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This is Fresh Air. I'm Terry Gross. Our guest today is Sarah Snook. She's best known for playing Shiv Roy on the show Succession. Now she's on Broadway in a one-person show, an adaptation of the Oscar Wilde story The Picture of Dorian Gray. Last week, she received a Tony nomination for Best Leading Actress in a Play. She spoke with Fresh Air's Anne-Marie Baldonado.
It's hard to describe Sarah Snook's performance in The Picture of Dorian Gray. Snook plays all 26 characters in this stage adaptation of Oscar Wilde's novel from 1890. It feels like you're watching a two-hour sprint. She's giving a nonstop monologue, a crazy athletic solo performance.
For those who don't remember this gothic horror story, it's about a young man, Dorian Gray, who falls in love with his own beauty when an artist friend paints a portrait of him. He loves his own image so much that he makes a wish, a Faustian bargain, that allows him to stay young and beautiful while his portrait ages and decays.
The show uses pre-recorded snippets of Snook, playing different characters, projected on huge video screens. There are cameras, iPhones, and lightning-quick costume and set changes, all used to tell this story that culminates in Dorian spiraling, and ultimately facing his sins and his mortality. When Sarah Snook did this play for a run in London last year, it earned her an Olivier Award, which is the British equivalent of a Tony.
This isn't the only award that she's received. She won an Emmy and two Golden Globes for playing fan favorite Shiv Roy, the daughter of Logan Roy on the show Succession. Sarah Snook was born in Australia, where she went to drama school and received many accolades for her work on stage and screen. Her films include Jobs, The Dressmaker, and Memoir of a Snail. Sarah Snook, welcome to Fresh Air. Hi, thanks for having me.
Well, the creator of this adaptation, Kip Williams, a fellow Australian, when he approached you about taking on this role or these roles, what was your response? I read that you said that if you had seen the show, you might not have agreed to do it. Yes. Well, I was pregnant at the time. And I think I was like seven months or something. And, you know, my first baby. And so that kind of
ignorance is bliss kind of world of what is to come and the efforts of parenting at the same time as doing this particular show was if I had seen the show I think my husband particularly if he'd seen the show he would have said this is not this is not a good idea this is not something you do if you have a newborn this is not possible I mean it's not impossible obviously but it takes a lot of concentration and support not just from myself from from the family and from my team
As we've mentioned, you play all characters in this show, and you're also the narrator of this story. How do you differentiate between the characters? Do you develop the characters in the same way you would if you were just playing one part in a play? If you were slumming it and only playing one part? How am I going to go back to just playing one character? I don't know what comes after this, what tops this sort of overstimulation of characters.
To differentiate between the characters, I think lots of different things. In some ways, a blessing and a curse. We had only two weeks of rehearsals before doing the pre-recorded portion of the show at the end of 2023. And so it really meant that I had to make sharp and considered decisions quite early.
And part of that was created out of doing a lot of voice work with Geraldine Cook, my voice coach in Australia, and working on what timbre and tone and pitch and speed, pace, et cetera, each of the characters had and accent, as well as what physicality came from that. It's very much a physical sensation of each character sits somewhere differently in my body.
And how do you develop these different voices? If you could talk a little bit more about that. And then how do you keep them straight? Yeah, I don't know how I keep them straight. Someone asked me actually the other day, have you ever gotten them confused? And I said no, because it was true. And since then, I have twice gotten them confused. Oh, my God.
There were two instances on stage that I did the slightly wrong voice for the wrong character. And Kip happened to be in the audience on one of those shows and he didn't notice, so that was good. It was a kind of chaotic moment, which I was aware of, but no one else was, so that was a good cover at least. I think the process of finding it in the...
in the body with the voice and the physicality really helped because when I come to perform them, you know, the... Basil, for instance, is very... His very... The tone of his voice or the temper of his voice, perhaps, is quite brittle. Basil is the artist who did the portrait. Basil Hallward, yeah. He's the artist. So he sort of sits quite on the gum ridge, just behind the teeth. And there's something...
I guess, like it's very focused down and right. It's hard to explain actually now that I'm thinking about it. And there's a, you know, quite an obvious clue for Lord Henry where
The narrator says, said Lord Henry languidly. So there's quite an expansive quality to Lord Henry. And there's something that's very somewhat like molasses. Like he's very juicy and also something about aristocratic British men who are able to hold court and speak, you know, widely on subjects.
