Melting Vinyl: Bringing the cream of live music to Brighton.

Melting Vinyl presents:

PERE UBU

Pere Ubu make music that is a disorienting mix of midwestern groove rock, “found” sound, analog synthesizers, falling-apart song structures and careening vocals. This has mesmerized critics, musicians and fans since their formation in 1975, and they’re still going strong!

Assembled in August 1975 to be the Crosby Stills Nash & Young of the Cleveland music underground, the plan was to record one, maybe two singles and exist no more. Within months, however, those first self-produced records were being snapped up in London, Paris, Manchester, New York and Minneapolis. Pere Ubu was changing the face of rock music. Over the next four decades they defined the art of cult; refined the voice of the outsider; and inspired the likes of Joy Division, Pixies, Husker Du, Henry Rollins, REM, Sisters of Mercy, Thomas Dolby, Bauhaus, Julian Cope and countless others.

Singer/frontman David Thomas named the band after the protagonist of Ubu Roi, a play by Frenchman Alfred Jarry. The single, “30 Seconds Over Tokyo” b/w “Heart of Darkness,” released in 1975, was the first of four independent releases on Hearpen Records and, along with Television’s “Little Johnny Jewel,” signaled the beginning of the New Wave. In the early to mid-70s the musicians who were to form Pere Ubu were part of a fertile rock scene that also produced 15-60-75, The Mirrors, The Electric Eels, Rocket From The Tombs, Tin Huey, and Devo.

Still going strong, in 2013 the band performed their underscore for the cult classic horror film Carnival of Souls; several pieces from the score became the basis for 2014’s critically acclaimed Carnival of Souls, which arrived in different CD and vinyl versions.

‘They’re the greatest out-rock ‘n’ roll group of this millennium, and probably the next’. – The Wire

‘Ubu are generally regarded as the missing link between the Velvets and punk. From the beginning they obviously understood the nuts and bolts of popular music, and then loosened them’. – Mojo

Support:
Sweet Williams

“I feel as though The Victoria is swaying like a ship; Sweet Williams slur and groan as gravity shifts beneath them, their music slipping nauseously off axis. But while there’s a wooziness trickling out of the gaps – open strings rubbing up against the chords, consonances lost to a drunken stream of vocal vowels – there’s an assertion powering the joints too, rooted largely in the beats that clack in impeccable time and haul all of the elements into miraculous parallel. It’s a fine set, particularly for those points of contrast where Sweet Williams rub their eyes free of muck and reality snaps back into its socket – the band go from a rickety to-and-fro to a patient and melancholic unfurl, with sombre thoughts drooled out carefully and inevitably into pools of minor key.” – Jack Chuter, ATTN:Magazine, November 2013

DJ set from The Cravats