The jukebox plays hits by lesser bands as we talk

The jukebox plays hits by lesser bands as we talk.What he remembers first is where he came from Pere Ubu are a Cleveland band. They all came from the suburbs, and went to the city's dead heart, the place where the old, abandoned buildings no longer made sense. They watched blasts of industrial gas fill the sky with flame, and lived in the places others hurried to leave. "These buildings to us were like art museums, places of vision," Thomas remembers, "and for a moment you could see behind the fabric of the world and see a perspective that could teach you things, geometries, truths."Geography is the only true culture people have What connects me to Mark Twain is the Mississippi River. The river is an element, a hieroglyph, that always means the same thing, down through history. That's why Bruce Springsteen's best song is called `The River'.

The land is the language."The truth Pere Ubu have been speaking since is that the landscape they loved didn't last. Thomas sees comfort in rivers because the buildings he communed with in Cleveland were pulled down long ago They only remain in his head. He coined the term Datapanik 20 years ago."History's being rewritten faster than it can happen," he sings again on Pennsylvania He despairs at the ignorance of change, and what it means "This is not just Cleveland," he states "Everything is not what it used to be England is not England any more, and America's not America There's a homogenisation of culture that's occurring. People mistake it for American cultural imperialism.American culture was the first to go. The death of Princess Diana was the breakthrough here of the kind of thing that had happened in America. For the first time the media discovered that it was in sole control of reality.

To understand the Diana episode, you have only to understand two things: Invasion of the Body-Snatchers, and Day of the Triffids. What you learn from Day of the Triffids is that if you look at something you go blind, and dumb plants can kill you Media, news, don't look at it. The thing that you learn from Invasion of the Body-Snatchers is that you can't tell who's human any more But you can't talk about that stuff," he sighs. "There are a lot of other factors that I don't want to get into because they're too ...

inflammatory."The other root of Pere Ubu's quiet, unstoppable rage is the music they grew up with. As a teenager, Thomas saw something powerful in rock music as it threw up off its adolescent shackles, the flowering of "sound as a poetic voice" in Captain Beefheart and Brian Wilson. His band saw themselves as the logical next step in an evolution that had lasted 20 years It was their manifest destiny to take the torch. Then punk, which they'd unwittingly helped to start, dashed it from their hands.