David Thomas, the founder and frontman of the influential, avant-garde rock band Pere Ubu, died yesterday (April 24) at his home in Brighton, England, the band wrote on Facebook. The statement attributed his death to a long illness, adding, “MC5 were playing on the radio. He will ultimately be returned to his home, the farm in Pennsylvania, where he insisted he was to be ‘thrown in the barn.’” Thomas was 71 years old.
During their initial run from 1975 to 1982, Pere Ubu were an untamable band, merging the loose energy of garage rock with 1960s rock, as well as funk bass, unwieldy saxophones, and Thomas’ commanding presence. Though they predated the surge of the post-punk genre, Pere Ubu embodied that sound in all of its sharp, pent-up, and unpredictable nature, largely thanks to Thomas’ wild spirit and exclamatory delivery of tirades about rejection, war, and defiance. Once alt-rock started taking off in the 1980s, Pere Ubu’s artful absurdity inspired other bands in their wake, including Joy Division, Sonic Youth, Pixies, and R.E.M.
Though born in Miami, on June 14, 1953, Thomas primarily grew up in Cleveland, Ohio, where the city’s burgeoning rock scene would impact his passions. After toying with the idea of starting a band, Thomas finally started his first formal project, Rocked From the Tombs, in 1974. Their raucous punk take on rock never materialized into a record deal, and the band chose not to enter a studio to record their original songs. Barely a year later, Rocket From the Tombs fizzled out, with Thomas feeling particularly disheartened by his bandmates’ desire to play cover songs.
Eager to continue pursuing original music, Thomas funneled his adventurous nature into the formation of a new band, Pere Ubu, with Rocket From the Tombs guitarist Peter Laughner, as well as bassist Tim Wright, drummer Scott Krauss, and synthesizer player Allen Ravenstein. Lifting their name from a character in an Alfred Jarry play—“I wanted to create a band that Herman Melville, William Faulkner or Raymond Chandler would have wanted to be in,” Thomas later said—Pere Ubu debuted with the sprawling, noisy, avant-garde single “30 Seconds Over Tokyo” and followed it with the sneaky jam “Heart of Darkness” and the explosive rock song “Final Solution,” the latter of which would become perhaps their most popular single in underground circles.
After dropping a few more singles, Pere Ubu signed to Blank Records and released The Modern Dance, their debut album, in 1978. Though never a commercial success, the LP made its way into the hands of oddball punks and art-rock weirdos in the Midwest, intriguing many with its aloof approach to merging rock, punk, new-wave, and experimental prog.
A few lineup changes and a brief disbandment later, Pere Ubu had dropped four more albums in a creative frenzy. Song of the Bailing Man briefly served as the band’s final album when they broke up in 1982. For their 1987 comeback, Pere Ubu recorded The Tenement Year the following year and picked up major label support, spawning an MTV hit in the shape of “Waiting for Mary” from 1989’s Cloudland. Pere Ubu reunited in fits and spurts over the ensuing decades in the hands of Thomas, who remained the only original member throughout the band’s tenure, and released 14 albums, not including live records. Pere Ubu’s final full-length album with Thomas would be 2023’s Trouble on Big Beat Street.
“We aren’t experimental—we know what works and what doesn’t,” Thomas told Louder Sound in 2024. “If you sit down and really analyse Pere Ubu songs, they don’t make a speck of sense, but there is this organic wholeness to it – some of the beats have been flipped around, dropped and picked up again later and you have to remember all that, but it all sounds natural. I think that’s a prog rock idea. But I wouldn’t want to go out and [be] ‘pastiche.’ It would be as false as some white band from Birmingham playing reggae.”
The statement announcing Thomas’ death noted that he and his band had been recording a new album. “He knew it was to be his last,” the statement read. “We will endeavour to continue with mixing and finalising the new album so that his last music is available to all. Aside from that, he left instruction that the work should continue to catalog all the tapes from live shows via the official bandcamp page. His autobiography was nearly completed and we will finish that for him. Pere Ubu’s Patreon will continue as a community, run by communex.”
The statement concluded, “We’ll leave you with his own words, which sums up who he was better than we can: ‘My name is David Fucking Thomas… and I’m the lead singer of the best fucking rock n roll band in the world.’”
Upon learning of Thomas’ death, numerous artists have shared tributes online in his honor, including David Grubbs, Wolf Parade’s Dan Boeckner, and more. “Such sad news of the passing of the darkly brilliant David Thomas of Pere Ubu. singer and larger-than-life persona,” wrote Elliott Sharp. “I had been a huge fan of the EP Datapanik In The Year Zero, and LPs The Modern Dance, and Dub Housing. In 1979, the Scientific Americans opened for Pere Ubu at Rahars in Northampton MA. I would guest on tenor sax with the SciAms and on this gig, met and hung out with the Ubus and especially bonded with bassist Tony Maimone, the beginning of many years of friendship and collaboration. Touring in Germany in 1983, I opened for David Thomas with Chris Cutler and Lindsay Cooper. Thomas was stellar and hilarious, firing Cutler onstage with a slow burn. Later, we met in various European festivals. David Thomas & Two Pale Boys was an incredible group and one of my favorite situations to see and hear David.”