Non-Alignment Pact

It opens with the title. Not a hook, not a guitar riff. David Thomas takes the language of Cold War diplomacy and applies it to a girl. He wants to sign a Non-Alignment Pact with her. He wants it recognized around the world. He will list her thousand other names. Pere Ubu opens their debut album with a love song that behaves like a geopolitical statement, and it sounds completely natural, because in 1978 Cleveland, the absurd was the accurate.

Pere Ubu formed in Cleveland in 1975. David Thomas handled vocals. Tom Herman played guitar. Allen Ravenstine ran an EML synthesizer that the Suma Recording engineers mistook for a technical malfunction and nearly erased from the tapes. Tony Maimone played bass. Scott Krauss played drums. The album was recorded at Suma in Painesville, Ohio, primarily in November 1977, financed by Cliff Burnstein, and released February 1978 on Blank Records. The label had to change its name from Dip Records because an evangelist already owned it.

Ravenstine’s synthesizer is the sound that does not belong and cannot be removed. It fills the spaces between the guitar and bass with something that has no name in rock vocabulary. Herman’s guitar is direct and aggressive. Thomas’s voice is a yelp, plaintive and strange. The band had absorbed Captain Beefheart, the Velvet Underground, industrial Cleveland, and the specific anxiety of American Midwestern life in the 1970s. They turned it into something that nobody else was making, in a city that was not supposed to produce anything that mattered.

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 #11 on NME’s Best Albums of 1978. It appears in 1001 Albums You Must Hear Before You Die. Scholars call it a genesis point of post-punk. “Non-Alignment Pact” is track one, side one. It is the first thing David Thomas chose to say on record.