I recently picked up my copy of David Thomas’ Monster, his 5-CD collection of five albums from the 1980s between
Pere Ubu’s breakup and reformation (and another disc of live material from the
mid-1990s). There are things about this collection that have always fascinated
me; not just those 1980s albums themselves, which I devoured avidly when they
were originally released, but also the curious treatment given two of them:
one, 1982’s spoken word (with musical accompaniment) Winter Comes Home, was ‘disappeared’ by Thomas – it’s not in the
box and Thomas suggests in the sleevenotes that it doesn’t exist (however it’s recently
become officially available again as a download at http://www.hearpen.com/hr160.html);
perhaps even stranger, Variations on a
Theme is not merely remixed (as Wikipedia claims) but in fact completely
reworked, with new lyrics/vocals, newly recorded elements, etc (‘overdubs and
revisions’ including new contributions from Jim Jones, who wasn't* on the original
record) from 1989/90.
I
like to write about music, and while I have no special insight even after
cogitating on various elements of Thomas’ music, I figured it might be a nice
project to start a conversation about these remarkable, and frankly overlooked,
albums (yes, all six, including Winter
Comes Home). How? I am not sure yet, obviously. I’m only starting now.
However, it seems reasonable to begin with the first track of the first of
these albums, and end up at the last track of the sixth – that’s 57 songs.
As
I so often seem to be saying these days, please don’t feel you have to read
this. I have a blog because although I write a lot for work, and I write a lot
for other publications, too, I also write for my own enjoyment but frankly that
enjoyment only really makes sense if there is some sense of the possibility
of someone reading it at the other end. For instance, someone searching
online for information on David Thomas’ solo records, which are actually pretty
underrepresented on the internet (and where they’re there, there’s a lot of
misinformation).
‘TheBirds Are Good Ideas’ begins the first ‘solo’ album by David Thomas, The Sound of the Sand. It’s not really a
solo album; you only have to look at the songwriting credits to appreciate
that. With no particular insight into David Thomas’ working practices, I am
fairly certain that many of the songs that make up his 1980s solo career are
the result of studio jams by the assembled musicians (from Dub Housing onwards, I gather, Pere Ubu worked this way; it’s
almost impossible to believe that in 1982 Thomas had a bunch of songs he was
itching to record).
OK,
so as I get closer to cutting to the chase re: ‘I Think the Birds Are Good
Ideas’ I just have one more thing to say about the album it’s on: it’s really
badly sequenced, at least as far as user friendliness is concerned. The first
three tracks are the abovementioned; followed by ‘Yiki Tiki’ and then ‘The
Crickets in the Flats’, an instrumental which Thomas presumably had little or
no involvement in (and for which songwriting is credited entirely to drummer
Anton Fier), but which – while it would have been terribly deceptive as a first
track – would also have been a great opener.
‘I
Think the Birds Are Good Ideas’ is, when it comes down to it, not the greatest
song, though like a lot of songs on this particular album the exceptional
talents of the men in the group mean that on occasion stuff really comes
together and you almost have the makings of a real pop song. The last 20
seconds of this track, for instance, could be the germ of a fabulous hit.
Eddie
Thornton’s trumpet, very trebly (to 2014 ears it sounds like a tinny synthesizer)
really makes the song, if anything does; I gather Thornton was a Rough Trade
artist at this time – he released a cover of ‘Theme from a Summer Place’ on 12”
I read on Wikipedia though I have absolutely no recollection of ever seeing or
hearing about that then or since.
However
I assume that the placement of this song at the start of proceedings probably
has more to do with the involvement of Richard Thompson, whose recruitment for
this album was something of a coup in certain minds – though once again the
dichotomy of David Thomas is highlighted. Richard Thompson is amazing as a
guitar player and a guitar playing innovator. Almost no-one who likes Richard
Thompson would like David Thomas, surely. Maybe there were a few Richard
Thompson completists who would buy David Thomas albums with Thompson on them…
let’s say there were a hundred? The connection Thomas forged on his solo albums
with former members of Henry Cow totally makes sense. The Richard Thompson
connection is that Richard Thompson helped to work up some of these songs.
Possibly it made some David Thomas fans think Thompson was cool, like he needed
that.
There
should be a name for the period in Thomas’ career when he had all those songs
about mundane everyday stuff. Let’s call it the Mundane period. I assume there
are twin aspects to the Mundane period – one, that Thomas is self-consciously
using the Mundane topics of birds, shoes, walking as metaphor (hard not to
assume that, he suggests it frequently in the songs themselves – and of course
there’s a way to read that into the title of this song particularly). The
other, less overtly stated, is that his Jehovah’s Witness devotion in this
period compels him to marvel at all elements in God’s schema, however small
they may be.
Certainly,
it’s an upbeat track, and about as far from scary as the material on Dub Housing and New Picnic Time as you can imagine, unless you’re scared by a big
American man singing in a high-pitched cartoon voice about birds. The music is
cartoony too. The song which follows it, ‘Yiki Tiki’, is almost a part two of
the themes herein – more soon.
*I had originally written 'was', this error corrected 4 December 2022, eight and a half years after it was made!
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