Pere Ubu

Terminal Tower
Rough Trade, 1985

Even though US punk didn't really take off until 1980, one of the nation's most influential post-punk groups had already released three albums by then. Pere Ubu were named after the lead character in a late nineteenth century French play littered with the word "shit" that caused a riot during its opening night in Paris and was one of the inspirations for Dadaists and Surrealists after the turn of the century. The band described their style as "avant garage", a term they invented to take the piss out of music journalists.

The band formed in Ohio after the break-up of Rocket From The Tombs and was led by David Thomas, a bigger-than-usual musician who worked as a bouncer and wore suits. They may not have liked critics, but critics certainly liked them – far more than the public, who granted them just one cameo in the alternative Top 10 fourteen years after they formed and half-way through their career. Thomas once said the band's biggest success was having none, as "the longest-lasting, most disastrous commercial outfit to ever appear in rock 'n' roll – no one can come close to matching our loss to longevity ratio".

Like Joy Division across the Atlantic, their '70s sound was as much about the empty space around it, as if the band were playing their instruments in a vacuum. Some of the songs were loud – certainly their most recognisable, 'Non-Alignment Pact' – but never messy. Each guitar pluck and smack of the drum was like a surgeon's incision, without any echo or noise trailing after it. It's surprising how alien that approach sounds today.

Pere Ubu's most famous albums were their experimental first and second, The Modern Dance and Dub Housing, but their 1985 collection of singles and B-sides Terminal Tower is more enjoyable. 'Thirty Seconds Over Tokyo' and 'Final Solution' capture their moody, nihilistic rock 'n' roll, while other tracks flirt happily with reggae, early electronica and pop. The contrast always makes me picture a Dada poet dancing on top of the clouds, above a city of factories being bombed by planes. But that could just be me.