VIA PRESS RELEASE | Fire Records announce the third release of the box set series that draws on Pere Ubu’s back catalogue. Drive, He Said 1994-2002 brings together the albums Raygun Suitcase (1995, winner of CD Review’s Editors’ Choice Award), Pennsylvania (1998, voted no.1 in Music Critics Poll (1988), Village Voice), St Arkansas (2002, prompting Mojo to summarise their review with “It’s difficult to think of a more important band currently working”) and a 12” disc of extras, Back Roads.
Back Roads features live studio, jam sessions and newly remixed tracks, including “Electricity” (with the original vocals that were discarded at the time as “too brutal”), an outtake from Pennsylvania, and a live recording of SAD.TXT from Transmusicales Festival in France, 1998. These albums were the catalyst to finally uniting critics and the establishment to recognise that the band’s music was a force to be recognised, prompting four-day festivals at the Royal Festival Hall in London, The Knitting Factory in NYC, and the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame’s event, “55 Years of Pain,” honouring Pere Ubu along with fellow icons of the Cleveland scene, 15-60-75, in 1999.
With current band members Michele Temple, Robert Wheeler, and Steven Mehlman joining David Thomas here for the first time, it is a defining period for Pere Ubu. All studio albums and the 12” disc Back Roads were remixed and engineered by David Thomas and Paul Hamann at Suma, in June 2016.
