I spent at least two weeks in fear of David Thomas. No, not the SCTV guy. No, not the founder of Wendy’s. The founder of legendary ‘avant-garage’ rockers Pere Ubu.
Thomas is considered eccentric by some people, and rumours abounded that, were my questions particularly insipid, that might not suffer my foolishness lightly. So when the time came to give him a call, I managed to delete “so how’s the tour going so far?” and “how do you describe your music?” from my list of inane questions. In the end, though, the conversation was fantastic and he was as friendly as you could hope. Though he was ready to take me to task if necessary…
Here’s the transcription in full. Clearly, there’s a reason Pere Ubu have lasted so long and stayed true to their vision.
ME: When I first heard Pere Ubu it was about 1985, and I borrowed a copy of [Pere Ubu’s 1980 album] The Art Of Walking. I had no context for it at the time – I was completely puzzled. Do you think, after thirty years of being exposed to different sounds in music, that people might be less perplexed by the sound of Pere Ubu?
DT: There’s two ways of looking at it. I particularly think that the sonic palette is far more limited now than it’s ever been, but you may have some sort of point there, I don’t know. I tend to think…I don’t mean to generalize so much but I’m going to generalize for the sake of it…most of the stuff sounds very much the same these days. For the most part it’s digitally generated from the same machines, and for the most part, using the same presets. So I’m not convinced that it’s such a glorious paradise these days.
ME: One of the things that sets Pere Ubu apart from the “small-A” alternative bands –
DT: But we’re not alternative.
ME: How do you mean?
DT: They tended to put us in with punk, and we were certainly in no way ever punk. I remember when we came out we were called industrial, then we became post-industrial, then somehow we became pre-industrial, so we’ve managed to be every kind of industrial there is. We were indie, then we weren’t indie, then we were pre-indie, then post-indie…you know, as I’ve often said, we’re a mainstream rock band. It’s everyone else that’s weird, not us.
ME: A lot of the hipster bands tend to lean on irony a lot, which I know you’re dead-set against [note: on the inner sleeve of their latest album it says, without irony, “this is an irony-free recording”]. Though some bands seem to be letting up on it…
DT: I think it’s still in its ascendancy - but I hope you’re right, that there’s some sort of a backlash against it. But I fear for the worst. Irony allows everybody to just cop out, so it’s a very useful tool for people that want to not be rigorous about what they’re doing.
ME: And it allows you to keep an emotional distance from your own work.
DT: Absolutely. As I’ve said, it allows infinite deniability. You can always cop out of whatever you chose to do by saying you’re being ironic. To hell with that. If you don’t believe what you’re doing, then keep quiet.
ME: I suppose people can be confused and think that Pere Ubu is being ironic at times.
DT: Yeah. We can be humorous, and the Pere Ubu point of view, our narrative point of view, is extremely complex at times - but that’s what I thought rock music was supposed to be.
In the early ‘80s there was this slogan, “F**k art, let’s dance.” This was utter nonsense. The complexity of the rock point of view, its narrative point of view, goes back to at least to “Heartbreak Hotel” which, from a narrative point of view, is extremely complex. The song is really about the bellhop – he’s the guy that’s the centre of the song, it’s not the Elvis Presley narrator character. It’s a very subtle and endlessly studyable work. But that goes way back - it’s not a recent event or song. This idea that rock music was meant to be some stupid – not stupid, but some dumbed-down youthist rebellion cult - is absurd because it’s deniable from the very early history of things.
ME: So what about bands who do think it ought to be dumbed-down?
DT: Well, that’s fine. There are endless artistes that allow you to not think about anything – but that’s not an excuse to force the rest of us to deny what rock music promised from the very beginning and continues to fulfill. If you want to be stupid, that’s fine. I don’t know what the stupid newspapers in Canada are, but I’m sure there are some tabloids. Presumably The Globe and Mail is the “classy” paper. Well, those two newspapers are right next to each other. People can choose one or the other. They’re not forced to take the crappy one. So it’s the same with music. I’m not going to sit here and say it all has to be one thing or the other. I just resent it when the people who like the crappy newspaper somehow look at us as if we’re the ones who are weird.
ME: People still think it’s weird? There have been plenty of bands over the years who aren’t stupid –
DT: Oh, there are tons of people who have pursued that course.
ME: Yeah.
DT: Yeah? And?
ME: Well, people should be used to it by now, shouldn’t they?