Lord Henry has quite a deep voice, but they actually have quite a range of pitch in their voices. And if you listen to Stephen Fry, he's talking up right at the top level of his pitch and then right down at the bottom in the same sentence. And it really holds your attention. And that was something we really wanted to find for Lord Henry.
Now, in an interview, I heard you say that when you were a kid, you used to love listening to cassettes of poems of Roald Dahl. And you used to memorize them. And I tried to find it online. I couldn't actually find it. But I was thinking that if you memorize those poems...
and they were read by British actors, listening could have been great training for you doing the picture of Dorian Gray, which is a bunch of different flowery British characters. It absolutely was. It was such a strange experience.
strange like thing to have as a reference like a feel a real body reference really from from my childhood of um Roald Dahl's Revolting Rhymes which um weirdly enough I think Miriam Margulies read one of the characters or one of the poems and when I met her I didn't realize this until I'd until I was thinking about the Roald Dahl's uh element of it all and went back I was like oh man I should have told her that she was such an inspiration to me as a kid and
through her voice, through the ability, like how her storytelling and characters really spoke to me when I was a kid. Through the help of cameras and recordings of you doing the other parts, you're actually acting opposite yourself. Is it odd to be acting with yourself as a scene partner? And this is like a version of yourself that was recorded a few years ago. Yeah, it's really, it's really strange. It's really strange because...
Well, what it does, particularly because I can't see myself ever, really. There's only once that I can see myself, which is the character of Alan Campbell. But otherwise I just have to listen to the audio recording aspect of it because I'm either back of stage or I'm in front of the screen or I'm behind the screen. I can't interact with it in that way. It really forces you to listen to what...
the person is saying what I'm saying um and forces you to uh be really imaginative really really you know engage with your imagination and how that makes you feel and and what part what what words are springing out to you tonight and what parts of the tone or how it's been delivered are springing out and um and maybe that's come from yeah listening to audiobooks when I was a kid a lot um
And having that imagination sustained in that way. Well, the performance is highly choreographed. You have to be very precise. You have to get to a mark or where you're supposed to be in time for you to interact with a recording of that you performed as another character. You say there are sequences where you have like seconds to get lines out. Otherwise, the scene cues will be off. Yeah.
Yeah, they'll just keep going. They're the worst kind of actors that I'm working with. They don't wait for you. They don't wait for me at all. They'll just barrel on, and if I don't keep up, it's my fault. Yeah, I mean, the hardest one of that is the Lord Henry sequence in the dinner party scene where there's seven... And you're playing all those seven other guests. Yeah. How many is it? Dorian? Two, three, four, five, six, I think. Yeah.
Yeah, I'm all of the, it's all me. You're playing all the other guests. Yes. But you know, like, I don't,
I don't think of them as me at all. I think of them as the characters. I mean, I can only see a kind of a side version of them as well because the screen is obviously not three-dimensional. But weirdly enough, because it's six different people and, you know, each of those was shot individually and then comped together and, you know, there's the kind of magic of that. They're all doing different things at different times and I've...
The more you look at the visual, the more you can find something new. There's something that I didn't realise or I'd forgotten that I'd done as the Duchess that is quite nice to play off of against and to be like, oh, she's thinking that there, that's funny. Which is, you know, I can't do anything with that verbally but I can use it to act opposite and to create something new for Lord Henry's performance.
One thing I want to add about the play is that it's funny. Not only the turns of phrases or the performance, but there's also this cheekiness to it. Like the narrator is a bit cheeky. And there are also other choices that you make. The way you switch from character to character can be quite funny. Yeah, I mean, it is a lot of fun to do. And the narrator really is, in a sense, funny.
Oscar Wilde. You know, I'm not playing him as a character, but there is his energy and his wit is definitely infused naturally into that role because it is the character based on the prose of the book. You know, Kip's turned a...
novel into a play and a Victorian novel that wasn't meant to be read out loud. It wasn't like a Dickens or anything like that. It was meant to be read and in episodic form in a way. So it's somewhat difficult to turn that into dialogue as well as into something that is accessible to an audience now. And part of that is
Part of creating that has been to keep the wit that Oscar Wilde has inherently in that text.
