"cry for tommorow, cry for today/cry for the lives that we've frittered away"

David Stubbs recently did a heroic job with the sleeve notes for the re-issue of Pere Ubu’s four Fontana years’ albums, The Tenement Year, Cloudland, Worlds in Collision and Story Of My Life, albums that are largely regarded as being the point where Ubu, having drifted into terminal avant-garage inaccessibility with the Art of Walking and Song of the Bailing Man suddenly tried to have an unseemly stab at the pop mainstream. Buy the Modern Dance and Dub Housing, the early, angularly experimental stuff, rock-concrete carved into odd new modernist geometries, pre-post-punk masterpieces of urban alienation and industrial decay. Maybe have a go at the next few if you’re smitten. Forget the next twenty year’s worth.

Naturally, I beg to differ. Actually I came to Ubu late and via Thomas’ side project, the superb David Thomas and Two Pale Boys and the somewhat expanded Pale Orchestra, who substantially re-worked much of the mid-period Ubu. For me the Modern Dance and Dub Housing are slightly pointless preludes to Thomas and co getting to grips with the central myths of American art, refashioning it, attempting to distil its central tropes, trying to figure out what it all means instead of simply attempting to obliquely sidestep the issue, and in doing so tracing a distinctly American modernist tradition. There was a horribly smug riposte to Springsteen circa Born in the USA called “Cars and Girls” (by Prefab Sprout, whose first album was called Steve McQueen and had them posing on a motorbike!) whose chorus ran something like “some things hurt more, much more than cars and girls” but in these albums cars and girls are precisely what matter, and the ways in which they hurt are uniquely American. The Sproutist attempt to have your cake and eat it (among other examples) can’t help but leave me thinking that there’s a horrible condescension on the part of “smart” Europeans for the mythic substratum of American life, a certain knee jerk anti-Americanism that holds the indigenous blue-collar culture in contempt and believes it needs to be corrected by our authentic European culture, and which is really just a defence against both the potency and the universality of certain American archetypes.

I intend to have a go at expanding this further with a considered blather on the four records but first I have to figure out a rather complicated idea on the notion of tradition which may well take me The Rest Of My Life and so I will leave it for the minute with a link to this. A very good thing in my book as among other delights it gives us a two hour set from my prime Ubu circa 91, a fine companion piece to the wonderful Apocalypse Now.

Can my money just go directly to Keith Moline?