Ahead of bringing their co-headline tour to the UK this week, Devo and The B-52s have spoken to NME about their shared history as new wave oddballs and how AI will inspire the next wave of boundary-breaking bands.
Meeting as art students at Ohio’s Kent University, DEVO were galvanised after witnessing the shooting of student antiwar protestors on campus in 1970 by the National Guard, and used the concept of “de-evolution” to satirically express their outrage at the US’s lurch to the right and their belief that humanity was regressing.
“When we started off, we thought maybe we’d start our own venue and do shows every weekend for hardcore fans and there would be 30 people,” reflected DEVO’s Mark Mothersbaugh. Instead, over half a century later, the Cosmic De-Evolution Tour, partly billed as a continuation of both groups’ run of farewell gigs, sees them play London’s O2 on June 20 and Manchester’s AO Arena the night after.
Speaking on a joint Zoom call with Mothersbaugh, The B-52s Kate Pierson described the combination as “a real meeting of like-minds”.
“We complement each other well. DEVO’s a bunch of grumpy, old critical guys and The B-52s have a lot of ‘up’ energy, so they offset us,” added Mothersbaugh, also a prolific composer for TV shows, films, and games including Rugrats and The Lego Movie.
“We have equal energy, because we do lots of dancing and Mark is running around onstage like the madman he is!”, countered Pierson, before Mothersbaugh interjected. “You guys still look like you did in the ‘80s though, whereas we all look like a bunch of old men!”
Both bands have an absurdist streak of humour, and each acted as a lodestar to misfits and elder iconoclasts. Kurt Cobain claimed witnessing Athens’ The B-52s on Saturday Night Live in 1980 opened his eyes to “weird” music, and would also enthuse: “Of all the bands that came from the underground and made it in the mainstream, DEVO were the most challenging and subversive of them all.”
John Lennon once sang DEVO’s ‘Uncontrollable Urge’ at Mothersbaugh, and the Beatle cited The B-52s’ ‘Rock Lobster’ as the track that enticed himself and Yoko Ono into the studio to record 1980’s ‘Double Fantasy’.
DEVO and The B-52s will rotate who tops the bill each night. “We keep trying to fight about who gets to be the opening band so we can go out to the restaurant after the show,” said Mothersbaugh.
Check out the rest of our interview with Mothersbaugh and Pierson below, where they also tease the possibility of a collaboration and recall smoking angel dust with Michael Jackson.
NME: Hello Mark and Kate! Do you remember when DEVO and The B-52s first met?
Mark Mothersbaugh: “We had indirect connection through my youngest brother, Jim, who used to play drums in DEVO. Then he worked for Roland during the time they were involved with MIDI. His job was to go and show bands how to use their synths, and he visited The B-52s one time.”
Kate Pierson: “That’s a strange connection which I don’t remember! But The-B52s were the first band to play The Mudd Club in New York in 1978, and I remember hanging out with DEVO one time there. You gave me a paper helmet. I still have it.”
Did you feel a kinship?
Pierson: “Yeah. We’re similar in many ways. We have the Kent State connection, because I was very affected by that as well, and both bands are political. DEVO much more overtly, but The B-52s have more subtle political meanings. We both have great stage presence, looks, and both bands are totally unique.”
Mothersbaugh: “We’re both art bands.”
Pierson: “Yeah. People thought we had to be from England because we were weird.”
Mothersbaugh: “A couple of our band members had really bad teeth, so they thought we were from England too!”
Being so idiosyncratic, what was the reaction to your early gigs like?
Mothersbaugh: “When we were in Ohio, it was a cultural wasteland and nobody wanted to hear original music. They’d get out of their rubber factories in Akron and go to clubs to get drunk and listen to covers of songs. They certainly didn’t want to hear ‘Mongoloid’ or ‘Jocko Homo’. We were paid to quit a lot of times!”
