Given the group’s nature, it’s not surprising that Devo has played in “a lot of strange places” during its 50-plus-year career, as the group’s Mark Mothersbaugh tells UCR.
But there was on that stands out, he adds — the Hot Club in Philadelphia, a converted house that opened during 1977 as a jazz club but soon pivoted to punk and new wave.
“They’d torn down walls on the inside of the house in a circle so they could put a stage right in the middle of the downstairs floor,” Mothersbaugh recalls. “They put chairs so you could sit in the kitchen and watch, or you could sit in the dining room or the living room and watch the band.
“I don’t think the promoter had enough money to pay us, so he paid us with Philly cheese steak sandwiches. We sat on the edge of the stage, sort of in a circle, and he had a stripper strip while we were eating cheese steak sandwiches. This was in our early says, and I just thought, ‘Is this how it’s gonna be? When we get a record deal maybe it’ll be different — or maybe it’ll be the same.’ But that was a strange one.”
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Things certainly did change for Devo, especially once it signed a major label deal in 1978 and found itself on Saturday Night Live and, nine years later, on the Lollapalooza tour. This week, meanwhile, the group joins the B-52’s and Lene Lovich for the Cosmic De-Evolution Tour, a 12-date trek that kicked off Sept. 24 in Toronto and plays a dozen dates, piecemeal, through early November.
“I’ve only seen Lene perform once; that was at the Whiskey A Go Go (in Los Angeles), I’m thinking somewhere around ’79, ’80, and she sounded great,” Mothersbaugh says. “I knew her music because that was our time period, and the B-52’s came a little bit after, and I loved ‘Rock Lobster’ and I liked their sense of humor and their aesthetic. I liked the way they made their songs, where it had this kind of Star Trek-y thing going on, with kitschy pop.
“It’s different than us. They’re much more of a dance band and a party band, and I think that makes us complementary to each other. I think you’ll get a little bit of two different things on these shows. It’ll be like chocolate and peanut butter.”
Cosmic De-Evolution follows an extensive run of Devo’s 50 Years of De-Evolution…continued! tour earlier this year, which Mothersbaugh found illuminating.
“I’m fascinated by how many young people show up,” he says. “It’s impressive top lay places where you see, like, three generations of humans out in the audience, because they’ve used the Internet to find out, ‘Well, influenced my band? Nirvana. Who influenced Nirvana? Oh, Devo,’ then they go back and check things out. We played Soldier Field (in Chicago) a couple weeks ago, and there were young kids singing the songs; I’m like, ‘How the heck do they know them?!’ That’s amazing, you know?”
The subject of a new Devo documentary on Netflix, Devo’s last album, Something for Everybody, came out during 2010 — and was the band’s first new album in 20 years. A single, “Total Love,” came out last year, and Mothersbaugh — who’s also writing music for several upcoming films, including Pixar’s animated Hoppers due out March 6 — says Devo might have more to come.
“Never say never,” he notes, adding that there’s “a strong possibility” Devo will be playing more during 2026. “Everybody sketches out stuff. I think we kind of all thought we had hung up our energy domes for good about 10 or 15 years ago, and then we did another record and it had some good music on it. So you never know; it could happen.
“When I had Covid about five years ago they put me on a ventilator, and I hallucinated a whole album. I still know that album — it culminated us going to a city and we put each band member on a different skyscraper in the same area and we used technology so we could hear each other and …the music was being blasted down to the city streets. So maybe that one…”
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Gallery Credit: Corey Irwin
