It's hard to think of a more apt venue to spend Armistice day than the 100 club that stayed open 24 hours a day during the blitz in World War Two, acting as both an air raid shelter and music venue back then.
I arrived just as SEAN McGOWAN was starting his support set with a song that was all about how life was too short to take too long. It was pretty decent too, in the vein of early Billy Bragg circa Life's a riot With Spy v Spy which seemed to be Sean's biggest influence. He even has his own equivalent of Wiggy in his guitarist Deano.
Neverland was next: a decent, slightly bitter song that just got us ready for the tune that really stuck with me, Millbrook Road which is all about what he got up to on that road down in Southampton. It's a memorable tale of youth gone wrong in tough circumstances that's worth hearing and is, I believe, his single.
Becoming seemed more like a wish list for how Sean wants his life to go rather than reality, but we all need a dream or two. He then told us Let In was about being banned form a pub for being a problem drunk and then ending up working as a barman in the same pub and feeling like you've won. OK. This Old Town, I think, was about growing up in Southampton and was passable enough. He then concluded with an angry poem I'm 20 Years Old that had a good flow and almost felt like he had written his own version of the poem Henry Rollins used to finish his spoken word sets with which was a good end to a decent set which was met with indifference by most of the crowd.
Soon enough it was time for Cleveland's legendary PERE UBU. I haven't seen for a few years and the lasts couple of times I saw them they were not at all good, with David Thomas trying his hardest to alienate the band's audience and that seemed a touch odd.
Still, the current line-up is reasonably stable and includes the legendary Graham Dowdsell (aka Dids or DJ Gagarin) who was in Nico's band the very first time I went to the 100 club back in 1985. Dowdsell is playing keyboards, computers and gadgets in Pere Ubu rather than drums and percussion with Nico and this latest Ubu has Keith Moline on Guitar and Steve Mehlman on drums and I'm guessing Daryl Boon on Clarinet.
David shuffled onstage and sat down and told us that the set would all be songs about ghost towns as they opened with the quite odd and at times whispered New Orleans Fuzz, which seemed to stretch and mutate to odd pulses and sounds with some odd scratchy guitar and bleepy sounds from Dids.
The we were off on The Road To Utah and it sounded like the opening of some horrific horror movie where the inhabitants of a small town were about to suffer some unspeakable acts. At least that's what the music tried to convey before David was off into the middle of the desert to start calling out to his Little Sister who must be in some kind of distress judging by the apocalyptic drumming and off-key guitar mangling that accompanied this story.
Damn, finally they sounded like Pere Ubu of old on a storming version of Heart Of Darkness, although it was the only song that sounded like you might expect it to all night. Afterwards, David told us we all had a look on our faces like we had just come in our pants, nice!
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We then got the band's reinterpretation of Goodnight Irene, here ominously entitled Prepare For the End. Well they are certainly preparing for something, though I'm not sure it's the end. David then told us the next song was originally called Strippers and Monkeys but the band objected so they called it Dr Faustus instead. Whatever its title, it was one really obtuse and odd sounding song that never once conjured up any strippers or monkeys in my mind.
Bus Station was the sort of tune that would accompany a three or four hour wait in a windswept freezing cold bus station on the edge of a town in the middle of nowhere while you count the seconds till you can leave and they seem to drag on interminably. But then you might have been waiting to escape before they Drag The River and cause you all sorts of trouble that can't be solved by oddly timed drumming and off kilter keyboard sounds.
Well soon David took us off to his dreamland on Visions Of The Moon and it was pretty far out there before they brought the set to a close with The Modern Dance. Great idea on paper, but it actually sounded nothing like the original. It was so heavily re-worked as to be a different song with the same lyrics, yet it was still most oddly compelling.
They came back for an encore, opening with a stuttering re-working of 96 Tears into a song about feeding the monkey called Golden Surf. It was very odd and out there, trying to push at who knows what boundaries before they went into what sounded like the Two Pale Boys' tune Meadville but was in fact Carnival: a weird compelling almost ghost story before David Thomas told us we had almost reached the band's favourite part of the show when they sell us stuff at the merch stand. To re-enforce this message the closing song was an exhortation for us to buy more Pere Ubu Merchandise that was part naked advertisement and part reason to go running from the venue empty handed in search of some weird Cornfields.
This was a far better Pere Ubu show than the last couple that I've been to but it is still a case of David Thomas trying to be more obtuse and out there as he can be with very little to hold on to for anyone hoping to hear the band play the classics like the classics should be. I enjoyed the show for what it was but it could have been so much better than this.
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