Do Ya Wanna Dada Dance?

Rip It Up, Issue 20, 1 March 1979, Page 14

Do Ya Wanna Dada Dance?

William Dart

I was introduced to Richard Hell and Pere Übu on the same night. It was late and I was tired. My head was like a mince pattie in between two hamburger buns of speakers. Then this veritable barrage of noise violent almost unbearable and yet vividly exciting enough to make one write purple prose for a couple of thousand words if an editor didn't prune one. My introduction to Richard hell was the song “Blank Generation” with its brilliantly searing guitar solos, and the Pere Übu number was “Sentimental Journey" from The Modern Dance album an amazing collage of music and sound effects held together by glass smashing all over the stereo spectrum in the most unexpected places and moments. Alas, The Modern Dance never made it to our local record shoppes, although I have a fantasy that there are some really freaky farmers down Waikato way who play it to their cows in the- milking sheds. What did appear was Datapanik in the Year Zero, a collection of classic Übu singles collected on a 12 inch EP. This had nothing as far out as “Sentimental Journey" but “30 Seconds Over Tokyo" had! some electronic bizarreries and there were even some strange sound effects in the uncomplicated Carribean jaunt of "Heaven”. But then, by the same token, Datapanik did not have anything as bewitching as “Chinese Radiation” from Modern Dance with its sliding textures and alluring Orientalisms. Now Übu’s second album, Dub Housing, is up for imminent release and looks like being one of the records of this and any other year. The dadaist origins of the group are apparent on the obligatory track, “Thriller", where the group play around with slowed-down vocals and interjected phrases from old movie melodramas on television. All this ends with a looped wiping static effect which sounds like a hedgehog being scoured by a Goldilocks pad in slow motion amplified a thousand times. If Datapanik showed Pere Übu under the influence of such psychedelic progenitors as the Thirteenth Floor Elevators and the Chocolate Watch band, then we find a wider field of references in Dub Housing. “Caligari's Mirror" is a brilliant Übu version of "What Shall We Do With a Drunken Sailor" with the same glissandi stylings that characterised the earlier "Chinese Radiation”. And "Drinking Wine Spodyody" is so transmogrified by the Pere Übu aesthetic that it seems unbelievable that it is a song from Jerry Lee Lewis's repertoire. If "Blow Daddy-o" shows the group's flirtations with minimalism at its most severe, then "Dub Housing” has the same musical approach in a more sophisticated version: the

song is based entirely on two alternating chords with a plaintively wailing sax solo and a chorus of voices chanting "We know" against David Thomas’ amphetamine vocals. I hope I’m not making Pere Übu sound like the four thousand five hundred and forty second rock group to attempt mixing a Psychedelic Expressionist cocktail on the rocks. They still know how to let their socks down: "(Pa) Übu Dance Party" is a fun track that sort of lives up to its name, although a British critic was really going a little bit over the edge when he called "Codex" the new Harry Lime theme. Was that old Greek Plato on the right track and does music affect the political and moral state of the nation? Were the Fugs giving us a warning when they sang “When the mode of music changes”? If so, then pray where are Pere Übu leading us poor little vegemites? David Thomas, lead singer, says that the aim of the group is "to try as much as possible to reproduce or try to create, a reality, and to try to appeal on as broad and full and deep a dimensional level as possible.” Although Mother of Eight in Te Atatu may be horrified by certain aspects of the Übu sound and image, their reality is one of the most exciting contributions to the music scene in the last five years. Who knows but the name Pere Übu might gain a universality that Alfred Jarry never dreamed of, and probably would have abhorred.