I want to ask about Succession. The show is about a rich and powerful family. The patriarch, Logan Roy, played by Brian Cox, runs a media company. His health is deteriorating and his children are jockeying for control of the company, for power, and, of course, for their dad's love. You said that originally you didn't want to audition for the role of Shiv Roy. I'm guessing this would have been...
like over or around 10 years ago now, why didn't you think the role was right for you at the time? I think because I, you know, personally I don't have any experience, you know, by association or proximity with wealth at that level. But I also, I guess I didn't understand the show so much and I didn't at that time want to be a...
secondary kind of handbag character to the men in the show who were going to be
I think billions had just come out and I was like, oh yeah, I can see that. It's straight white men in business and there's no room for me there. So I don't think I'll have a very interesting through line and maybe I don't think I'm going to get this role anyway. So I don't want to audition. And my friend, I was auditioning for something else and already had hair and makeup on, which is such an effort when you're doing self-tapes. I don't know, other people might not think it is, but
I find it a real effort doing a self-tape in the first place. But I was doing a self-tape for something else, and so my friend did just read the lines. Just have fun. Let's just try and do it. And I am forever grateful for her. Do you...
Do you remember what you did or what your take on it was that might have sort of, even though you originally didn't think it was the role for you, made them take note of you to be Shiv? I don't know. I mean, there probably was a level of insouciance or attitude about not feeling right for this and like...
You know, without using it as a succession word. F you for making me audition for this when you know I'm not right for this. Like, that's a bit shiv, to be honest. Like, that's...
Like a little above it, but also like showing up angry and wanting to win the test. Yeah, exactly. As Tom says. There you go. Yeah. Well, it occurred to me that the way Succession was filmed may have had some similarities to the way you perform your current role in Dorian Gray. I think that for Succession, there were numerous cameras following the cast as they did scenes, kind of like the cameras that follow you on stage. Are there similarities? Yeah.
Yeah, there are similarities. I mean, very different in terms of the specificity required for Dorian and the fluidity allowed in Succession. But something about the proximity of cameras and the kind of subtextual or subconscious awareness of them as a character in both Succession and Dorian has been really useful to have experienced that in Succession. It was never like...
they are definitely a character and we're going to dramaturgically make them feel like that. But just the presence of, you know, like Gregor, one of the camera operators, at one point he was on the other side of the couch and
I was doing the scene. He's behind my back on the other side of the couch. I look over. Yep, he's still behind me on the other side of the couch. And within three seconds, I turn and throw another line back over my shoulder, and he's right behind me. He has crossed the couch somehow. He's, like, leapt over it with a camera in hand. And that kind of agility from the camera operators, both in Dorian and Succession, is very similar. Wait, so you would sort of perform the scenes...
And it was kind of the camera people's job to sort of anticipate where you might go with it? Yeah, in some sense, yeah. We would do a director's rehearsal and we would know the approximate areas that we would need to be in. And then the camera operators with direction from...
The cinematographer and the director would be telling them, you know, be in this, OK, double down on that line, keep going, or, you know, do a crash zoom to here or there, like being in the right areas and the right spots. We would tend to light the room for the scene, or light one side and then the other side, so there was no, like, coming down the line, set up, set up, set up, changing the lights each shot, each frame. It was very just...
Yeah, there was a lot of freedom in that way of working and I loved it. It was great. It meant that the scenes really had a lot of energy between the characters and that we, in that particular way of working, we had a lot of space to fill in the gaps, I think, and that was where, you know, the camera operators and the DP knew, OK, well, we know that Sarah's in the corner in this set-up, but actually she's been told, you know,
As is always the case in succession, you're likely to be on camera, so have an opinion on everything. Like, you know, just be acting. You can't just sit back and relax for a moment. And that kind of attention to what's happening in front of you is really fun to work with, but then also was really valuable for transitioning onto something like Dorian because you're never sitting back. You're never, oh, I'm not on camera, so I can just switch off for a second. You're always on. You're on stage. You're always on.
Yeah, the thing about your character Shiv, she's an observer. She sometimes hangs back and watches as her brothers, her father, people in the company interact, and she seems to process it. And you can see that on your face. Can you talk about how you thought about Shiv as an observer? Sure.