DT: You would think.
ME: I guess not.
DT: Well, it’s not my fault…well, it probably is. This issue is one of the topics that people always go into. It really is the one question that has always gone through. When we started out nobody liked us and nobody was ever going to like us, and that was the deal. We were all pretty happy with that because that meant we could do what we wanted to do. And we’ve always done what we wanted to do. Even when we were on major labels, they were so scared of us. People thought “Oh, major labels!” I wish sometimes they had interfered in our career. Maybe they would have made us more successful (laughs quietly). But everybody’s too scared to tell us anything. But we’ll take it. It means nobody bothers us. “Here comes David – be careful!” Well, fine.
ME: You have a saying about your audience
DT: Ars longa, spectatores fugaces? [vague translation: audiences are short-lived, art is forever]
ME: Yeah – wasn’t it “ars longa, audience brevis?”
DT: Well, we decided we’d get real Latin.
ME: Though I understand what you’re getting at, there are others who might think that’s dismissive.
DT: All we owe the audience is to provide a product that’s worth them spending money for. Well, we determine the product, so that’s not even it…all we owe an audience is a good performance of what we’re doing.
I hate to go into this stuff because most people can’t understand it at all, but the audience is totally irrelevant to us. We don’t play for the audience. We have something that we do and if people want to pay to see it, wonderful. We love it. It’s not going to change anything, though. The audience fulfills two functions. One is…there’s a unique thing that happens when you make music. When you make a record you spend probably six months on it but you never really hear it until you actually play it for somebody else. It’s not the question of their reaction to it – they don’t have to say a word. They don’t have to express anything physically or visually or subconsciously. It’s just the mere presence of a third party allowed you to hear the thing for the first time. That’s not just some psychology, it goes down to subatomic physics. It’s the whole nature of when you observe subatomic particles, you change the nature of what’s occurring with them. It’s one of the mysteries of subatomic particles. It’s the same with an audience, and that’s their function, as far as we’re concerned, as far as the art is concerned. That’s all that I in the end care about. If they want to buy it, fine. They can choose to do what they want with their money and we’re very grateful that they choose to spend it on us – but that doesn’t get them anything. That doesn’t mean they can transcend the proper boundaries. If people start clapping along and hooting along and things out of excitement, we generally stop and say please don’t do that because it’s disturbing to us. People can’t clap in time, I don’t know if you’ve ever noticed this, but they don’t clap in rhythm. So they think they’re doing it but their not. You know, things like that. But a lot of people aren’t going to understand any of that. They’ll just say “Oh he’s a snob.”
ME: They might mistake it for disdain for the audience.
DT: Absolutely. I have absolutely no disdain for the audience. I love the audience - but they’re not going to determine what I do. Somebody else is not going to make the rules. We make the rules, and it’s always been that way, and we’re too old to change now – nor would we want to.
ME: Many of your fans probably like you for that very reason, that you’ve never worried about anything except your own artistic vision. That’s why they come see you.
DT: Well we don’t really attract casual passers-by anymore. Which is fine. Generally speaking, if you’ve come to a Pere Ubu show, you’ve gone out of your way to specifically come to us. It’s not like we’re the hit flavour of the day anymore, we haven’t been for decades, so you don’t get terribly many fickle sort of people, you know. So that’s all right.
ME: Maybe you’re on to something. Maybe this philosophy really works because many of the artists I know who have been around for 30 years aren’t any good now. You keep putting out good records, though.
DT: You have to be convinced…before anybody had ever heard of us, we were convinced that nobody was ever going to like us. If you go ahead and work under those conditions, and you don’t change that point of view, accordingly… if no one’s going to like you, you do what you want, because what else is the point? It takes a certain amount of rigor, it takes a certain amount of discipline over the years to keep moving forward, but that was the deal.
We have a real dread - and unfortunately it has been commercially disastrous for us - but we have a dread of repeating ourselves and a dread of doing something that we’ve already done or that we can do easily. Not to disparage Rocket From The Tombs [one of Thomas’ other projects], because Rocket From The Tombs is brilliant, but we could do that endlessly and not change. Rocket does change, yes, but you know what I mean - it’s basic sort of Midwest groove brutal rock. We could do that. We know how to do it. It’s just not something that…I mean why keep doing it if you can do it? What’s to be gained from it except for money? Who cares about that? I don’t mean to sound flippant over money, but I mean, you can’t base what you do on money.
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