Pere Ubu play The Village this Thursday

Pere Ubu bring their Visions of the Moon tour to Dublin this Thursday November 14 with a headline show at The Village.

A limited number of tickets priced €18 are available from Ticketmaster. Hot Press Eamonn Sweeney spoke to David Thomas in advance of the show and found the frontman in engaging, reflective form as he ran the rule over Pere Ubu's past and present...

You're playing in the Village next week, which is actually the very same venue you played in the 90s when it was the Mean Fiddler. Any fond memories of that show?

"To be honest, after forty years it all blends into each other (laughs). I do remember wandering around Dublin, hanging out in a bar and everything was cool. I remember liking the Mean Fiddler."

The current Pere Ubu album Lady From Shanghai comes with lengthy notes detailing the creative process and the Chinese Whispers technique you adopted to make it. What essentially does this involve?

"I’ve been working with the Chinese Whispers methodology for about twenty years. It involved working out a number of techniques and assembling a band capable of working in the way I anticipated, so it took twenty years to work it out and I’m pretty pleased with it."

I like the part where you say, "I don’t experiment. I know what I’m doing." It reminds me of when you said that you didn't consider Pere Ubu to be particularly avant-garde at all, and that it all sounds very normal to your ears.

"It is not experimenting! The basic issue is how do you improvisation in the studio? Improvisation onstage is relatively simple. You have to have talent, some wisdom and experience and know what you’re doing, but essentially it is very basic. But how do you improvise composition? The way I figured it out is to keep everyone in the dark and use the Chinese Whispers method. You whisper a message into someone’s ear and it get passed around. When it gets back to the beginning it’s often different if not unrecognizable. It worked so well that the drummer didn’t recognize two of the songs on the album a year after he laid his parts down. The key is coming up with interesting composition techniques rather than just banging around.

"In terms of the avant-garde, in the historical sense of things, we’re actually a mainstream band. It’s not my fault that everything went screwy after the seventies. Everything was proceeding along in a fairly methodical way and then a bunch of crap happened. When you look at it sensibly One Direction, Madonna and Lady Gaga are all avant garde and experimental. We’re just mainstream. We’re following along in a straight line the evolution of rock as set up in the '50s and '60s and '70s. It is increasingly sophisticated and challenging. I hate it when people say rock n’ roll is dead. It is not dead. You’re dead. You’ve given up. If you do the same goddamn stuff from 30 years ago, then yeah, it is dead, but don’t blame rock for that. That’s just being lazy. How can you look at yourself in the mirror and do something you were doing 40 years ago? It’s absurd. When we were kids in the '70s we were making fun of the Rolling Stones because they were doing exactly the same thing for ten years. We found that to be totally outrageous. Lo and behold, 40 years later and the Stones are still doing the same thing they were doing 50 years ago, but I don’t want to pick on them.

"We don’t set out and say we’re going to something radical or different. We want to communicate ideas and tell stories that involves developing the expressive qualities of rock music which are vast. It’s not that we’re trying to do anything different, we’re trying to tell stories that are more and more interesting and developed. It’s like reading literature written by a five year old for your entire life. Why bother? We’re old guys now. We’re not singing ‘Baby, Baby I Love You’ or ‘I Can’t Live Without You.’ Well frankly, I can live without you. There’s more to life than that."

Very insightful thoughts there about rock not being dead. How do you think the Internet has impacted on rock music and popular culture?

"I was involved with the Internet in its very early stage. I’m no Luddite, but I’m not a fan of it. It appears to have become about publishing photos of Cindy in front of the Roman Coliseum. I hate photos. I hate people who take photos. I don’t want to know how you feel today on Facebook. Your life is not that important. This is one of the things I’m working on with the new album.

"Basically, you’re not important. You’re going to live and die and be forgotten no matter how many damn photos you take of yourself or how many posts you make. I don’t it is old man grumpiness. I’m just very intolerant of crap and I don’t care how you dress crap up."

You just mentioned a new album. What will you playing at the Dublin show next week?

"We’re doing all new material at this show and we’re doing older songs that we’ve re-arranged so much you won’t recognize them. About 60% is locked down and the other 40% is taking shape. We’re having a great time and it’s very exciting."

It is now 35 years since The Modern Dance album. Did you ever think you'd still be doing this in 35 years when you were making that record?

"The very first question I was ever asked in an interview two years before our first record came out was how long am I going to do this for? I used to say that we’ll stop tomorrow, or we’ll stop when I die. I was very influenced by Greill Marcus’ Mystery Train where he talked about people following a career over decades, so the answer remains that I’ll stop tomorrow, or the day I die. Orson Welles probably would have been more successful doing anything else apart from making films.

"I fell in love with the process and I would have been more successful doing anything other than making music, but I love the process and I love making music. As long as I’m interested I’ll be doing it. If I get cynical or non-interested, I’ll stop. I don’t have a compulsion to share. I don’t give a damn. I do it for myself."