David Thomas, the irreverent experimental musician who led the influential band Pere Ubu, died April 23 after a long illness. He was 71. The MC5 was playing on the radio at the time of his passing, reports Pere Ubu's official Facebook page.
Formed in Cleveland, Ohio, in 1975, Pere Ubu was defiantly original, embodying the industrial decay and hardscrabble ethics of its hometown by combining primitive synthesizers, skronking saxophone, scraping guitars and ominous arrangements. Thomas tied together the band's sound with uncompromising vocals that exuded steely menace and unfettered anguish.
"It's underground," wrote the legendary music critic Jane Scott, introducing Pere Ubu in a December 1975 Cleveland Plain Dealer article. "They may never be accepted by the general public. They don't care."
But Pere Ubu had an enormous influence on the burgeoning late 1970s post-punk and no wave movements, courtesy of legendary singles (the 1975 debut "30 Seconds Over Tokyo" and the following year's ominous "Final Solution") and a pair of 1978 LPs, The Modern Dance and Dub Housing.
Thomas, who was Pere Ubu's only constant member, maintained this uncompromising attitude for his entire career — even during a brief period in the late 1980s, when Pere Ubu flirted with the alternative rock mainstream thanks to singles like "Waiting for Mary," from 1989's Cloudland.
Over time, Pere Ubu's imprint was heard on countless bands that resisted categorization; to name a few, Wire, Mission of Burma, Joy Division, Sonic Youth, Pixies, Nine Inch Nails and Mr. Bungle.
Thomas was born in Miami but grew up in Cleveland Heights, a suburb located just east of Cleveland. His dad taught literature and his mom was an artist; Thomas, meanwhile, said in 2021 he was "taking special college-level courses in microbiology. That was my future until I became disillusioned and declined college."
In the early 1970s, Thomas — using the name Crocus Behemoth — became art director and wrote album reviews and a gossip column for the alternative newspaper Cleveland Scene. (He later used the moniker as his DJ name.) By 1973, he and several coworkers at the newspaper performed locally as the Great Bow-Wah Death Band.
Less than a year later, Thomas formed Rocket from the Tombs, a self-described "Mind-Death Rock 'n' Roll" band. Although short-lived, the gritty proto-punk group's scorching sound was enormously influential, with members going on to form raucous punks the Dead Boys in addition to Pere Ubu.
Over the years, Thomas juggled multiple creative projects outside of Pere Ubu. During the 1980s, he released albums under the names David Thomas & the Pedestrians and David Thomas & the Wooden Birds; later, he composed an irreverent opera called Mirror Man, gave college lectures and performed in music and theater productions overseen by his long-time pal, the late Hal Willner. Thomas also resurrected Rocket from the Tombs several times and continued to release a string of albums as Pere Ubu, most recently 2023's Trouble on Big Beat Street.
In addition to making new music, Thomas was a meticulous historian of his own work, contributing his collection of archival live recordings to an official Pere Ubu bootleg page on Bandcamp. "My ambition for Pere Ubu was to be discovered in a used record bin in 30 years," he once said.
At the time of his death, Thomas was working on an autobiography and recording a new album with his band. All of these projects will be finished, it's been noted.
Thomas eventually moved to the U.K., settling in Brighton. But in a 2017 interview with Cleveland Magazine, when asked how Cleveland influenced his music, his response was telling.
"We were savages living in the ruins of a great civilization of Rockefellers and Carnegies," Thomas said. "We would drive through the steel mills and within 20 yards of open blast furnaces. We weren't duplicating those sounds. Those sounds were showing us the way to change the narrative vehicle of modern music."
Copyright 2025 NPR
