 5.28.1991 by Jeff Reding | |||
| David Thomas |
HI, THIS IS JEFF REDING FROM VIDMAG-TV AND WE’RE GREATLY HONOURED TO
HAVE DAVID THOMAS OF PERE UBU WITH US HERE TODAY. DAVID, WELCOME.
DAVID: You’re very welcome.
I WANT TO START YOU OFF AROUND 1972. ROCKET FROM THE TOMBS, MAINLY
BECAUSE IN A LITTLE … RIGHT AROUND A WEEK FROM NOW IS THE FIRST ANNIVERSARY OF
STIV [BATOR]’S DEATH AND YOU GUYS GO WAY, WAY BACK. AND I
WAS HOPING YOU MIGHT REFLECT A LITTLE BIT …
DAVE On Stiv?
YEAH.
DAVID: [Big sigh] I’m not sure what I know to say
about Stiv. I mean, we worked together for awhile. He was always a nice fellow.
You know, I mean, he was always a nice fellow who I think tried too hard to be
something that necessarily he wasn’t. But, um, I don’t know much beyond that to
say about him. I mean, I liked him.
IT WAS A TRAGEDY TO
LOSE HIM.
DAVID: Sure.
OKAY, SO WE’LL TAKE
A QUANTUM LEAP UP TO AROUND 1976 …
DAVID: Yikes! Okay.
AND PERE UBU. AND, COULD YOU TELL US … BECAUSE A LOT OF PEOPLE THAT WE
HAVE WATCHING THE SHOW REALLY DON’T KNOW A LOT ABOUT PERE UBU, SO NOW WHY DON’T
YOU GIVE US A QUICK CAPSULE AS TO …
DAVID: Well, number one, it was 1975, that’s okay,
‘cause it was around the end of ’75, um, he said pedantically. Umm, in those
days we were among a group of people in this town who were known as ‘urban
pioneers.’ And, um, we were among a group of people who moved back into the
downtown area [the infamous ‘Ubu House’] had the same sort of idea at the same
time. And we made … Pere Ubu was the folk music of the urban pioneers and, um,
we were young and we were living in a city that was despised. We were living in
a city … it’s always interesting … it always fascinated me and many others to …
you know, you figure the Mayan and Incan cities and at what point the living
city dies and how it becomes a jungle-overgrown area. And we were living at that fascinating time
in history where we were living at the time the city was dying. The people who
lived there no longer understood the hopes and dreams of the builders, and they
fled at night in fear to their campfires in the suburbs and, um, so we
understood that at that time we loved the despised thing. We were the only ones
who wanted it. And for a few brief years we owned downtown Cleveland by sheer
squatter’s rights, and we would go into the industrial areas of the Flats and …
among the steel mills and the mystery and the, the poetry and the geometry and
the light and the colour and the, and the drama of it all … the movements, and
we sought ways of expressing the inexpressible, and that’s how we got to be
what we were doin’. There’s never a short answer when you ask me a question.
THE WHOLE CONCEPT OF PERE UBU IS BASICALLY BUILT AROUND THIS, THEN,
THIS WHILE … BASICALLY THE WHOLE CONCEPT OF PERE UBU IS TRYING TO MAKE
SOMETHING OUT OF ALL THIS SQUALOR …
David: No, no. the basic concept of Pere Ubu is
that sound has a visual component and that music exists to express the
inexpressible. That, that music is the language and poetry of the human
experience. It has nothing to do with squalor. We didn’t see squalor. We saw,
we saw industry in the ideal sense. And we saw wonderful visions and, um, these
were the things we were expressing. We weren’t industrial. We weren’t concerned
with your down side of forever.
