VIA PRESS RELEASE | New four disc box set newly remixed by David Thomas. Includes Why I Luv Women, Long Live Père Ubu!, Lady From Shanghai, and Carnival Of Souls. Fans can purchase an early copy of the box set at the Canterbury Tales live show 11th February ft. David Thomas & Two Pale Boys, Bob Holman, and Rats on Rafts.
Rewriting the history of music, Pere Ubu continue to confound convention and shift personnel. Nuke The Whales traces the innovative process between 2006 and 2014; turning possible pulp fiction into art, providing a musical adaptation of the 1896 play that gave them their name, scoring the 1962 film Carnival Of Souls and re-inventing the very concept of recording music on Lady Of Shanghai. Nuke The Whales is a nod of respect to a couple in Cleveland who would daub such messages over the big news stations’ advertising boards.
All four albums have been remixed by David Thomas in 2021; the renamed Why I LUV Women originally released on Glitterhouse in 2006 bore the line, “This is an irony-free recording,” it gains its first vinyl release. David Thomas says “I did an album of love songs. I studied the question of why I love women and I was concerned of people not accessing the deeper level on the songs, so I threw in the John Thompson-esque title to throw people off—or on to—the scent. It ended up in garbage bins in radio stations despite a full explanatory press release. You need me to spell it out? I spell it out for you on this release.”
Long Live Père Ubu! was originally released on Cooking Vinyl in 2009, and Lady From Shanghai, their Fire debut for Fire in 2013 and its follow up Carnival Of Souls released the following year, complete the set.
This love/hate interplay was followed by Long Live Père Ubu!—a soundtrack to a musical adaptation of the play from which the band took its name featuring the unique vocals of Sarah Jane Morris who played the part of Ubu’s wife both here in vinyl and in theatres, premiering at Queen Elizabeth Hall in London in 2008, followed by two years of subsequent touring by the band in traditional music venues.
“Reflecting the original play’s deliberately repugnant manner, the accompaniment is full of martial, rat-a-tat drum fusillades and pompous marches, synth whines, washes of white noise and colossal bouts of belching” exclaimed The Independent at the time, while Record Collector noted its “skronking, squalling rhythms and melodic snippets undulating round a pulsating soundscape.”
Four years on and the recording process was reinvented as Pere Ubu members recorded their parts for Lady From Shanghai “in isolation, unrehearsed but according to Thomas’s quite particular and faintly perverse rules,” said The Guardian. Originally released on the 35th anniversary of the group’s debut, The Modern Dance, it took the idea of unprompted spinning pirouettes where the dance encourages the body to move without permission; and fixed it for all; a latter day re-evaluation of the dance genre.
And so, the last act here, takes place in an abandoned carnival pavilion, mirroring the 1962 film Carnival Of Souls, it’s a haunting “underscore” to a tale of alienation, as AllMusic noted of the track “Dr Faustus,” it “combines metallic percussion, spare guitars and David Thomas’ muttered vocals into something rustic and rickety, yet threatening at a moment’s notice.” Two of its tracks were picked up by the successful TV series, American Horror Story.
