David Thomas, who faced the wild and free American rock group, Father Ubu, died at the age of 71.
A declaration on the Facebook page of Pere Ubu said that he died “in his hometown of Brighton & Hove, with his wife and his youngest daughter-in-law by his side. MC5 played on the radio. ” The declaration continues: “He will finally be made in his house (family), the Pennsylvania farm, where he insisted so that he must have thrown in the barn” … We will leave you with his own words, which sums up which he was better than we can: “ my name is David Fucking Thomas … and I am the singer of the best drop in rock and roll in the world ”.
This group was indeed a strength with which it is necessary to count, channeling the noisy and raw energy of rock garage in adventurous writing dotted with saxophones, funky bass and animated exclamations of Thomas. With a post-punk spirit even before Punk launched itself properly, Pere Ubu had a great influence on the alt-rock which emerged in the 1980s, including groups such as pixies.
Born in Miami and raised in Cleveland, Ohio, Thomas trained his first Rocket group in The Tombs in 1974, which, despite lively energized broadcasts, I did not find a recording contract and never extinguished studio equipment. Thomas later said that he was dismayed by the group’s desire to play cover versions, and “knew that the tomb rocket was dead”.
Thomas then formed Pere Ubu, taking his name from a character in a play by the absurd French writer Alfred Jarry. “It was a name that would not mean anything to 95% of an audience,” he said later. “I wanted to create a group in which Herman Melville, William Faulkner or Raymond Chandler wanted to be.”
The first single 30 seconds on Tokyo was released in 1975, and the group impressed an A&R to Mercury Records, which created a brand new imprint for their first album in 1978, The Modern Dance. Described as “hard and deliberately ugly” in Rolling Stone, it contained superb vocal performance of Thomas, like the exhilarating diatribe of life, and although it was not a commercial success, it sounded with an increasing post-punk movement.
The group briefly broke in 1979, then for a longer period after the fifth Song of the Bailling Man album. Thomas published a series of discs far from the group, with support bands such as pedestrians and wooden birds, before Pere Ubu reformed in 1987.
They released 14 albums in the following years, with Thomas the only founding member who runs a changing range of more than 20 musicians. “If I called 20 of the 21 tomorrow, they would come back. They like to work with me,” Thomas at the Guardian told 2022.
Thomas also had intriguing parallel projects, such as an appearance in the Snape gallery, a series of star concerts by playing pirate songs (he also interpreted what we will do with a drunk sailor on a 2006 album which also included Sting, Lou Reed and Nick Cave) and a production of “Junk Opera” from 2002 to West End 2002 of Peter. A five -star Guardian review praised his “gravity” and said: “Thomas adds immeasurably to the Freakshow call”.
He then lived with a kidney disease. The Facebook publication announcing that his death said that Thomas had recorded an album that “he knew it was the last”. The album will be completed after his death, as well as an autobiography and a live concert archives project.
