death

David Thomas, anarchic Pere Ubu bandleader, dies aged 71

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David Thomas, anarchic Pere Ubu bandleader, dies aged 71

David Thomas, who fronted the wild and free-thinking American rock band Pere Ubu, has died aged 71.

A statement on Pere Ubu’s Facebook page said that he died “in his home town of Brighton & Hove, with his wife and youngest step-daughter by his side. MC5 were playing on the radio.” The statement continues: “He will ultimately be returned to his [family] home, the farm in Pennsylvania, where he insisted he was to be ‘thrown in the barn’ … We’ll leave you with his own words, which sums up who he was better than we can: ‘My name is David Fucking Thomas… and I’m the lead singer of the best fucking rock and roll band in the world.’”

That band were indeed a force to be reckoned with, channelling the raucous, raw energy of garage rock into adventurous songwriting decked out with saxophones, funky bass and Thomas’s spirited exclamations. With a post-punk spirit even before punk had properly got going, Pere Ubu were a big influence on the alt-rock that emerged in the 1980s including bands such as Pixies.

Born in Miami and raised in Cleveland, Ohio, Thomas formed his first band Rocket From the Tombs in 1974, who, despite some notoriously energised live shows couldn’t find a record deal and never put out studio material. Thomas later said he was dismayed by the band’s desire to play cover versions, and “knew that Rocket From the Tombs was dead”.

Thomas then formed Pere Ubu, taking their name from a character in a play by absurdist French writer Alfred Jarry. “It was a name that wouldn’t mean anything to 95% of an audience,” he later said. “I wanted to create a band that Herman Melville, William Faulkner or Raymond Chandler would have wanted to be in.”

Debut single 30 Seconds Over Tokyo was released in 1975, and the band impressed an A&R at Mercury Records, which created a whole new imprint for their 1978 debut album The Modern Dance. Described as “harsh and wilfully ugly” in Rolling Stone, it contained superb vocal performances from Thomas, such as the exhilarating rant of Life Stinks, and while it wasn’t a commercial success it chimed with a growing post-punk movement.

The band broke up briefly in 1979, then for a longer period after fifth album Song of the Bailing Man. Thomas put out a series of records away from the group, with backing bands such as the Pedestrians and the Wooden Birds, before Pere Ubu reformed in 1987. This was the beginning of the band’s most commercially successful phase, with a major label behind them, prompting minor MTV hits such as Waiting For Mary, and appearances on British TV.

They released 14 albums in the following years, with Thomas the sole founder member leading a changing lineup of more than 20 musicians. “If I called up 20 of the 21 tomorrow they’d come back. They love to work with me,” Thomas told the Guardian in 2022.

Thomas also had intriguing side projects, such as an appearance in Rogue’s Gallery, a star-studded concert series performing pirate songs (he also performed What Will We Do With a Drunken Sailor on a 2006 album that also featured Sting, Lou Reed and Nick Cave) and a 2002 West End production of “junk opera” Shockheaded Peter. A five-star Guardian review hailed his “gravitas” and said: “Thomas adds immeasurably to the freakshow appeal.”

He later lived with kidney disease. The Facebook post announcing his death stated Thomas had been recording an album that “he knew was to be his last”. The album will be completed after his death, along with an autobiography and an archival project of live concerts.

Source: David Thomas, anarchic Pere Ubu bandleader, dies aged 71 | Pere Ubu | The Guardian

Pope Francis Dies at 88

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Pope Francis

Pope Francis has died at the age of 88. The Argentinian-born Jesuit had led the Catholic Church since 2013 when he made history by becoming the first pope from Latin America. He made his last public appearance on Easter Sunday when he repeated his call for a ceasefire in Gaza, saying the situation was “dramatic and deplorable.” In November 2023, Pope Francis accused Israel of committing terrorism after Israel attacked a church in Gaza.

Pope Francis: “A mother and her daughter, Ms. Nahida Khalil Anton and her daughter Samar Kamal Anton, were killed, and others wounded, by the snipers as they went to the bathroom. The house of Mother Teresa’s nuns was damaged, their generator hit. Some say it’s terrorism. It’s war. Yes, it’s war. It’s terrorism. That is why Scripture says that God stops war, breaks bows and breaks spears. Let us pray to the Lord for peace.”

Pope Francis was also a vocal champion for the poor and marginalized and often spoke out about the climate crisis and against the death penalty.
On Thursday, the pope traveled to a prison in Rome to meet with dozens of prisoners as part of a Holy Thursday ritual. The mayor of Rome, Roberto Gualtieri, said today, “Rome, Italy and the world are mourning an extraordinary man, a humble and courageous pastor who knew how to speak to everyone’s heart.”

On Sunday, Pope Francis briefly met with U.S. Vice President JD Vance. In February, before he was hospitalized, the pope openly criticized the Trump administration’s attacks on migrants. The pope wrote, “The act of deporting people who in many cases have left their own land for reasons of extreme poverty, insecurity, exploitation, persecution or serious deterioration of the environment, damages the dignity of many men and women, and of entire families, and places them in a state of particular vulnerability and defenselessness.” We will have more on Pope Francis later in the program.