Yeah, I mean, sometimes it just came out of me as Sarah and feeling like I couldn't compete in the level of, like, comedy, humor or improv that Kieran at the level that he's able to deliver. So half the time it was like, I'll just keep my mouth shut and have an opinion that I'll keep to myself. The camera will pick it up. And that sort of somewhat developed into a character choice as much as it was a...
an acting choice, an actor's choice. But yeah, I think it's right for her though as the younger sister of
of a, you know, oftentimes a room full of men, you're just kind of like, all right, let me watch my stupid older brother and my even stupider older brother and my even stupider older brother fight themselves out and tear themselves down and get themselves into a knot. And then I'm, here I am, dad, you know, I've just, I've just been sitting here.
You know, there's a cunningness and a cunning quality to Shiv. And a part of that is just being the observer and waiting her turn. Sarah Snook just received a Tony nomination for her role on Broadway in the stage adaptation of The Picture of Dorian Gray. We'll talk more about Succession after a break. I'm Anne-Marie Baldonado, and this is Fresh Air.
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Hi, this is Molly C.V. Nusberg, digital producer at Fresh Air. And this is Terry Gross, host of the show. One of the things I do is write the weekly newsletter. And I'm a newsletter fan. I read it every Saturday after breakfast.
The newsletter includes all the week's shows, staff recommendations, and Molly picks timely highlights from the archive. It's a fun read. It's also the only place where we tell you what's coming up next week, an exclusive. So subscribe at whyy.org slash fresh air and look for an email from Molly every Saturday morning.
I want to play a scene from Succession. This is actually the last episode. The board of the company is meeting to decide the company's future and who will take over. Would it be your brother, Kendall, or Shiv's brother, Kendall Roy, or would the board approve a sale to a tech company? After all the votes are in, Shiv is the deciding vote. She walks out of the room and the brothers, played by Jeremy Strong and Kieran Culkin, follow her.
You can't be CEO. You can't, because you killed someone. What do you mean? Which? What? Wait, what do you mean? Which? What? Like you killed so many people you forgot which one? That's not an issue. That didn't happen.
Wait, it didn't... As in what? It's just a thing I said. It's a thing I said. I made it up. You made it up? It was a difficult time for us, and I think I, you know, must have something from nothing because I wanted for us all to bond at a difficult moment. Wait, it was a move? No, there was a kid. There was that kid. So there was a kid. I had, like, a toke and a beer and not... I didn't even get in the car. Hold on. What? I felt bad, and I...
False memory did like I'm totally clean I can do this wait did it happen or did it not happen it did not happen it did not I wasn't even there it did not happen dude vote for me just please vote for me Shiv vote for me no yes Shiv don't do this you can't do this absolutely not man absolutely not no why
No, why? What, just... I love you. I really, I love you, but I can't on the f***ing stomach, you. This is disgusting. It doesn't even make any sense! I'm the eldest boy! I am the eldest boy! And, you know, it mattered to him. He wanted this to go on. That's a scene from Succession. What's it like to hear that scene now? It's so funny. Oh my gosh.
Listening to it and kind of, you know, forgetting, I guess, I've forgotten the lines. Getting to listen to it and I guess not seeing the visual of it is really, really, that's so fun. What great writing. Oh my gosh, Jessie, such great writing. It just makes you go like, oh, oh no, oh no, Kendall, you did not just say that. Like it's so cringy and...
and gross and wonderful. Like, it's just like...
It's, yeah. Jesse Armstrong is the creator of Succession. And a lot has been made about how some of Succession was improvised. And once I heard Kieran Culkin, who played your brother Roman, say that you're his favorite improv partner. Can you talk about the improv or if there was a lot of it? And even in that scene we just heard, there's your character and Kieran Culkin's character reacting to what Jeremy Strong is saying. And like all the no's and the like, oof's.
feel like very in the moment. Yeah, definitely. I mean, that's the sort of the funny thing about this show and the writing in the show. I would be hard pressed to know which parts were improvised and which parts weren't. But I would suggest that most of the like the oofs and the no's and the interstitial kind of moments, I always felt that those were improvised. And that was the beauty of it, where we could be live and real and expressive without
without worrying about going over someone else's line for sound or for stitching them up for reacting too loud or whatever it was, which gave everything a lot of aliveness and energy.
