Pere Ubu, in which David Thomas was a singing central figure, lived and died amid the industrial wonderland of Cleveland, Ohio and bequeathed a substantial body of work (David has kept the substantial body).

Their six albums included the mighty 'Dub Housing' of 1978 and the final flourish of 'Song Of The Boiling Man' some three years back. Instead of a series of conceptual albums," continues David, "we produced the conceptual career. We started and set off to go someplace and on the way knew we were cutting our throats commercially.

"We started as a garage band, progressed through the land of big record companies as a garage band and we finished in the swamps of the Independents as a garage band – you better not quote that."

I won't. He closed the garage and walked out with The Pedestrians. A sometime band, often including avant-garde stalwarts like Chris Cutler and Lindsay Cooper. There was also a 'lecture series' tour wherein our man went solo and sang and read and bellowed and whinned. The L.A. Times said he had 'the goofy grace of a silent film comic'.

David claims to deliberately mumble during rehearsals and thereby dupe the band into thinking they're creating the music for a finished piece. Instead the words are laboured over later, "using the psychological terrain and the feeling of the music to establish the framework – you then stick in the finer points of the lyrics."

Funny, sad, bright, bleak, David's lyrics demand listening to, really listening to, if they are to be enjoyed at all. His curious tales of this and that (in the past he's dealt with dogs, dinosaurs and the problems of mathematics) are often a giggling feast of reason and language. As the ants say to the grasshopper (on the new 'More Places Forever' LP) 'why hold back and cheat yourself of joy?

"Obviously it isn't a pop product, we're dealing with human communication and art. My goal is to improve my talents, achieve a complex, multi-faceted expression – you wouldn't like to be in my shoes!"

Of course not, you're wearing them. David screams fiercely that (his) art is entertainment:

"What is Picasso or Rembrandt but entertainment? What is chess but entertainment? Just because it's intelligent and strives after maturity doesn't mean it's not entertainment. This is the great problem. The Great Problem. THE GREAT PROBLEM (Dust stirs on the rafters above us.) Just because you're intelligent you get lumped in with all these oddballs who do totally inaccessible stuff that nobody can understand.

"I'm 31 now and getting into maturity and I want to do music that expresses what I am. I tend to find older people are more open minded to musical experiments, avant-garde progressive-type music and different ways of performance. Obviously if you're dealing with music as a form of human communication you want to communicate to all people not just a narrow band who talk about dogmatic art principles. You want something to be appreciated by all people."