Nanci Griffith: From a Distance review – harrowing account of the country music star’s life that ended in isolation and alcoholism

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Nanci Griffith

By Ed Power

In 1987 Nanci Griffith became a country-rock superstar in Ireland even as she struggled with obscurity back home in the United States. Something in the Texas musician’s storytelling style and the starry-eyed sadness of her lyrics connected at a deeply emotional level to audiences on the other side of the Atlantic. She sounded poetically miserable, and, emerging from the awful 1980s, we were poetically miserable, too.

That sadness was more than just an artistic device, as becomes clear in RTÉ pop presenter turned producer David Heffernan’s Nanci Griffith – From a Distance (RTÉ One, Sunday, 8pm), an engaging, if harrowing, account of her success in Ireland, the many friendships she made and her retreat into isolation and alcoholism in the years before her death in 2021 at age 68.

It’s a tragic story, and while her music will be familiar to anyone who remembers Ireland in the late 1980s and early 1990s, the film struggles to give us a sense of what Griffith was like. But perhaps that’s because she herself was never quite sure who she was: one contributor explains that, like many creative types, Griffith was insecure – a lack of confidence that intensified with age. “She would pour it out in some of her songs,” says her manager, Ken Levitan. “You see in a lot of artists. She was very insecure. The insecurity grew as she got older.”

Still, if she lacked self-belief, she had plenty of fans. Emmylou Harris, Lyle Lovett and Rodney Crowell are among those who express their admiration. They recall a gifted songwriter and lyricist and talk – seemingly in earnest – of how they envied her success in Ireland.

“Everywhere you went, everyone mentioned Nanci,” recollects Crowell of a visit to Ireland. “I was probably a little jealous. We’ve been slogging away. She hits the big time. But good for her.”
Emmylou Harris agrees Griffith became an Irish success story, even with her American roots. “You almost thought she was Irish,” she says. “Sometimes you forgot she was from Texas, even with that deep accent.”

Yet that success papered over profound unhappiness – a remoteness from even close friends that spiralled with age. “I didn’t know her loneliness,” says Emmylou Harris. Crowell says that even if he had reached out, he isn’t sure how much help he could have offered. Some people don’t want to be saved.
The paradox is that she has made friends easily. She was close to Heffernan, a host of Anything Goes in the 1980s, and godmother to his son, Aaron. Heffernan recalls visiting her in Nashville and being collected from the airport in a limousine.

But Griffith grew distant from even her closest acquaintances in her final years. Twice married, she struggled to connect with people at an emotional level, says a friend.
“She wasn’t capable of forming real intimate relationships,” they say. “She couldn’t let go of herself. She drove [the men in her life] away because of that. She knew it, I’m afraid. It was a source of un happiness for her.”

She died alone in 2021. If beloved by her fans, there was a perception she had been forgotten by Nashville – though with a 1994 Grammy to her name (for best contemporary folk LP), she could hardly be described as unappreciated.

Her final years were tragic, yet there are many heartwarming aspects to the story of a singer with low self-esteem and a poetic air who found success in Ireland, where people were struggling with the same sort of emotional damage. This heartfelt documentary is a worthy homage to an artist Ireland took to its heart in troubled times – but whose own troubles were ultimately too great for even the love of an entire country to heal.

Source: Irish Times

Remembering Terence Davies, the Greatest British Director

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The late filmmaker was the supreme cinematic poet of memory, and thus of loss and regret.

By Richard Brody

There’s a special pain to the news of the death of the British filmmaker Terence Davies on Saturday at the age of seventy-seven: his career, filled with some of the greatest movies of the past forty years, has always seemed just to be getting started, and, to the end, he kept the exuberant bearing of youth. He was past forty when he made his first feature, “Distant Voices, Still Lives” (1988)—one of the most original of all début features—and he only made eight more, not because he worked slowly but because the money was slow in coming. Although Davies was among the most accomplished of filmmakers, he remained a perpetual beginner, always on the verge of breaking out but never quite getting there. He reached old age with too few films made—a grievous loss to the history of cinema—but with the ardor, the urgency, and the curiosity of youth unabated. He never made a “late” film; no work of his suggests a detached philosophical overview or a foot in the beyond. The paradoxes and complexities of his character run through his output and his life—and they were also very much on the surface, on public display.

I had the honor and the pleasure of meeting Davies on several occasions (including onstage, in 2016, at The New Yorker Festival). In person, he was hearty and vigorous, wryly and effervescently humorous, a trait that spilled over into his cinematic taste: he expressed unflagging enthusiasm for classic Hollywood musicals at every chance he got, whether in front of an audience at moma, about a decade ago, or in his ballot for the 2022 Sight and Sound poll. Yet his own films were marked by a keen sense of ambient tragedy and often scarred by the horrors of war. The American experience of the Second World War shapes “The Neon Bible,” and the British experience of it shapes “The Deep Blue Sea.” (A scene of Londoners seeking shelter in an Underground station during a German bombing raid is one of his most spectacular creations.) The Civil War is an important part of his Emily Dickinson bio-pic “A Quiet Passion,” and the First World War is decisive in “Sunset Song.” It is also the very heart of his last film, “Benediction,” a bio-pic about the poet Siegfried Sassoon.

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