Pierson: “When we started out in Athens, Georgia, nothing was happening. There was no scene, so we played our first gig at a party on Valentine’s Day in 1977 in a house we had borrowed. Our friends danced so much, the house shook. We’d play house parties and got a great reaction. Wherever we went, people would start dancing. We got harassed from the Frat guys who threw stuff at us one time, but the next year [in 1979], ‘Planet Claire’ was blaring out of the Frat House.”
You mentioned that both bands are political. DEVO envisaged the idea that society was regressing. Does it depress you that your philosophy now feels increasingly prophetic in the age of Trump?
Mothersbaugh: “Definitely, it is. But I’m aged 75 now. When I was doing that, I was 25 and thought everything was going downhill because I hadn’t lived long enough to understand that there’s a conflict between evolution and de-evolution, and they’re the yin and yang of humans. Humans are defective. With DEVO now, I feel like we’re talking about humans being the one species out-of-touch with nature.
“What’s happening now with technology, but also with greed and fascism being back again, it’s going to happen again. In 1975, I remember wishing I had been born 50 years earlier and was sad I didn’t get to be in Paris or Berlin during the period of Dadaism, surrealism, or Futurism. But after Nixon, things changed again and they went up. It’s on a cycle. It goes back down, it gets nasty again.”
So there’s hope?
Mothersbaugh: “This is going to be a time that’ll be interesting to listen to what kids are going to do with music now, because I think they’re going to be inspired by AI, the taking away of freedom, and the rampant greed on display in our world. It will inspire kids to make art where we’ll go, ‘Wow! I wish I’d thought of that!’”
Pierson: “It’s a shitshow here in the US. I’m thinking, ‘Where can I go if things keep sliding down?’ But there’s got to be a backlash and you hope they’ll be a pole shift and everything will turn around.”
Do you have a less-than-typical positive view towards AI, then?
Pierson: “[Typing] Let me ask ChatGDP about that and I’ll answer you then!”
Mothersbaugh: “When the Mellotron came out [in the early ’60s], the American Federation of Musicians wrote a letter saying, ‘Dear brothers, do not use the Mellotron because you’re going to put your fellow union members out of work’. It cracked me up because I tried to imagine going to a symphony with half-a-dozen Mellotrons onstage. It would be cool, but it would not sound like real players. There’s an initial novelty when you start hearing songs made by AI that makes you laugh, but people aren’t going to only listen to them -that’s not going to happen.”
Pierson: “AI could become a great tool eventually, but it’s scary when you think of the paths it could lead us down.”
Mothersbaugh: “We’re in a learning curve period. I have two kids. When I adopted them 23 years ago, I bought Encyclopaedia Britannica so they could look up information like I did when I was a kid. But they never looked at them. They’ve got this incredible device in their hands and have information with them constantly. That’s why so many young kids know our bands because they’ll go, ‘Nirvana is my favourite band. Who influenced them?’, and then find out it’s The B-52s and DEVO.”
Pierson: “We’re experiencing that too with young fans. It’s almost like there’s no past now.”
Kurt Cobain included, you shared a lot of the same high-profile fans. Did any of them blow your mind?
Pierson: “John Lennon and Yoko Ono.”
Mothersbaugh: “John Lennon. When I was 14, I remember seeing The Beatles on Ed Sullivan and I said, ‘That’s what I’m going to do when I grow up’.”
Pierson: “Me too. I heard The Beatles on the radio when I had a high-school folk-protest band called the Sun Donuts, and I freaked out, so John Lennon knowing our band at all was the most amazing thing to me.”
It’s Pride month. Most of The B-52s members are LGBTQ+, and inspired artists such as Jake Shears to feel less alone. Would you have described yourselves as having a queer sensibility back then?
Pierson: “Not only did we have a queer sensibility, we were queer. In Athens, we lived in a very positive bubble, surrounded by other artistic friends. It was a forgiving atmosphere for creativity, being eccentric, doing your own crazy things and dressing up. When we hit the thrift stores and put on our costumes and came to New York, people said: ‘Cyndi and Kate are drag queens from England…or Mars!’. They couldn’t imagine us being from Athens – just as they couldn’t imagine DEVO were from Ohio. It came from a spirit of, ‘We can make something creative ourselves. We can make a statement and say and be whatever we want’.”
