Baba Yaga's Hut has brought The Moon Unit version of Pere Ubu to the Corsica studios for a sweltering night of Avant Garage weirdness supported by David Thomas & Two Pale Boys. That means this will be the 4th and 5th different bands I've seen David Thomas play with over the last year. Not bad for a rather frail-looking old gent.
I arrived about 10 minutes after David Thomas & Two Pale Boys had come on and although it's a good few years since I last saw them they sound pretty much the same with Keith Moline's scratchy and exploratory guitar set against Andy Diagram's treated trumpet squiggles. These were at times hampered by the odd technical glitch while David Thomas sat and told the stores that form the band's best songs.
The epic story about the future and all sorts of other things sounded very cool. They added Graham Dowdsell (aka Dids) as a Third Pale Boy on Keyboards and gadgets for 18 Monkeys On A Dead Man's Chest. This slowly evolved for the story and studied music into a sort of Middle eastern Dirge that was quite cool all told.
Dids remained in the mix for the rest of the set as Andy's trumpet came and went due to the tech hassles and David mercilessly jibed at him and the band for the failings as he wondered if they were ready for another song. As David sung about How I Wanna Go into some sort of weird future the odd keyboard sounds it seemed to build and almost conflict with Keith's guitar that was increasingly scratchy and almost clawing as us.
They closed as ever with David's choice as the greatest song ever written, Surfer Girl. This was a slightly shorter version than I've heard in the past or the one they released many years ago. It still had plenty of twists and turns and was nicely odd and as it broke down to the instrumental core Andy Diagram took a wander out into the audience for his solo. As he returned to the stage it morphed into a couple of verses of Stand By Me which was a goo, if odd ending to a decent set.
After the break it was time for Pere Ubu (The Moon Unit) who differ from the version of Pere Ubu from the Co-ed Jail tour by not having a bass player and swapping Tom Hermann for Keith Moline and bringing in Dids on Keyboards and Daryl Boon on Clarinet as well as Andy Diagram on Trumpet for some of the set. Also, they only played more recent material so that they don't duplicate any of the material I heard last time.
Being all different material I didn't know what hardly any of the songs are called but it didn't matter as they sound for most of the set like a cross between Henry Cow and The Pedestrians. The first song about 20 Years was a very cool and slightly trippy adventure with the clarinet duelling with the guitar. David sung about heads on the radio and Dids' keyboards seemed to be providing the bass parts as well as lots of strange noises, it seemed they were ready for lift off.
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They brought on a special guest for Dr Faustus which allowed Steve Mehlman to switch from drums to some sort of computer gadget and the new drummer added textures rather than beats to a song that was sort of halfway between sounding like Faust and Henry Cow.It was cool and out there.
I think it was while David was going on about Mum being home that Andy Diagram's trumpet seemed to be dovetailing in and out of the clarinet, giving them a quite eastern European jazz feel to it. Does Monkey know best? Well in The Moon Unit's world he certainly does in some wonderfully strange way that made this all the more compelling.
For me one of the highlights of this set was the long version of Irene. It was involving and musically rather intricate in places as David told us all about Irene and managed to mutate Goodnight Irene into the song at various parts as if he was trying to sing it while having the most intense acid flashback and the band went off on almost as many tangents as David's lyrics.
Bus Station had some odd squelchy keyboard sounds and clarinet doodles. As the story unfolded at the end of the song David checked the time and told us that as he'd played for his contracted time slot. They then closed the set by singing/speaking the first three lines of Search & Destroy. It was as cool and odd and ending as I could have wished for.
After the packed club had gone suitably nuts they came back for an encore which started as an exploratory instrumental and nicely avant jazzy it was too. Eventually as David clambered back onstage rather slowly, it morphed into David singing about how he is A Prisoner Of the Senses: a really cool and in places manic end to a very cool and very different set.
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