Pere Ubu

This year the artistic director of the South Bank Centre, David Sefton, is leaving, and as a send off, has basically booked all his favourite bands to play in a season called 'Outtro' before going off to be the artistic director at UCLA. The Fall played last week, but I had the misfortune to miss that, and Faust are playing at the end of October, and I will bust my butt to see that. In the meantime came Pere Ubu. All the bands tonight started in the 70s, apart from MC5 in the late sixties. All forty plus years old, and yet this is the roots of _so_ much of todays interesting rock. Pere Ubu were contemporaries of Beefheart, though less bluesy and a fair bit more intense. Lead singer David Thomas, a barefoot poet and source of continuous insanity sometimes sings sometimes shrieks sometimes speaks. This is the band who's insanity gave birth to Flaming Lips and Mercury Rev, and though they all look reasonably respectable, they still rock easily as much as their spiritual progeny. David has an apron with a radio microphone taped on to it and walks around hugging amps and drums... everything he hugs becomes very loud and fucked-up... while on the other side of the stage the keyboard player seems to do some kind of crazy t'ai chi over the top of his two pronged triangle topped theremin producing the most mental whoops, whirls, wahs, wheeoooos...

...and yet after all that psychosis, the part that most touched me was when they played Final Solution and the song dropped down to Michelle playing bass and gently singing over the top, so quietly that you could have talked over it... my heart stopped still, and then she kicked in and drove that bass like a stoked up V8 road racer... For the last song they were joined by Wayne Kramer, Brother Wayne of MC5, the man who called us to KICK OUT THE JAMS and raised up the first banner of punk rock... and his own set, before, a stripped three piece rock band, raw and riffing, singing songs of politics and social commentary, prophetic Johnny Cash vocals and screaming guitar breaks... STILL!

It doesn't die, rock and roll. Just like Iggy Pop, Wayne Kramer is still true to his art, still believing in the power of music, still immersed in it... and I'm sitting here working as a backline tech, coming to terms with a real hero of punk who happens to be a lovely easy going guy who knows he's going to kick ass and cares not for being anal or demanding.

The first act, 15-60-75, all looked like US senators, I'd not heard of them before... again that thread of Johnny Cash, but a much more american sound, the sound of NY bars in the seventies and eighties, the soundtrack to crime thrillers... and as with all the acts to follow, they reminded me of the _craft_ of being in a band, of holding an audience in the palm of your hand without speaking a word, of creating suspense with your music and then releasing it... one minute ripping guitars then sax suspense stop hold a moment and a moment more bosh vocal...

There's no bullshit here. Everyone is for real, and more to the point they've been for real for twenty or thirty years. There's something amazingly immortal about that. Disciples of rock meet your makers...