DEVO had plenty of high-concept ideas, including the (unrealised) one of all getting plastic surgery to look like each other. Were any other extreme notions abandoned?
Mothersbaugh: “Luckily, we didn’t have enough money to do that! It probably wouldn’t have been very successful anyhow.”
Pierson: “At one point, Ricky [Wilson, original B-52s guitarist] said we should shave our heads and wear prairie dresses.”
Mothersbaugh: “That would have been a good video!”
Although you’re both retired from full-scale touring, is there any new music planned from DEVO or The B-52s?
Pierson: “Not really. We keep saying we’re going to write at least one song, but we haven’t done that yet.”
Mothersbaugh: “For my day job, I’m lucky enough to constantly be writing music for film, TV, and games, so I keep trying to get DEVO back into the studio. It could happen.”
Pierson: “Never say never! I’m working on a solo Christmas album. They’re all weird songs!”
Mothersbaugh: “I can only hope as much! Let me know when you’re doing that. I have sleigh bells that I used on a Wes Anderson movie that I’ll send you.”
Pierson: “I need sleigh bells on every song!”
Any possibility of a musical collaboration between your bands?
Mothersbaugh: “I would love to write music with Kate. That would be exciting. We’ll see.”
Pierson: “Maybe you really started something with that suggestion!”
Now there’s set to be a sequel to the blockbuster Michael Jackson biopic, is there any chance of seeing the time Mark smoked angel dust with the King of Pop and Andy Warhol immortalised onscreen?
Mothersbaugh: “Oh, he wouldn’t have remembered that.”
Pierson: “Wait! You smoked angel dust with Michael Jackson and Andy Warhol?”
Mothersbaugh: “It was before we had a record deal. I was in New York and got a call from the hostess of [sexually explicit late-night US show] Midnight Blue asking me on a double-date with her, Michael Jackson and Andy Warhol. We went to Studio 54. Somebody was passing a joint around. Michael didn’t smoke it and handed it to me. I took a couple of hits and hallucinated that the disco balls were spinning really fast around and lowering so much that they were hitting people in the head. Blood was gushing everywhere..”
Pierson: “ I accidentally smoked it once with Danny Beard, who put out our first record [‘Rock Lobster’]. We sat on stools, saying ‘Help! We can’t move!’ We couldn’t feel our feet or legs and had to be carried away. I met Andy Warhol once and got a dry handshake. Fred [Schneider, B-52s frontman] had an encounter with him, but he’d have to tell that story!”
Sounds intriguing! Do you have a favourite song from each other’s catalogues?
Pierson: “DEVOs ‘Whip It’ is one that constantly goes through my head – it’s inescapable.”
Mothersbaugh: “I’m a big ‘Rock Lobster’ fan. I love the way the guitar parts fit together. It’s a great sound and very specific. You always knew when a B-52s song was playing because the voices were so distinct.”
Pierson: “Ricky’s guitar playing, especially in ‘Rock Lobster’, was something else. He used to use his guitar like a machine gun. ‘Rock Lobster’ only had four strings, so the two middle-strings were missing. Ricky played these separate parts, almost, on the guitar. I have to say, DEVO’s cover of ‘Satisfaction’ equals the Rolling Stones’ original. It’s a kick-ass version.”
Mothersbaugh: “That’s sweet of you! It was 1974 and I thought, it’s been 10 years now, rock ‘n’ roll has to be over. I thought: ‘What’s next?’ We did a deconstructed version of [The Rolling Stones‘] ‘Satisfaction’ because that’s where we thought music would go.”
Pierson: “All postmodern stuff!”
DEVO and The B-52s UK tour dates are below. Visit here for tickets and more information.
JUNE 2026
20 – The O2, London
21 – AO Arena, Manchester