From the heart of industrial Cleveland

“Everybody goes on about the urban wasteland of Cleveland. We never even heard the phrase until we started touring around and journalists came up to us and started going about urban wasteland. And we’re going, ‘Huh? What, is that a suburb we never heard of?’.”

David Thomas, the imposing leader of avant-rock figureheads Pere Ubu, and the one constant since the band emerged from the Ohio industrial heartland in 1975, is reflecting on the place that birthed the band.

“It was where we lived. It was factories and stuff. And it was cool. It was really cool. The lights were cool. The colours were cool. You would get high and drive down into the flats and it was a psychedelic experience. It was intense, so for us it was like art. It wasn’t in a building called the museum; it was reality. You know reality was really kind of cool and had all this mystery to it. And you felt that the world was a curtain that you could pull away. You used to be able to drive 20 feet from the blast furnace doors. You could drive right into the damn steel mills. All that’s changed, of course, a long time ago. But it was a very intense experience. So it was not a wasteland to us. We were kids. And it was cool.”

Famously dismissive of commonly held preconceptions of the band, Thomas gives short shrift to the notion that those psychedelic lights and intense experiences found in the factory landscape of Cleveland found reflection in the band’s music.

“What do you think?” he asks, in a manner that suggests he’s heard this question too many times before.

Thomas may have a reputation as a prickly character but there’s no doubting his place as one of the most entertaining contrarians to have emerged from the underground rock scene. So much so, that he will swear blind that Pere Ubu, who from the get-go have employed found sounds, weird synth-scapes and unconventional song structures to wrap around his distinctive high-pitched warble, are very much in a pop music tradition.

Pere Ubu released their 14th studio album, The Lady From Shanghai, earlier this year. But Thomas recently announced that the band will not be performing any material from that record on this current leg of their tour.

Instead they will be playing an entirely new set consisting of two song cycles of material that will be on the next album; the first cycle will be Dr Faustroll in the Big Easy and the second is Visions of the Moon.

So what inspired this development?

“If something works, why do it again?” says Thomas: “I determined I kinda wanted to do a medieval record and I’m not sure if it’ll end up being that, but you start getting excited about the next record. I know it just came out this year, but for us the Lady album is at least two years old. You know it’s something we’ve been working on for a while now, and …

“You just get excited,” he yells. “You know, I’m getting older. The decades roll by and the end gets closer and closer and you just kinda don’t want to wait around.”

Pressed on what constitutes a medieval record, he reveals it will be in the character and tradition of a memento mori.

“I’m going to remind people that death is around the corner,” he adds with a maniacal giggle.

nPere Ubu play The Pavilion, Cork, on Wednesday, November 13, and The Village, Dublin on Thursday, 14.