'A Day Such as This'
David Thomas’ second solo album (as
‘David Thomas and his Legs’, though the front cover merely lists the three
contributing musicians) is Winter Comes Home. It is a live recording of
a show he, Lindsay Cooper and Chris Cutler put on in Erding, ‘a town north-east
of Munchen, West Germany' on 11 December 1982. It is largely a spoken word
performance, for which Cutler and Cooper periodically provide atmospheric and
presumably largely improvised backing.
In the sleevenotes to the compilation
Monster, Thomas explains why Winter Comes Home has no place in the CD
box set of his solo material:
BTW Winter Comes Home does not exist. According to the Authorized View,
it never did exist and so, it never will exist. Those who claim to own copies are
troublemakers. Report them to the Grocery Police.
In taking on such a rare form for a
rock musician, blending performance poetry, stand up comedy, public
expostulation, theatre and music, Thomas was really making a bold move. Like
the single of ‘I Didn’t Have a Very Good Time’, which may or may not have been
too arcane for the already extremely arcane Sound of the Sand, Winter Comes
Home was (presumably) too obscure a project for the Rough Trade label and
was, instead, released on Chris Cutler’s own record label, Recommended. The
calligraphy on the back cover is typical of many Recommended releases, and is
Cutler’s own.
Cutler had already worked with
Thomas, to a minor capacity, on his recording of ‘Sloop John B’ on Sound of
the Sand. Here, Cutler was required to be part of the band recording
backing to a pre-recorded vocal – never an easy task. John Greaves, the other
half of Henry Cow’s rhythm section with Cutler, also played on that album.
Greaves does not appear on subsequent Thomas releases, but another Henry Cow
member, the late Lindsay Cooper, was to appear on a number of future albums;
this was the first.
An additionally unusual element of
the Winter Comes Home album and the tour it represents is the ‘text’
Thomas is using. Though Sound of the Sand had been released by the time
of this show, the works Thomas is performing are Pere Ubu lyrics, largely from
the band’s most recent album from that time, Song of the Bailing Man; ‘Rhapsody
in Pink’ was a track from the previous album Art of Walking. These are
blended, on the album, with commentary and monologues from Thomas.
To add to what might be seen as the
perversity of this approach, it should be borne in mind that Thomas (and indeed
Pere Ubu) was seen at this time by many having lost direction, particularly
lyrically, though also musically. Whereas the trend amongst new wave (now often
called postpunk) bands of the early 1980s was for depressive, harrowing and
thereby ‘meaningful’ lyrics exploring a ‘dark side’, Pere Ubu had completely
eschewed such output by 1981/2 – which they had already shown on Dub Housing
they were more than capable of generating, should the need be apparent.
Instead, Thomas’ work these days was primarily about birds, hats, walking and
other profoundly mundane elements of daily life; the effect for many was
childishly naïve, irritatingly rootless and perverse. Why would a band who had
made their name firstly with proto-punk, Hawkwindesque rock – and then with
cutting-edge new wave paranoid angst before moving into often uneasy-listening,
edgy experimental material – then turn to idle whimsy? Song of the Bailing
Man is probably regarded by many as the nadir of Pere Ubu’s output (yes –
it’s due for reassessment, like everything) largely for this reason.
How, then, to write about these
tracks? There are, of course, numerous possibilities. However, it strikes me
that this, like the next Thomas album Variations on a Theme, can be
regarded as a series of songs with (at least) two iterations, and the truth of
the matter lies in the contrast between the two.
‘The theme for tonight,’ Thomas says at the start
of the record, ‘comes in the form of a question “is hyperbole man’s best
rhetorical friend?” This is also printed on the back of the sleeve as the
overarching concept for the album. He describes hyberbole (he’s translating,
remember, for a German audience who incidentally seem to find as much humour in
his intonation and crazy voices as his actual words – not to suggest they’re
not fluent in English, obviously they are) as speaking ‘more than the truth… to
create a vivid impression’. ‘A Day Such as This’ is, of course the perfect song
to illustrate this concept. On Song of the
Bailing Man it’s brisk and breezy; on Winter Comes Home Thomas
teases out all manner of possibilities. He repeats the first line twice;
then Lindsay Cooper and Thomas work around the ‘H.Y.P.E.R.B.- O.L.E.’ refrain
in a number of ways; the second time, Cutler joins them and turns the whole
into something of a folk dance. (‘He plays drums like he’s singing’, Thomas
says in the Monster sleevenotes).
During this performance, on some occasions Thomas
is singing the song as it’s known on Song
of the Bailing Man then on others, drifts off into his speaking voice.
So we might be encouraged to think, then, that
this particular rendition of this track (and indeed the whole
performance/album) has been created to showcase Thomas’ abilities as a
lyricist, and a misunderstood lyricist at that. The ‘nature prance’ is not, as it
might superficially appear, a random, incidental gathering of wry and musings
on the passing show; it’s a thoughtful inquiry into the workings of language
and observation. In that regard, while it is probably the weakest track on this
peculiar album, it sets up the remainder admirably.