I want to play another scene from Succession. This is a really emotional scene. It's when Logan Roy's children find out that Logan is dying. They're all on a boat celebrating the wedding of the oldest son, Connor. They've received a call from Shiv's husband, Tom, played by Matthew McFadden, who's on a
a plane with Logan when he's passed out in the bathroom and isn't responsive. Tom calls the siblings to share the news. Kendall and Roman have tried to say goodbye and have handed the phone to Shiv, who's just finding out. Hey, Dad. Hello. You're going to be OK. And I'm sorry. Is he dead? I don't know if he's dead. Is he dead? I don't know. Tom. Hey. I don't know. Are you just being nice to me?
Is he gone? He's, uh, I don't know. I don't know. We, he, uh, we don't know. We don't know. Okay, I'm putting you back there, okay? Uh, okay. Well, um, I don't know what to do. You're by his ear. Yeah. I'm gonna put you back there. Okay, just, um, just, like, go private, be somewhere private, just speak. It's weird, but speak, okay? Like, you never know, he might hear you. Uh, Dad? Um, hey, Dad?
Daddy? I love you. Don't go, please. Not now. No, I love you. God, there's no excuses for me. And it's okay. It's okay, Daddy. It's okay. I love you.
That's a scene from Sex Session. That episode was such a killer and it shows how the siblings are still their father's kids. They hate him, but they still love him and want his approval. Was that episode difficult to film?
It was challenging in its expectations, but rewarding because of that. I think the challenges were we were all on a boat in the East River. I can't remember if that was docked at that point. I think we were docked at that point. But, you know, you're on a boat, you're at close quarters. Mark had decided as a group with Jesse and everybody to shoot that sequence as like a one take. And so each time we did that scene, it was a 29-minute take from...
That room, then up onto the next level, following Jeremy up, Kendall up, and then coming back down, and then we would go up into the top level room. Yeah, it was hard. It was hard. We shot it over two days, though, that sort of sequence.
I heard the director of that episode and many episodes, Mark Myland, talk about how you filmed this scene and gave it all of this weight. And then you sort of snapped out of it and were your delightful Sarah Snooks self again. Is that how you usually are able to do things? Are you able to go in and out like that? Yeah, I made a choice to do that on this one particularly because...
Particularly on that discovery moment, the lines that Jesse had written. This particular speech, I really wanted to learn exactly as he'd written with all the ellipses and the hyphens and the stuttered thoughts. I wanted to do it exactly as it was because it was so simple, the way he'd created that. And I really could see...
that there were thoughts that she couldn't finish and there were things that were too difficult to be said and she's going between all these sort of emotions. And finding that really sure footing with that and having felt like I'd rehearsed and prepared well enough to come to the day, I knew that I would...
lose the impetus and lose the freshness if I stayed, quote unquote, in character all day. If I was like down in the dumps and dealing with the passing of my father all day, it's just going to run out. Like I'm going to get dehydrated in a sort of practical sense because I'm going to be crying and I'm not going to be refueling enough with water.
I'm going to get desensitized to the fact of my father dying. So I was doing stupid stuff to actively put myself into a different space. And part of that came from being inspired by...
working with a young actress called Lily Latour in Australia on a film called Run Rabbit Run and dealing with really heavy things and dealing with really big scenes and seeing her ability to go into the scene, to be fully present, fully active, and then because she was using her imagination because she was a kid, when they called cut, she was out. She was doing cartwheels. She was doing other things. It was...
It was a real eye-opening moment to go like, oh, we're elastic. If you work hard enough, you can be elastic. If you lean on your imagination enough, you can come in and you can come out. You just have to be, maybe as an adult, mindful of how you do it because you don't want to shortchange your performance. But to trust that there is that ability to do that
My guest is stage and screen actor Sarah Snook. She played Shiv Roy on the Emmy Award-winning show Succession. Now she's on Broadway playing all of the roles in the stage adaptation of The Picture of Dorian Gray. More after a break. This is Fresh Air.
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I want to ask you about Shiv's marriage to Tom. And spoiler alert, Tom, the son-in-law, ends up becoming the head of the company. Shiv's by his side. And I want to play a scene, though, from earlier in that last season. Tom and Shiv are hosting a pre-election party when it looks like their candidate is going to win. And there are all these powerful people there.
