You buy me a ticket to a sonic reductionGuitars gonna sound like a nuclear destructionIt seems I’m the victim of natural selectionMeet me on the other side, another direction
“My name is David Fucking Thomas… and I’m the lead singer of the best fucking rock n’roll band in the world.”
Toll the bells: legendary Pere Ubu frontman David Thomas has passed away after a long illness at his home in Brighton, England at the age of 71. According to the statement his band wrote, he shuffled off this mortal coil with a bang:
“MC5 were playing on the radio. He will ultimately be returned to his home, the farm in Pennsylvania, where he insisted he was to be ‘thrown in the barn.’”
Born on a mid-June day in Miami, Thomas spent most of his formative years in the rustbelt womb of Cleveland, where he formed the shortlived proto-punk group Rocket from the Tombs in 1974. The following year, Pere Ubu crawled howling from Rocket’s crumbled carcass: an erratic, electric offspring birthed by David Thomas and Peter Laughner. Borrowing its moniker from the Alfred Jarry play Ubu Roi, the band became a bizarre broadcast of dissonance and derision.
“It was a name that wouldn’t mean anything to 95% of an audience,” Thomas once said. “I wanted to create a band that Herman Melville, William Faulkner or Raymond Chandler would have wanted to be in.” He also later stated, “My ambition for Pere Ubu was to be discovered in a used record bin in 30 years.”
Pere Ubu dubbed their din ‘avant-garage,’ a collision of clatter, clang, and caustic croon; surreal shrieks strafed by synths, streetcorner guitar squall, and the spit-and-sputter of Thomas’s cracked incantations. Pere Ubu’s The Modern Dance rattled the underground in 1978, planting thorny seeds that sprouted in Joy Division’s dread, R.E.M.’s drift, and Gang of Four’s gnashed nerve. Along with MC5 and the New York Dolls, they were certainly punk-adjacent. Thomas hated the labels, anyway, meandering through everything from aggressive licks to esoteric avant-garde to sea shanties.
“Either everything I’ve done is punk or nothing is,” Thomas once scoffed. ‘Punk’ doesn’t mean anything. It’s one of these words that everybody has their own definition for. To me, ‘punk’ was cliché pablum designed to sell merchandise to gullible rubes in confused and decaying cultures. That’s what punk is to me. Pere Ubu and Rocket: we were rock bands working in the mainstream.”
Thomas was less frontman than feverish fixture, delivering sermons on spurned love, soured war, and wilful disobedience. He staged lectures, led operas, stalked stages from London to Los Angeles with wild-eyed weirdos and honest eccentrics. Without Pere Ubu, there would be a very different version of Pixies, Bauhaus, Bush Tetras, Interpol, and Primus. Pere Ubu’s peculiar legacy will remain jagged, jarring, and joyfully out of joint. Hell, they even covered The Osmonds!
Ever the polymath, Thomas typically had a large number of ongoing projects at any one time, including a London West End production of Shockheaded Peter. He delivered his lecture The Geography of Sound in the Magnetic Age at Clark University and UCLA, among other venues. He staged his improvisational opera Mirror Man at venues in Europe and North America, featuring at various times contributions from many of his previous collaborators, as well as Linda Thompson, George Wendt and Syd Straw. In 2010 he performed with the backing of Australian band The Holy Soul.
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