A guest series by Fraser Pettigrew (aka our New Zealand correspondent)
#3: Datapanik in the Year Zero – Pere Ubu (1978)
As a genre label, ‘post-punk’ implies some sort of influence and progression from punk, when in fact it was more like the way that natural selection operates in the biological world. Evolution is often misrepresented as an active, conscious process when it is really the accidental combination of random mutation and environment. Pere Ubu was one of many musical mutations taking place in the mid-70s and punk was the environment that enabled them to flourish.
Whatever the definition or consciousness of ‘punk rock’ was in Cleveland, Ohio in 1975, Pere Ubu were unquestionably distant from any mainstream music scene. Formed by two ex-members of recently disintegrated Cleveland band Rocket From The Tombs, singer David Thomas and guitarist Peter Laughner, Pere Ubu tagged themselves as ‘avant-garage’, a neat and clever coinage that indicated a different direction from their erstwhile bandmates Cheetah Chrome and Johnny Blitz who went on to form the very definitely punk Dead Boys.
Ubu’s music was an unsettling hybrid of mid-70s rock and weirdo gothic psycho-horror, and frontman Thomas wasn’t likely to soften the appeal. Always a big lad, usually dressed in an ill-fitting suit, there was no mistaking him for David Cassidy in the visual charisma stakes and his vocal style ranged from depressive mumble to disgruntled adenoidal bleat. Keyboard player Alan Ravenstine rarely played a chord, preferring to smother the music with harsh electronic noise that evoked the declining industrial landscape of rust-belt Cleveland. Altogether, you can see how the eclectic experimental non-conformism of post-punk drew Pere Ubu into the fold.
Datapanik in the Year Zero is a bit of an outlier in this EP series since it is a compilation drawn from three of the band’s first four singles rather than an original release of new material. As a compilation it’s a bit odd too because it contains only one a-side from those three, all three b-sides and a different unreleased version of one of the other a-sides.
The 12” EP was released in the UK early in 1978 in a one-off deal with Radar Records, to coincide with Mercury’s UK release of first album The Modern Dance. The singles had never been released outside America, having appeared only in limited numbers on Pere Ubu’s own Hearthan label. The name Hearthan became ‘Hearpen’ because it comes from the Anglo-Saxon for ‘harp’ and uses the ‘thorn’ character Þ which looks like a ‘p’ but sounds like ‘th’. As Thomas explained on his Crocus Behemoth website, “Confusion was the foundation on which the business grew”. So, not a slick marketing campaign and world-leading brand strategy, then?
Datapanik covers a two-year period from 1975 to 1977. The first side is a grim affair, containing both sides of the debut single, but opening with b-side Heart of Darkness. Not Joseph Conrad’s story but a similar nightmare of emotional dysfunction. A-side 30 Seconds Over Tokyo is about the 1941 Dolittle Raid on Japan, America’s first retaliation after Pearl Harbour, imagined from the perspective of one of the pilots, “never coming back from a suicide ride”. All six minutes and 20 seconds of it.
Dark stuff, and clearly not a serious bid for global rock stardom. But if you’re going to name yourself after an absurdist literary character, you might at least confound expectations. 30 Seconds was a reworking of a Rocket From The Tombs number, co-credited to Gene O’Connor (Cheetah Chrome), while Heart of Darkness was a Pere Ubu composition, but stylistically very much from the same crypt.
Second single Final Solution is another Rocket song, comparably morbid in title and sound, based on a heavy guitar lick that might have been plucked from The Stooges or MC5, with bleak lyrics of romantic rejection and existential despair. However, Final Solution is not included on Datapanik. The modern perspective assumes the reason is good taste, but the song is not about the Nazi final solution any more than Heart of Darkness is about colonialism in the Congo, and people weren’t so nervous about that sort of ambivalence in 1978 when this EP was released.
Whatever, the b-side Cloud 149 is the first track on side two of the EP, and it’s a distinct contrast to side one. It’s like the sun has come out and big Dave has suddenly, unexpectedly found love with the simple flip of a 7” slice of vinyl. The song bounces into life on overlapping layers of rhythm, settling into a briskly chugging syncopation with the kind of musical ingenuity that leaves you wondering where exactly the first beat in the bar is until the vocals nail it down. “Here she comes/She’s ok/I can tell/She’s ok…” From the lyrics it could be The Undertones or The Beach Boys, and it really doesn’t feel ironic. No idea what Cloud 149 means, unless it’s simply 140 clouds higher than cloud nine.
Third single Street Waves is completely absent along with its b-side My Dark Ages. The obvious rationale is that the same version of the a-side can be found on The Modern Dance album where it is one of the highlights of side one, a great little chunk of 70s rock’n’roll, though it has always sounded structurally weird to me, like the second half of a song rather than the whole thing. The explanation for the b-side’s omission may simply be that it’s not that great, certainly the least appealing of these early single tracks.
Fourth single The Modern Dance is sort of here, but in a different version from either the original a-side or the album version. Those two versions are exactly the same cut except that on the album the instrumental backing is accentuated by a metallic percussive clink, but on the single this rhythmic highlight is provided by that common musical instrument, a squeaky toy. The ‘Untitled’ version on Datapanik has neither clink nor eek, nor the call-and-response backing vocal that I used to think said ‘mantra mantra’ but I have since discovered is actually ‘merdre merdre’. All you Alfred Jarry fans will of course be keenly aware that ‘Merdre!’ is the opening line of the play Ubu Roi, a technical provocation to the French censor of 1896, usually translated into English as the definitely not sweary-word ‘Shrit!’
Final track Heaven was the b-side of The Modern Dance and is another little ray of melodic and lyrical sunshine: “A mid-summer’s night on a magic beach/The dreams that come to me, they don’t look out of reach… C’mon, darlin! It feels like heaven”.
The singles sampled on Datapanik, and the first two albums The Modern Dance and Dub Housing are, for me, the essential moments of Pere Ubu’s career. Focus and inspiration began to drift on New Picnic Time and The Art of Walking and weren’t recaptured after their subsequent split and reformation, nor were they evident to me on what I heard of David Thomas’s solo work. Too much formless electronic noise collage and weird yelping, not enough of the delicious punchy rock knocked slightly off kilter by the unique vocals and synth terror.
They were still impressive when I saw them supporting Gang of Four in 1981, when there was little indulgence of the shuffling sounds of the sands, but on record the appeal had faded. The self-defined avant-garage was something more accessible than avant garde and less ragged and more taut than garage, but rather too soon it became too much of one and not enough of the other.
Heart of Darkness
30 Seconds Over Tokyo
Cloud 149
Untitled
Heaven
THE NEW VINYL VILLAIN 