But they're so angry with each other that they go out on the balcony and have a blowout fight.
who betrayed me. You were going to see me get sent to prison, Shiv! And then you f***ed me off with that undrinkable wine and you won't have my baby because you never even thought honestly that you'd be with me more than like four years, I don't think. You offered to go to jail, Tom! You offered because you're servile! You're just, you're servile! You are incapable of thinking about anybody other than yourself because your sense of who you are, Shiv, is that f***ed up!
Oh, yeah? You read that in a book, Tom? You're too transparent to find in a book. You're pathetic. You're pathetic. You're a masochist and you can't even take it. I think you are incapable of love. And I think you are maybe not a good person to have children. Well, that's not very nice to say, is it? I'm sorry. I'm sorry. But you, you, you have hurt me more than you can possibly imagine. And you...
You took away the last six months I could have had with my dad. No. Yes. No. Yes. You sucked up to him and you cut me out. It's not my fault that you didn't get his approval. I have given you endless approval and it doesn't fill you up because you're broken. I don't like you. I don't, I don't even care about you. Don't care.
That's a scene from the last season of Succession. Can you talk about filming that scene with Matthew McFadden? Yeah, that's so weird to listen to. I feel so sorry for them because you can hear it from like more of an objective side. Like, oh no, you're such broken people. Yeah.
Yeah, filming that was so fun working with Matthew. He's so present and generous as an actor. He's so giving. But we rehearsed a little bit the night before and so when we came in, it was really just like in us, I guess. And all the kind of the well of pent-up aggression, the things that we've never been able to yell at each other or been able to say as Shiv and Tom was really there, like all the, oh, it's really just...
deep subterranean in them and really fun to have a go at each other because they don't argue well. As a couple, they never really had good arguments that would clear the air or see another person's point of view. But here, they really go for each other's throats and that was really fun. I mean, I think I just told everyone that I was pregnant as Sarah at that point. And so hearing...
Hearing Tom say, I don't think you're going to be a very good mother was an easy thing to act in response to because it's all that kind of bound up in there and wondering whether you will be, you know, as Sarah, let alone as Shiv, be a good parent. And Shiv is pregnant at that point but hasn't told him. Yeah. Which makes it even more hurtful. Yeah. It's just a horrible, horrible scene. And so, again, so well written. And that's the wonderful bedrock of this show.
Now, you grew up in Australia, and I read that you grew up near a national park. So was that very rural or picturesque? Yeah, it was very picturesque, and I felt rural. But looking at it now and looking on Google Maps, it's like 30 minutes from the center of the city. It's so close to the center of the city, it's crazy.
But this national park is so beautiful. Yeah, I guess Australia has a real wonderful blurred line between nature and metropolis or city.
And you have two older sisters, so you were the youngest, just like Shiv. Your parents got divorced when you were young and you moved a bit, but I read that one thing that was constant was your love of watching movies, and your mom even worked for Disney for a time. Yeah, at one point she was distributing Disney VHS, so she got to bring home a bunch of those, and I loved them. I really just repeated those all the time I had time.
Snow White, Cinderella, Little Mermaid, Lion King, Aladdin, just on repeat in my house. I read that you were sort of more interested in the character actor or the villain. Yeah, you know, there's a part of me, the feminist in me is like, oh, but if you watch Disney films, you might end up wanting to be a princess and being saved by a prince and a princess can save herself. You know, like, sure. I mean, that is true.
But also, I grew up watching those films and I was the one who came out of that going like, great, I want to be the genie. I want to be Jafar. I want to be a Yago. I want to be Ursula. I want to be Scar. I want to be Simba. I want to be all the characters who go and do stuff and who are funny and strange and weird and get great musical numbers. Yes, they have the good lines. They have the great lines. Well, Sarah Snook, thank you so much for joining us. My pleasure. Thanks for having me. Nice to chat.
Sarah Snook spoke with Fresh Air's Anne-Marie Boldenaro. Last week, Snook received a Tony nomination for her leading role in the stage adaptation of The Picture of Dorian Gray. The show's run has been extended until June 29th. Coming up, our rock critic Ken Tucker remembers David Thomas, the lead singer for the band pair Ubu. He died last month at age 71. This is Fresh Air.
