David Thomas, frontman of the legendary avant-garde rock band Pere Ubu, has passed away. Thomas, who also led the proto-punk band Rocket From The Tombs and who released records as a solo artist, passed away on Wednesday at his home in the English town of Brighton And Hove after suffering from a long illness, according to a statement posted on Pere Ubu's Facebook. Here's that statement:
David Lynn Thomas, lead singer of Pere Ubu, Rocket From The Tombs and multiple solo projex, has died after a long illness.
On Wednesday, April 23 2025, he died in his home town of Brighton & Hove, with his wife and youngest step-daughter by his side. MC5 were playing on the radio. He will ultimately be returned to his home, the farm in Pennsylvania, where he insisted he was to be “thrown in the barn.”
David Thomas and his band have been recording a new album. He knew it was to be his last. We will endeavour to continue with mixing and finalising the new album so that his last music is available to all. Aside from that, he left instruction that the work should continue to catalog all the tapes from live shows via the official bandcamp page. His autobiography was nearly completed and we will finish that for him. Pere Ubu’s Patreon will continue as a community, run by communex.
We’ll leave you with his own words, which sums up who he was better than we can-
“My name is David Fucking Thomas…and I’m the lead singer of the best fucking rock n roll band in the world.”
(Frigo Documentary)
Long Live Pere Ubu.
David Lynn Thomas was born in Miami. In the early '70s, he was living in Cleveland and writing under a number of aliases for the Cleveland Scene, his local alt-weekly. The best-known of those alter-egos was Crocus Behemoth. In 1973, Thomas got together with fellow Cleveland Scene employee Charlie Weiner to form an anarchic rock band called Rocket From The Tombs. Influenced by Detroit bands like the Stooges and the MC5, Rocket From The Tombs wrote frantic, hallucinatory songs about death, nihilism, and historical atrocities. They never released any records during their time as a band, but they became an influential force anyway, and their recorded material was collected on a number of records years later. Rocket From The Tombs broke up in 1975, with its members splitting off to form two bands, Pere Ubu and the Dead Boys.
David Thomas and his former Rocket From The Tombs bandmate Peter Laughner started Pere Ubu in 1975, and they essentially made post-punk music before the initial 1977 punk explosion even happened. They took their name from a reference to the avant-garde play Ubu Roi, and they all lived in a house together. Their debut single "30 Seconds Over Tokyo," a repurposed Rocket From The Tombs song about a 1942 suicide bombing run on Tokyo, came out on a local independent label in 1975, and it sounded like nothing else. Pere Ubu's three guitarists came up with a piercing, buzzing groove that worked as mechanical reggae and devolved into noise, while Thomas hollered in an unhinged bellow that set the stage for decades of freaked-out underground rock voices. They were true originals, and it's essentially impossible to imagine bands like Gang Of Four or the Pixies existing without their precedent. Since those bands were so influential, that makes Pere Ubu the originators of many, many things.
Pere Ubu followed "30 Seconds Over Tokyo" with more similarly bugged-out singles "The Modern Dance," "Final Solution," "Datapanik In The Year Zero." They signed to the Mercury Records offshoot Blank Records and released their full-length debut The Modern Dance in 1978. It won critical raves but sold very little. The band cranked out four more similarly confrontational albums before breaking up in 1982. Before Pere Ubu's initial run was over, David Thomas released his experimental solo debut The Sound Of The Sand And Other Songs Of The Pedestrian in 1981. It featured Richard Thomas on guitar, as well as a few members of the British prog band Henry Cow.
Thomas continued to release increasingly whimsical solo albums throughout the '80s. On 1987's Blame The Messenger, Thomas' crew of collaborators came to include many of the members of Pere Ubu, so the band got back together and released the 1988 album My Tenement Year. They continued on for years, and they got some MTV exposure with their 1989 LP Cloudland. The band's lineup continued to shift through the '90s, with Thomas as its linchpin. At the same time, Thomas also continued to release solo music, stage experimental theater performances, and he toured with a revived version of Rocket From The Tombs. Pere Ubu's most recent album Trouble On Big Beat Street came out in 2023.
Below, check out some of David Thomas' work.
