Pere Ubu

From stories and photos, I'd imagined David Thomas as gigantic, much bigger than a normal man. He had to be immense, oversized like some cartoon villain, one endowed with prodigious strength. Instead he's big, sure, but well within human proportions. That's the only disappointment of the evening.

Until now, yours truly was one of those convinced of the importance, beauty and blablabla of Thomas's music in its many guises, Pere Ubu first and foremost. What was still missing was faith, unconditional surrender. A concert was all it took. Just being there, seeing it firsthand, hearing it live, was enough.

The band includes a rhythm section that genuinely hits hard (drummer Steve Mehlman proudly shows off Bauhaus and Einstürzende Neubauten tattoos: good ink doesn't lie), Pale Boy Keith Moliné on guitar, and Robert Wheeler behind an old synthesizer and a rather peculiar-shaped theremin he built himself.

The man walks on when the others have already started playing. Long black coat, a hat, his gaze serious and turned downward, a small case in hand from which he pulls out a booklet that he sets on a music stand. On the microphone stand there's also a telephone receiver, used now and then to produce an effects-laden, even more nasal voice.

The sound that materializes is the one we've come to know over the years. At first new wave more out of circumstance than conviction, later tending toward a diagonal classicism that carries the rock discourse down rarely-trodden roads, a kind of avant-garde classicism. Or a classicism that's avant-garde in its own way, deeply rooted in American soil.

It hardly matters that the setlist is mostly recent or very recent material (though there's room for a cover too: "Sonic Reducer" by Dead Boys). Over everything looms the imposing figure of David Thomas, his red-eyed gaze behind which the spark is still a fire. He is, and remains, the iconoclast, the clown, the tragedy, the intellectual, the pagan. Whatever he does, you can't stop watching him. Whether he's opening his flask, refilling it halfway through the set because it's already empty, sitting down to wipe himself off, downing beer cans and then smashing them on his head, running the show with that fiercely anti-realistic, or hyper-real, attitude, or coming out with absurd remarks. Everything is formidably contained within that highly visible tension between a body that responds placidly even to its most destructive impulses and a mind in constant, frantic motion.

On "The Modern Dance", greeted like the Messiah by those present, he seems to be in terrible shape, amid coughing and desperate, terribly convincing crying. You leave with the doubt: was it all real, or sublime theatre?

His between-song banter consists of nursery rhymes recited in an unnaturally high falsetto voice, incomprehensible bubbling, or surreal, humorous stories in which Elvis dictates a hit to him ("many months have gone by and this song still hasn't had any success: Elvis lied to me, or maybe it wasn't really Elvis"). Or ones in which friends suggest David write something more socially engaged, and he writes a song "about the rainforests: how to burn them all down".

As if what we're seeing on stage weren't enough already, on "Final Solution" we even find ourselves pogoing(!) alongside a wildly unleashed Piero Pelù(!!), who's appeared in the crowd from who knows where.

Then comes what Thomas calls "my favourite moment": the end of the show, time to collapse into a hotel bed. He says goodbye to everyone over a long version of "Love Song" (blaze, calm and band introductions, blaze and finally silence). Then he orders the crowd to part in two to let him through, as if they were the Red Sea and he were Moses, and sets about selling the band's latest CD ("Why I Hate Women", a year old by now), signing autographs and trading quips.

Some time on, the most astonishing legacy of this show is how it has settled into the mind. For days I couldn't stop mulling over just what kind of spectacle I'd witnessed. Forget those four idiots dressed up as more or less indie pretty boys: rock and roll is this guy, dangerously balanced between genius and cirrhosis of the liver.

Ride the wave of great music

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