"Hello Cleveland"

GH farewells Pere Ubu's David Thomas

Second from left: ‘If you let the big guy’s attitude get to you, you were liable to feel like maybe he wasn’t such good company.’

This is a music post, inspired by the death of David Thomas, a ‘true pioneer of the avant garde’. If you’re trawling for cricket content, feel free to pass on.

‘Hello Cleveland!’ shouts Derek Smalls as he rushes through the catacombs of a theatre in This Is Spinal Tap, ready for the first salaam of the rock’n’roll audience - which, of course, he and his fellow band members cannot find. It’s a perfect comedic sequence, somehow all the better for the locality - Cleveland is like that prototypical midwestern city most outsiders would struggle to locate on map, and which fifty years ago evoked nothing but smokestacks, steel, a crime-ridden downtown and a long-ago heyday. Pere Ubu’s Dave Thomas, who has died aged seventy-one, would have been a remarkable musician had his roots been New York or Los Angeles; but Cleveland suited his outsider’s aspirations. Had he been unable to find a stage or audience, he’d have been just as happy to play for himself. And for all his originality and eclecticism, Thomas retained a fierce attachment to the city as it was, summed up in the paradox at the end of ‘Fortunate Son’ on The Long Goodbye (2019):

Places that don’t exist any more have something in common, they’re real;

Places that do exist aren’t so real after a while.