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.”