Pere Ubu - The Modern Dance and Dub Housing

With outside interest in the Ohio scene reaching its peak, Blank Records released Ubu's debut album, The Modern Dance, in March 1978, while in April U.K. label Radar Records put out Datapanik in the Year Zero, an EP that made widely available for the first time the best tracks from the first three singles released on Hearthan Records.

At the eight of both their acclaim and artistic power, Pere Ubu sealed the impression of their creative floodgates having been hurled wide open by unleashing a second, even more impressive album only seven months after the debut.  

Dub Housing got its evocative name not from any reggae leanings, but a stoned eye's view of Baltimore as the band drove through the city in their tour van. "In Baltimore they had these row houses, and somebody said, 'Oh, look, dub housing'", says drummer Scott Krauss. The vistas echoed endlessly, paralleling the way that drum hits, guitar chords, and horn licks were turned into reverb trails by dub producers like King Tubby.

Pere Ubu - Ubu Dance Party 1978

The Modern Dance and Dub Housing both contained absurdist sound collages and exercises in pure Dada like "The Book Is on the Table" and "Thriller". These now became the blueprint for Ubu's third album, New Picnic Time.

"Our problem is that we never wanted to repeat Dub Housing", Thomas once said. "That desire to never repeat became as much of a trap as trying to repeat formulas the way some bands do". "We were on the edge of being popular but we were fundamentally incapable of being popular", Thomas admits, "because we were fundamentally perverse".

Pere Ubu's first singles

Pere Ubu formed from the ashes of singer David Thomas's and guitarist Peter Laughner's previous band Rocket from the Tombs, a less obviously art-warped proposition modeled on the raw power of the Stooges and MC5. Pere Ubu's inaugural act was recording one of Rocket from the Tombs' least characteristic tunes as a single. In Ubu's rendition, "30 Seconds Over Tokyo" - an attempt to create the "total sonic environment" inside American bombers as they set off on their World War II mission to flatten Japan's capital - became even more eccentric. It starts out like some loping, rhythmically sprained hybrid of Black Sabbath and reggae, speeds up a bit, dissolves into free-form splinters, flips back to avant-skank, lurches into a sort of doom-laden canter, then expires in a spasm of blistered feedback. Over six minutes long and almost prog in its structural strangeness, "30 Seconds" sounded about as far removed from the Ramones as, say, Yes did.

Pere Ubu - 30 Seconds Over Tokyo 1975

The band's next two singles, "Final Solution" and "Street Waves", sold very well in the U.K. and Ubu's first tour there in the spring of 1978 was greeted as the Second Coming. Emerging bands like Joy Division and Josef K were in the audiences, assimilating Tom Herman's fractured guitar, Tony Maimone's baleful bass-as-melody approach, and the ominous atmosphere of song like "Real World" and "Chinese Radiation".

Pere Ubu - Final Solution 1976


Pere Ubu - Street Waves 1976


Pere Ubu - Real World 1978


Pere Ubu - Chinese Radiation 1978