HOW COULD YOU … HOW WOULD OU CLASSIFY PERE UBU, FOR PEOPLE THAT INSIST
ON PUTTING A CLASSIFICATION … BECAUSE YOU’RE NOT PUNK AND, AS YOU SAID YOU’RE
NOT INDUSTRIAL AND YOU’RE NOT ARTROCK AND YOU’RE NOT DANCE ROCK …
DAVIS: We create music that doesn’t fit for the
enjoyment of people who don’t fit. I mean … people say ‘What do you do?’ We
say, ‘WHY, WAIT A MINUTE … People say, like this [person watching the
interview] would say, ‘what do you do?’ and we say ‘We do the “avant garage”.’
And people would say, ‘Well, what’s the avant garage?’ And we’d say ‘Par as in
par and king as in king. Par-king.’ And then you would say, ‘Well, what does
“par-king” mean?’ What does the avant garage mean?’ And the non-sequitors would
continue until one of us gave up and I never give up.
AS WE CAN TELL BECAUSE HERE YOU ARE TODAY. SO WHY DON’T YOU TELL US
ABOUT, LIKE, YOUR LAST COUPLE OF PROJECTS [1989s] CLOUDLAND AND NOW THE NEW
ALBUM [1991s WORLDS IN COLLISION] ARE KIND OF A DEPARTURE FROM PERE UBU.
DAVID: Every album that Pere Ubu does are kind of a departure
from Pere Ubu in style. Um, these last two records, yes, at the end of …
[1988s] Tenement Year was a record that was very noisy … that eight or nine
kitchen sinks being knocked down the steps … and this is the … what we set out
to do. Mmm, the message of, as it were, the vision of the poetry, the voice of
the ‘tenement year,’ required to be at levels as such. We got done with that …
we understood that id we were to do this again that we would parody ourselves
and that we really basically, kind of, kind of do this stuff. So … naturally
the first thing Ubu does is to trek to the exact opposite approach. You know,
to, um, to go the opposite way, which was to be very, very strict with
ourselves and to be very, very, um, direct … We got done with Cloudland, we
said ‘well, maybe we better loosen up a bit,’ you know, so it continues. So,
this record, we went to use the poetry of emotion to, um, to accomplish a few
things. And the poetry of emotion really requires a very direct delivery and a
very no-nonsense naked, as it were … um, the heart is a crazy sort of approach
so, I think, that’s it. That’s the vehicle. The next album, who knows?
ACOUSTICS.
DAVID: Yeah.
PERE UBU USES
ACOUSTICS ON THIS ALBUM,
DAVID: Yeah. Shock. Horror.
WHAT WAS THE … WHAT
WAS THE IMPETUS BEHIND IT?
DAVID: The impetus behind it was Jimmy [the late Jim
Jones, long-time fixture in the Cleveland Underground scene dating back to the
early in70s] came along with this beautiful acoustic piece that was just …
sublime … and rather than electrify it and, sort of, cheapen it in some ways,
or, or, or diffuse it … we thought … well, it was obvious that the only thing
we really could honestly do was just go ahead and deliver it without worrying
about what we’re supposed to and not supposed not to do.
AND SPEAKING OF SUPPOSED AND NOT SUPPOSED TO DO, MANY PEOPLE WOULD
CONSIDER PERE UBU AS BEING PRACTICALLY A TOTALLY AND COMPLETELY UNCOVERABLE
BAND, AND YET TWO DIFFERENT GROUPS HAVE DONE ‘FINAL SOLUTION’.
DAVID: Peter Murphy ….
RIGHT. PETER MURPHY AND LIVING COLOUR. HOW NOW DOES THAT STRIKE YOU
THAT SOMETHING LIKE THAT WOULD HAPPEN FOR YOU, WITH THE WHOLE CONCEPT OF WHAT
YOU …
DAVID: Well, I’m … I think it’s better than a poke in
the eye with a sharp stick. Um … I … I think of the number of songs that can be
covered of ours … those are, you know … I haven’t heard the Living Colour. I
went out and bought a copy when it came out as a single in England, um, but I haven’t
had the courage to listen to it yet. People have told …
ACTUALLY, IT’S VERY
GOOD.
