The title is the joke and the joke is the point. David Thomas takes the Non-Aligned Movement, the Cold War political framework by which nations refused alignment with either superpower, and proposes signing one with a girl. He wants the deal recognized around the world. He lists her thousand other names. It is a love song written in the language of international diplomacy, performed by a large, strange man in Cleveland who called himself Crocus Behemoth and whose voice did not sound like any other voice in rock music. Pere Ubu opens The Modern Dance with this and it is the right choice. The song tells you what kind of record you are holding.

Pere Ubu formed in Cleveland in 1975. David Thomas sang. Tom Herman played guitar. Allen Ravenstine operated an EML synthesizer. Tony Maimone played bass. Scott Krauss played drums. Cleveland at the time was a Rust Belt city in visible decline, its industrial infrastructure corroding, its population leaving. The band absorbed that environment. They also absorbed Captain Beefheart, the Velvet Underground, musique concrète, and the cultural theory that was circulating in art school corridors. The result was something that had no precedent and no easy name.

The album was recorded at Suma Recording in Painesville, Ohio, in November 1977, financed by Cliff Burnstein, and released in February 1978 on Blank Records. The label had recently changed its name from Dip Records because an evangelist already owned that one. During the sessions, the engineers mistook Ravenstine’s synthesizer for a technical malfunction and nearly erased it from the recordings. The band insisted it was intentional. It is the sound that makes the record strange and irreplaceable. Without it, The Modern Dance is a different album. A lesser one.

David Thomas was born on June 14, 1953. Today is his birthday. He died on April 23, 2025. He was 71. The Modern Dance is ranked #11 on NME’s Best Albums of 1978, #14 on Spin’s 50 Most Essential Punk Records, and appears in 1001 Albums You Must Hear Before You Die. It is called a genesis point of post-punk. “Non-Alignment Pact” is track one, side one. A man asks a girl to sign a diplomatic non-aggression treaty. Ravenstine’s synthesizer makes sounds that have no category. Herman’s guitar cuts through. Thomas yelps. Cleveland produces something that the music capitals of New York and London had not thought to make.