David Thomas regarded this as the nearest he ever came to writing and performing a straight-up pop song. Which tells you all you need to know about the Pere Ubu frontman, who has just died.

That this song was written and recorded in 1974 – first by his previous band Rocket From The Tombs – is just mind-blowing to think about. That was the year of Seasons In The Sun and Billy Don’t Be A Hero, of the albums Tubular Bells and Band On The Run.

Over a lurching rhythm that sounds like a Sabbath tribute band trying to play reggae, he recounts the story of a wartime US air raid on Tokyo in retaliation for Pearl Harbour… from the perspective of a suicide pilot.

After 2 minutes and 20 seconds it lurches to a halt… then starts up again like a motorcycle sputtering into life before taking off again like a rocket and disintegrating into a maelstrom of dissonance. And all through it there’s Thomas – “Crocus Behemoth” as he called himself in those early days – yelling, howling, squealing in a voice dripping with desperation.

A friend of mine once told me she didn’t believe that I or anyone else actually liked Pere Ubu because she didn’t believe anyone could “like” Thomas’s unconventional voice.

I can see why she might have drawn that conclusion: one critic once described his unique high-pitched voice as “James Stewart trapped in an oboe” and another as the sound of a man muttering in a crowd: “You think he’s talking to himself until you realise he’s talking to you.”

He was the perfect match for the experimental music made by Pere Ubu and their brutal predecessors, Rocket From The Tombs, who first recorded this song. After only a year they split into two new bands The Dead Boys and Pere Ubu, whom Thomas described as “the Crosby, Stills & Nash of the Cleveland, Ohio underground.”

They were, of course, never that, though Thomas may have believed they achieved their ambition. “I’ve insisted for 40 years now that we’re in the mainstream. Lady Gaga is avant-garde jazz; we’re Perry Como,” he said a decade ago. “We don’t sit around thinking: ‘How can we do stuff that nobody’s going to like?’ We’re a pop band. We’re just not a very good pop band… Everything I’ve done has been a failure.”

A glorious failure. I remember seeing them at The Marquee in 1978 or ’79 and being terrified by the sight of Thomas, a huge man in a suit and tie wielding a hammer and anvil onstage. The noise made by his bandmates on songs including this one, 30 Seconds Over Tokyo, was even more frightening.

I loved it and I saw them several more times, including the Rocket From The Tombs reunion a decade ago. By the time of their 2015 gig at London Fields, Thomas was unable to walk and had to be helped onstage.
They played this, and the Dead Boys favourite Sonic Reducer, but his performance was not enhanced by several bottles of red wine and a display of temper after he became infuriated by losing the reed from his horn and angrily blaming band members and crew.

In the last interview I read with Thomas, he said: “As I’m approaching the end of my life, I’ve got my foot to the floor and I’m going to be going full speed ahead when I hit the wall.” I’m sure he was.