DAVID: That’s what I’ve … see, everybody’s told me
that it’s very good, so now when I get back home I’m gonna listen to it. Do
they pronounce … see, I always go on one criteria. Do they pronounce the words
so you can understand them?
SEE, THAT’S WHAT I WAS JUST GONNA SAY. WHEN I SAW YOU AT THE AGORA THE
LAST TIME WHEN YOU SAID THAT EVERYBODY’S BLOWN IT BY SAYING YOU CAN UNDERSTAND
THE WORDS. YES, YOU CAN HEAR ‘EM.
DAVID: Okay, so they’ve blown it.
SEE, THAT’S ANOTHER … THAT’S ANOTHER INTERESTING CONCEPT ALSO ABOUT PERE
UBU IS THAT THERE ARE, THERE ARE SONGS THAT ARE CONSIDERED ‘CLASSIC’ SONGS …
LONESOME COWBOY DAVE, AND, UM, THE, YOU KNOW, FINAL SOLUTION, 30 SECONDSOVER TOKYO … THAT ALMOST SEEMS TO BE IN CONTRADICTION TO WHAT THE PERE UBU
CONCEPT HAS BEEN OVER THE YEARS. THE MEMORABLE … I MEAN THE …
DAVID: Well, we do memorable stuff. You know, when we
do, we do get … we don’t produce … we don’t sit there and think, ‘Well, how can
we write a song that nobody’s gonna like, gonna be so obscure that nobody can
get it?’ you know, we don’t do that … but we do try to, try to manipulate the
listener and lead him down the garden path and jump out at them with a scary
mask, or a, or a romantic … [goes into freeverse] ‘I want to be like you are / I
wanna rewrite your name / I want to live in the heart of someone and ride the
mystery train / for you and I alone / I want to be like the moon / I want to
roll through the harbour skies / I want to look down on your house, be honest /
mmm, nice / only you and I will know.’
I think that’s all I have to say
unless there’s one last question that‘s so important.
THERE’S ONE LAST
QUESTION, AND THAT I …
DAVID: ‘Cause I have my snacks … [his sister gave him
a sack]
YES. AND THAT IS THE COMPARISON BETWEEN AMERICA TO EUROPE. YOU GUYS ARE BIG
IN EUROPE, AND YET IN AMERICA, AND CLEVELAND PARTICULARLY, YOU
KNOW, THE HOMETOWN PEOPLE, AND IT’S …
DAVID: I don’t know. What’s the question?
HOW DO YOU … HOW CAN YOU COMPARE THE TWO AND WHY DO YOU FEEL LIKE
YOU’RE SO MUCH MORE POPULAR IN EUROPE?
DAVID: Well, it all had to do with, with the
historical thing, in that when we were … when we were …in 1975, 1976, when we
were starting here, everybody in the main … in the ‘overground,’ the mainstream rock establishment, you know,
despised us and, uh, made fun of us and we thought we were idiots, you know,
and … but what was happening was that the, the journalists from the national
rock … the equivalent of Rolling Stone in France and the equivalent of that
in Italy or in Holland … These people were sending … were sending journalists
to Cleveland to report on us. You know, at that time we were here, you know,
‘You guys are idiots’, you know, ‘What are you doing? Why don’t you, you know,
why don’t you do … why don’t you learn some cover songs?’ and stuff, you know,
and so, obviously, our sights immediately shifted to where people were saying,
‘Gee,’ you know, ‘This is … these guys are …’ you know ‘This is something
special,’ you know, so our attention just focused, focused there and we really
haven’t focused anywhere else until quite recently.
HAS IT, HAS IT CHANGED? I MEAN, HAVE YOU FOUND MORE ACCEPTANCE IN THE
STATES NOW?
DAVID: Yeah, it’s beginning to change. Yes. Okay,
thank you.
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