapidly sold out. This new one gathers together early albums New Picnic Time, The Art of Walking, and Song of the Bailing Man with a fourth LP of alternate takes and live recordings.
Inside you’ll find some of the richest, strangest pop music ever made. Give it a spin and your mind will explode, just like mine. But Thomas couldn’t care less if you buy it.
‘‘I just make this stuff; I don’t try to sell it. Frankly, I don’t care if people go and get a copy. It’d be nice, I guess, ’cos I’m still hoping for that billion-dollar stadium tour before I die. But if you ask me how much I care about record sales, the answer is ‘zippo’.’’
And there, perhaps, is one secret of Pere Ubu’s critical if not commercial success: their sound has evolved without regard to the musical marketplace.
Partially, says Thomas, this is because the band members came from comfortable middle-class families, ‘‘so if we couldn’t do exactly what we wanted in our music, we could always do something else.’’
Consequently, their sound has been guided by whatever new ideas they wanted to explore, whether or not these sonic experiments might be able to sell.
‘‘What you really mean to say is that Pere Ubu is the biggest commercial failure to ever exist. And you’re right! We should get some sort of special failure award from somebody. Considering our importance to history, culture, and how long we’ve been going at it, we should be bigger than U2!’’
Thomas claims to be perplexed by his band’s lack of commercial success. After all, it’s everybody else who’s doing the weird stuff. Justin Bieber, Beyonce, and Lady Gaga are the anomalies, as far as he’s concerned, while Pere Ubu is the mainstream.
‘‘There’s a manifest destiny of rock music, which is a straight line from Heartbreak Hotel to Brian Wilson to now, growing more complex as it goes. A lot of other music has deviated from that, and it’s gotten increasingly weakwilled and selfish, with everyone just whining about their feelings.’’
He pauses to allow me to share his revulsion. ‘‘Meanwhile, Pere Ubu is totally devoted to pop music, just as much as The Beatles or The Beach Boys ever were. What confuses people is that we love noise as much as we love pop music.’’
And besides, he says, rock music is part of his heritage, because it’s a uniquely American type of electrified folk music. ‘‘And that’s why people way down there in New Zealand can’t really play rock music. You don’t know how, because you don’t have the right cultural context.’’
This seems deliberately provocative, but Thomas claims he’s dead serious. ‘‘People will get bent out of shape if I say Kiwis
can’t play rock music. Well, you got your own damn music! Don’t slimeball over our culture! That’s just cultural imperialism, like when English indie bands in the ’ 90s started plundering snippets of ethnic music because they had no fresh ideas. Really, that borrowed stuff was just a bunch of gaudy foreign gee-gaws they’d paste on top of their own stupid pop song.’’
But American rock’n’roll didn’t arrive fully formed out of a vacuum. At its heart are African rhythms from the blues crossbred with country music, which was based around British and Irish folk tunes that came to America with the early settlers.
‘‘Yeah, of course. But that’s what we do in America, because America is a bunch of retards from all over the place, throwing their own stuff in the pot. But my point is – New Zealanders should work out how to make distinctively New Zealand music. You can’t know anything else unless you know who you are first, and why you are who you are.’’
Pere Ubu formed in Cleveland in 1975, arising from the ashes of previous band, Rocket From The Tombs. They were inspired by the questing space jazz of Sun Ra, the grinding punk racket of The Stooges and MC5, the melodic uplift of the Beach Boys, Glen Campbell, and The Monkees.
Cleveland itself also fed into the mix. Ubu synthesizer player Allen Ravenstine filled the songs with clanking, fizzing explosions of sound that recalled the city’s heavy industry. Thomas channelled the loneliness and paranoia of someone making a life for themselves near some cold corner of Lake Erie, in a city where most of the sound and light came from tyre factories, blast furnaces, and chemical refineries.
Then as now, Thomas cut a compelling figure as frontman – a guy so huge, he once went by the name Crocus Behemoth, using his voice in a tremulous, oddly strangled way, like a tentative trumpet player.
Pere Ubu once coined the term ‘‘avant-garage’’ to describe their singular mix of ruthlessly experimental music and raw garage rock. It was in part a reaction against earnest singer/songwriters’ confessional lyrics, a trend he describes as ‘‘pure evil’’.
Why should anyone else care about a stranger’s feelings? Thomas was more interested in capturing a very specific mental state. ‘‘We tried to embrace a sort of pure expressionism where if the song concerning jealousy or anger or depression or whatever, we wouldn’t tell that story in a traditional narrative way; the whole song WAS that feeling, right down to the sounds and structure we used.’’
Consequently, Thomas goes to some very weird places for his art. He shouts. He whispers. He screams like a stabbing victim and coos like a pigeon.
The amount of trivia that clogs up people’s lives has been a recurring theme in Thomas work. Way back in 1978, the band put out an EP called Datapanik In The
Year Zero, a collection of early singles exploring the idea that we’d soon be swamped with so much information, it would act as a sedative and nothing would mean anything any more.
‘‘Yep, and now here we are, at precisely that point. Look at all the Bowie death-week hysteria we saw recently. That wasn’t about Bowie; it was a bunch of selfish people transmitting their own feelings via every possible channel. Let’s not forget 150,000 other people died the very same day.’’
But surely such outpourings of emotion are unavoidable when influential cultural figures die. When Thomas himself finally drops into a very large grave, there’ll be no shortage of Pere Ubu obsessives eulogising him to the heavens.
‘‘Oh, no! That’s not gonna happen, because I’ve specified in my will that when I die, everything is to keep going. There’ll be people still running our ubuprojex website, and they’ll keep posting messages from me on Facebook and so on. Eventually, someone like you will try to interview me, and our office will say: ‘Oh, no, I’m sorry, David Thomas died two years ago’.’’