David Thomas cuts an unlikely figure, perspiring, trench-coated, perched on a stool and squeezed uncomfortably into a gap by the side of the Mean Fiddler’s meanly proportioned merchandising booth. He’s smoking a cigarette down to his nicotine-yellow smoke-singed fingers, to his left empty coke cans, some improvised ashtrays, litter the counter.

I first saw Pere Ubu at the Roundhouse in 1978, a support act for the wonderful Graham Parker and the Rumour. It was, I think, their first visit to the UK during what was still a phase of marvellous musical turmoil in the world of rock and roll. And Pere Ubu, as I can still recall vividly, were simply astonishing – the thing of the moment – unconventional, unexpected, unpredictable and uncompromising. An animated David Thomas, looking like the main protagonist in Eraserhead, beat out distracted rhythms with his hammer and sang with almost hysterical intensity, to a pounding bass beat backing, with fragmented guitar and a disorientating science-fiction synthesiser that looked more like an old valve radio.

But tonight he’s in Pere Ubu mode, with a sparkling band – sometime journalist Keith Moline on guitar (if not fragmented, then fractured), Michele Lamb on pounding bass driving the band along with drummer Steven Mehlmen, and star of the show computer-boffin Robert Wheeler who like his predecessor in 1978 occupies the left hand side of the stage with what looks like a home-made synthesiser, cables trailing all over the place, and a home-made Theremin which he plays like a virtuoso.

Robert Wheeler

The Modern Dance (1978) Why I Hate Women (2006)

And despite his apparent angst about cash and equipment we’re not short changed on the evening. Indeed he seems determined to deliver value for money – when he screws up the start to ‘Modern dance’ he halts the band - “Now these good people have paid their money to see Mr Thomas perform his hit and I think we owe it to them to ensure he does it properly” – before racing through what might have been a word perfect version, had we been able to understand a single word that he was singing. And having returned for an encore he drives the band on, calling songs at will, past the curfew, eventually apologising that he has to leave to catch his train home (and no doubt give the whippet its last walk before bedtime). The new album is a cracker, and he mixes material from this – notably ‘Love song’ (an outstanding song) , ‘Two girls, one bar’, ‘Mona’, ‘Stolen Cadillac’ ‘Flames over Nebraska’ (“I’m proud to say this is a song written for me a few months ago by Elvis Presley”) and ‘Synth farm’ with an eclectic selection from the band’s extensive back catalogue including the hugely misogynistic ‘Time will catch up with you’, the marvellously titled love song from debut album Modern Dance, ‘Nonalignment pact’ and ‘Final solution’, but alas not their early take on reggae ‘Heaven’, which would have made a very good evening almost perfect.

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