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David Thomas, lead singer and principal songwriter for the band Pera Ubu, died on April 23rd at age 71. Thomas and Pera Ubu emerged from the Cleveland punk rock scene in the late 1970s and were immediately recognized as unique artists. Our rock critic Ken Tucker reviewed the band's 1978 debut album, The Modern Dance, for Rolling Stone, describing the music back then as harsh, ugly, vivid, and exhilarating.
Here's Ken's appreciation of David Thomas' work. In 1978, that was most people's introduction to David Thomas' voice, the central sound of Pair Ubu, on the opening song of their debut album, The Modern Dance.
Everything Thomas would do for the next 47 years was already in place. The high-pitched growl and prickly phrasing, his stop-start way of blurting out the lyrics, the surrealist approach to imagery. The band's personnel would change regularly over the decades. The one per-ubu constant was David Thomas. His singing, his songwriting, and his immense physical presence on stage.
Not for Nothing was one of his pre-Ubu stage names, Crocus Behemoth. It's a lovely day by the sea Mr. Potato Head is strumming a guitar The beggar on the bench is acting lewd and cruel Weak and father's got his kid out for a stroll
Winter by our shores, shredding the seagulls once more. So that's good. And it is as it should be, on a lovely day by the sea. Thomas' death at age 71 brings to a close one of the most significant avant-garde experiments ever conducted within the confines of pop music.
Emerging from Cleveland, the band was as inspired by the clanking sounds of the city's industrial factories as it was by the blues that David Thomas loved. As he said more than once, we don't promote chaos, we preserve it. Make the emotional garbage for someone who's gonna pretend much better than I do. Shut up! Shut up!
Take a look at me! Take a look at me! Later boys dance to dream. A bearded cop who sings like a girl. And on something they're gonna wanna say. Take a look at me! You have intentions. You think that this is real. Take a look at me!
Over the years, certain themes recurred in Thomas' songwriting. He wrote lyrics that revealed a deep knowledge of 20th century hard-boiled fiction. Novelists like Raymond Chandler, Jim Thompson, and James Crumley would have covered their ears at Pere Hubu's noise, but they'd recognize a kindred spirit in the man who wrote repeatedly about desperate getaways in the ink-black night of the 20th century.
about cynical men and tough women trying to make emotional connections. In the extraordinary song called Irene from 2014's Carnival of Souls album, Thomas steals a phrase from 50s rocker Screamin' Jay Hawkins to tell Irene he thinks their love is probably doomed. For a few moments, the harsh clatter of peru-bu music subsides. His croon only underlines his despair. I put a spell on you
Because you're, I put a spell on. You will say you love me. And I will say, oh, I'm gonna go wrong. Not gonna turn out very well at all. Thomas' go-to facial expression was the scowl. He liked to come off crotchety and did not suffer fools gladly.
In his later years, he'd sing while seated in a chair on stage, like a king surveying his subjects. Like, in fact, the mad King Ubu in Alfred Jari's 19th century absurdist play that inspired the band's name. This pair Ubu enunciated like a man caught mumbling in a dream to convey the sound of distraction, confusion, or pure bliss.
In the song Mandy from the 2013 album Lady from Shanghai, Thomas sings the line, I could sleep for a thousand years. The people overseeing Perubu's Facebook page included this statement in announcing his death.
David Thomas and his band have been recording a new album. He knew it was to be his last. We will endeavor to continue with mixing and finalizing the new album so that his last music is available to all. I cannot wait to hear it. Ken Tucker is Fresh Air's rock critic. David Thomas died April 23rd. He was 71.
Tomorrow, our guest will be Emmy winner and Oscar nominee Michelle Williams in the new limited TV series Dying for Sex. She plays a woman who finds out she's dying of cancer and decides to leave her unhappy marriage and her life behind to seek pleasure and sexual satisfaction. She'll tell us about portraying characters experiencing grief, loss, and resilience. I hope you'll join us. Just one more, just sing a little song.
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Fresh Air's executive producer is Danny Miller. Our technical director and engineer is Audrey Bentham. Our managing producer is Sam Brigger. Our interviews and reviews are produced and edited by Phyllis Myers, Anne Rebo Donato, Lauren Krenzel, Teresa Madden, Monique Nazareth, Thea Chaloner, Susan Yakundi, and Anna Bauman. Our digital media producer is Molly C.V. Nesper. Roberta Shorrock directs the show. Our co-host is Tanya Mosley. I'm Terry Gross.
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