Ace Mower
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acemower.bsky.social
Ace Mower
@acemower.bsky.social
260 followers 610 following 2 posts
Music botherer, former tinyscale fanzine & tape label impresario, urban gardener, free radical.
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Reposted by Ace Mower
peterjukes.bsky.social
We turned it into an Advent Griftmas Calendar bylinetimes.com/2025/12/10/n...
Nigel Farage's Russian Influence Advent Calendar
Byline Times has compiled a festive offering of the prize moments when the Reform leader has gifted the political agenda to Vladimir Putin and Russia
bylinetimes.com
December 10, 2025 at 4:18 PM
Reposted by Ace Mower
rhodri.biz
Some further thoughts on David Thomas this morning.
I started working for David Thomas's manager, Nick, in 1992, a few weeks after leaving university and with no idea of what I wanted to do. That essentially meant working for David Thomas, too. At the time, Pere Ubu were finishing up the album "Story Of My Life", a rather benign, unremarkable affair that quietly tied up their time spent on a major label. Things were a bit fraught. To be honest, things were always a bit fraught. David would call up with edicts, and some of those would be assigned to me. I was 20 years old and had no idea what I was doing. I remember being told to ring Tony Maimone to give him details of where some Ubu rehearsals would be taking place, and Maimone being furious at how far he had to travel, and putting the phone down on me, and me being left with the prospect of telling David that his bass player wanted the rehearsals relocated. I was terrified of him. Every day brought new challenges. I remember David, with good reason, being livid with Nick that the accounts weren't being kept up to date, and coming into the office one morning to find an answerphone message from David that began quietly with "Accounts. Accounts. Accounts," but got louder and louder over the course of a minute until he was literally shrieking "ACCOUNTS", with spittle jamming up his receiver. I remember him calling me from Atlanta at 3am UK time, having picked up a hire car that I'd arranged, with angry, probing questions about insurance that I was ill-equipped to answer. I also remember ringing an employee at a former Ubu record company at 9am and beseeching them to log into their boss's computer and delete an email that David had sent overnight which would have, let us say, put future releases in jeopardy. But set against that was a boatload of charm, loyalty and artistic wizardry. I remember listening in the office to Ubu's next album, Ray Gun Suitcase, on a pre-release cassette, and being thrilled that David and the band had produced this awkward, difficult record with a bunch of rough edges where he sounded like he was genuinely enjoying himself again. I remember dozens of gigs with David Thomas and Two Pale Boys – extrarodinary, improvised affairs with Keith Moline and Andy Diagram – where he would be on the verge of throwing the gig away, having these enormous tantrums, and memorably, at Dingwalls, walking off stage halfway through only to be coaxed back for a triumphant endgame where he had the audience eating out of the palm of his hand. Was it all pre-planned? Was it all part of the show? I'm still not sure. After a few years I won David's trust, partly as a consequence of a masterful piece of music management where I managed to persuade an employee of American Airlines, over the phone, to let bass player Michele Temple on a plane without a ticket in order to get to a show in Cleveland. My terror of him abated (a bit), and there was laughter, even fun – I remember us poring over a map of Russia to find unusual place names to put on the front of the Pale Boys album Erewhon. He could be kind and generous. He came to my wedding in 1995 and bought a present, which was unexpected. No one else could have persuaded Linda Thompson to sing in public, but David did, in the late 1990s, standing on stage at the Queen Elizabeth Hall and literally holding hands with her while she visibly shook, but sang, so beautifully. David Sefton asked David to curate a whole series of Happenings on the South Bank around that time which David called Disastodrome ("We call it disasto so nothing can go wrong") which was to include David cooking steaks on the forecourt on a huge griddle, basted with American beer which he'd swig from a bottle and spit onto the meat. I stopped working for Nick around Christmas 2000, and in the New Year David called me and asked me if I would reconsider. I found this hugely touching, but had to close a chapter on what was a pretty stressful working environment. But I loved going to see Ubu in subsequent years, even as his health declined and his grizzled onstage presence became more muted. The last time I saw him was at the Moth Club in Hackney, about 7 years ago, where I was playing with Prescott. DT and a couple of other acts were on the bill, and the finale was to be an improvised affair with all of us onstage and David at the helm. Finally I was about to actually play some MUSIC with this guy who I'd watched perform so many times, biting my nails as he berated musicians and audience alike. He turned to me and said "Rhodri... give me [I actually can't remember what he told me to do, but let's say it was, uh, a moonlit river.]" I did my best to convey the essence of a moonlit river. He nodded. "I like that, keep it going." So I did as I was told. As usual. He influenced my thinking in so many ways. His websites are full of eloquent pronouncements on the Right Way to do things – the rules of being on tour, his dislike of vinyl and so on – which I sometimes go and read just for fun, whether I agree with them or not. He was simply an extraordinary human being, and my heart goes out to all those people who were a lot closer to him than I was. David Thomas onstage
April 24, 2025 at 9:19 AM