David Thomas died in Hove on 23 April. He was 71. Lest there be any confusion, dear reader, as to which David Thomas we’re talking about, this is the guy who would introduce himself with ‘I’m David fucking Thomas and I’m the lead singer in the greatest fucking rock ‘n’ roll band in the world’. Is anyone arguing?
I first came across him when I was living in the Caribbean in the mid-1970s. There wasn’t much contact with the outside world. There was no TV, no short-wave radio so no World Service, no fax, no email obviously.
Life was slow. A boat came once a week to collect the island’s export bananas and it would bring the mail, usually about a month late.
One day, I took receipt of an album called The Modern Dance by a band called Pere Ubu, who I recognised were named after a nineteenth century avantgarde play I’d seen once in another life.
Music was important to me and I had assembled a powerful hi-fi in my house on the beach. It was a rare source of recorded music for most of my friends.
The Vincentians I knew liked Lord Kitchener or sometimes Jimmy Cliff. The Americans invariably went for the Eagles and the Europeans liked Elton and ELO. Leo Sayer was huge.
As a preparation for Pere Ubu and its lead singer, who, at that time, was still calling himself Crocus Behemoth, this was however a very far from adequate preparation.
The Modern Dance
Before we proceed and given we now have the questionable benefit of being able to access, in the blink of an eye, (most of) the entire history of recorded music, I suggest you pull up this very Long Player right now.
You could start at the beginning but, if you only have three minutes, play the title track. Or you can play this much more recent video of the same piece. Either way, turn the system up LOUD and hold on to your chair.
You will quickly see why, when the Martians come to write the history of popular music, Pere Ubu will be high up on the scoresheet. The Eagles they ain’t.
My story continues when, having played the record incessantly, even managing to enlighten some of my beachcomber friends to a phenomenon that I assured them must be taking over the world beyond our horizons, I was unexpectedly visiting the UK.
I saw Pere Ubu were doing a gig at Uxbridge Poly, a place out on the edge of the known universe.
Anticipating having to fight my way through the screaming crowds, I got there an hour early only to find a completely empty gym and a few desultory Americans propping up an uninviting bar. Surely some mistake, I thought. Have I got the wrong night?
Long story short, this colossal, somewhat intimidating guy – half man, half bigfoot – lumbered over, mumbled awkwardly to us for a few minutes, then repaired to a makeshift stage to start up a bewildering racket which involved a lot of feedback and screeching and the big man beating a sheet of corrugated iron with a hammer.
I was thrilled to bits but puzzled as to why only a handful of people had shown up and not the million punters there should have been. In my exile and isolation I’d heard there had been a punk revolution. Had I been misinformed? Weren’t the people told?
‘He rarely sang in tune’
Described as “harsh and wilfully ugly” by the taste police, Pere Ubu had formed in Cleveland in 1975. They drew inspiration from sources such as musique concrète, performance art, 60’s garage rock and the industrial decay of what were to become known as the rust belt cities.
The band’s name “wouldn’t mean anything to 95% of an audience,” Thomas said once, “I wanted to create a band that Herman Melville, William Faulkner or Raymond Chandler would have wanted to be in.”
They blasted out a cacophonous howl of rhythmic bass, junkyard percussion, saxophones and Thomas’s wild growling, bleating and yelping.
It was post-punk before punk. They released nearly 20 albums over the years. There are several compilations, all terrific.
I saw the band play another time at the Festival Hall in the early 2000s, the din they made still resolutely fearsome. I was bemused to see people wearing earplugs.
Unfortunately I missed them in Brighton where they played twice after I came to live here: in 2013at the Haunt, and the report for that suggests Thomas had already been living here for a while; and at the Komedia in July 2015 where the Argus reported quite needlessly that ‘lead singer David Thomas rarely sang in tune’.
The other genius
Pere Ubu were a seminal influence on all the left field music that came after them, from the Ramones to the Fall to Sonic Youth and the Pixies and everything beyond.
Other fans ranged from Rebus writer Ian Rankin to Beach Boys lyricist Van Dyke Parks, who once introduced Thomas to the late and much lamented Brian Wilson with the words: “Meet the other genius”.
And never mind Laurel Canyon or Greenwich Village, he lived in Hove! A giant walking among us. This is making me dizzy.
I’ve heard a thousand and one stories about where Nick Cave lives, and Norman Cook and Jimmy Somerville and Chris Eubank and Peter Andre, but no word of David Thomas’s Amazon geolocation number has filtered down to me. At all. It’s a bit hard to believe.
I think if I had known this earlier I might have been drawn in to stalking around his house. Why wasn’t his presence better known? He was a genuinely great artist. Why didn’t the Mayor throw a party for him? We call ourselves a progressive town? We think we’re interested in the arts? What the hell is going on?
Many performers get safe and boring as they get old and their obituaries tell you to remember them as they were when they were young.
This doesn’t apply here.
David Thomas never held back from his need to push the envelope. There’s not that much of early Pere Ubu on video but you can find two exceptional mid-period pieces 30 Seconds Over Tokyo (2013) and Dub Housing (2011).
The band’s Facebook page tells us Thomas died “with the MC5 playing on the radio” so maybe it’s appropriate to sign off with a startling MC5 cover that David did relatively recently. Even the band are smiling.
Why not remember him this way?
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