With their official documentary set for release on Netflix, DEVO’s Mark and Bob Mothersbaugh talk to Clash about the divisive band’s history, hologram tours, AI in music, Mick Jagger, and MTV. 

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“Musically, what they were doing was better than anyone.” That was Iggy Pop’s verdict after first seeing DEVO at CBGBs, amid the frenzy of punk music’s propagation in New York City. The art-punk oddities weren’t at any shortage of esteemed admirers after they beamed in from their Akron, Ohio origins to the vanguard of guitar music in the mid-to-late 70s. John Lennon was a fan. Bowie called them “the band of the future”. Brian Eno was similarly effusive. Neil Young jammed with them after cherry-picking the band to star in his debut motion picture Human Highway. “I’m glad he looked at DEVO and thought we were interesting enough,” Mark Mothersbaugh fondly recalls, speaking to Clash via Zoom from his studio in Los Angeles, the nerve centre of his music production company Mutato Muzika. Sat beside him is DEVO guitarist Bob Mothersbaugh, who is a touch more matter-of-fact about theirs and Young’s musical kismet. “Well, he liked our band and he got his manager to sign us.”

Despite their contrasting styles, DEVO shared a kinship with Neil Young beyond music. Young wrote the song ‘Ohio’ about the Kent State massacre in 1970, where four unarmed students opposing America’s expanding involvement in the Vietnam War were shot dead by the Ohio National Guard. DEVO founders Mark Mothersbaugh and Gerald Casale were students at Kent State University at the time. The tragedy, as you can expect, altered their lives irrevocably, fortifying their cynicism and disdain for a society seemingly in freefall.

DEVO was born from the concept of “devo-lution”, as a means of artistic expression when political protest felt redundant. Rallying against rampant consumerism and skewering America’s right-wing pandering traditions, the band adopted humour and B-movie aesthetics in their zany multimedia project. At their commercial zenith, people were in on the joke.

The synth-pop weirdness of ‘Whip It’ scored DEVO a hit single, they featured in an obscure Honda advert – an eyebrow raising contradiction – and were ready-made for the audiovisual omnipresence of MTV, a format that they pioneered. A band that deemed themselves more of an art project than a rock band found themselves on heavy rotation, but were dismissed as a novelty act by critics. 3-D glasses, yellow jumpsuits, and the red ziggurat LEGO-looking helmets are often the first attribute that springs to mind at the first mention of DEVO, even still. In truth, their resistance to commercial conformity was their downfall. DEVO’s esoteric sensibilities were lost on the masses, which never bodes well for repeated record sales. They split in 1990. Gerald Casale went on to direct commercials and music videos for Foo Fighters, Soundgarden and Silverchair, whilst Mothersbaugh founded Mutato Muzika, establishing a career as an in-demand composer for film, television, and videogames.

A 1996 reunion solidified the band’s cult fandom among the freaks and geeks however, finding new audiences through the films of Wes Anderson – who Mothersbaugh scored four films for – and continuing to confound people with their subversive, anti-culture arcane.

Being perennially misunderstood is DEVO’s bread and butter. But their mission statement might be made clearer in their forthcoming documentary, DEVO. Helmed by Chris Smith, the American Movie director has an affinity with outliers and eccentrics. Based on his previous work in the Tiger King, Fyre, and Jim & Andy: The Great Beyond documentaries at least, which wasn’t lost on the Mothersbaugh brothers.

Before the documentary peers into what went on beneath their trademark red energy dome hats, Clash writer Tom Curtis-Horsfall talks to Mark and Bob about why now was the right time to sanction an official documentary, if they’d embark on a hologram tour, their opinions on AI in music, Mick Jagger, and their widespread influence.

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Official music documentaries and biopics nowadays can often feel a bit dishonest. What I loved about DEVO was how frank you are about the mistakes you made, how naïve you were to the music industry machine, and how divisive you were as a band.

Mark: Good. When I watched it, I saw a lot of what you’re talking about. DEVO wasn’t your typical rock band by any means. We had a different message. We weren’t typical. We were questioning humans as the centre of the universe. Even today it’s more extreme, like ‘hail mankind, let’s finish destroying this planet so we can all move to Mars.’ Priorities are screwed up.

You pretended to be a covers band to get booked for gigs in the early days. Can you describe how disastrous those shows were after they sussed you out?

Bob: Well, we got paid to quit playing some shows. When you played clubs back in Akron, you’d play maybe three times to the same audience. After the first set, the owner would go ‘you know what, the waitress can’t operate the cash register whilst you’re playing, it’s screwing her up. You don’t have to play the rest’. We’d say we wanted to keep playing and they’d go ‘we’ll pay you not to’.

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Given your Dadaist leanings, you must’ve got a bit of a kick out of them.

Mark: Well, we knew we were doing something right if we were freaking those people out.

You found a level of acceptance with the punk movement, and the scene that spawned from CBGBs. Did it validate your vision and the music you were making?

Mark: Yeah. It was kind of a surprise. We’d gone from deceiving people as a cover band, coming on stage saying ‘here’s another song by Foghat, called ‘Mongoloid’…’ to a situation where people were responsive to what we were doing. We brought a projector with us we rented from Akron Library, and put up a sheet in front of us to show the first film we made that had ‘Jocko Homo’ and ‘Secret Agent Man’ on it. Then we’d come out and play. People were saying stuff like ‘you’ve got to see these guys, they show a film of a song before they perform a song?’ It was definitely a different response.

In the documentary you say that David Bowie was able to turn from being a pure artist into a pop artist. Were you fans of his before he endorsed DEVO?

Bob: Yes. ‘Low’.

Mark: For me, I liked ‘Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders From Mars’. The stuff he did with Eno was great. When we were working with him and Brian in Germany, Brian would grouse to David about how he was uncredited on ‘Heroes’. We got to listen to that argument every night at dinner.

Eno later said that you were the most tense people he’s ever worked with in the studio. Did you struggle having an outsider enter your creative unit for the first time?

Mark: We’d produced and engineered everything. Our demos didn’t sound like that by accident. We had amateur equipment so we just wanted to take it up a notch in terms of quality. We weren’t trying to reinvent our songs, or the band. Brian was kind of new to producing in those days. I remember sitting at Conny Plank’s studio. You know how it is, there’s a console and a stereo set of speakers. Everyone huddles in the middle to check the mix. They turned on the two-track to listen to the master mix, and I remember reaching out up and pulling down on one of the faders that had Brian’s extra synthesisers in there, or some additional Bowie vocals. I’d keep looking straight ahead, acting like nothing was happening, but could see Brian snap his head and stare at me like ‘what the fuck?’ We’d record it like that. Brian didn’t know what to say, he never confronted me.

I forgot about all that until about ten years ago. Bob and I, at the studio we’re at now and where we’ve been writing music for 35 years, we were archiving all the DEVO stuff. I pulled out these two inch masters with Brian’s beautiful handwriting on them. It was before automation, so he wrote down all the effects sends for every channel and all the equalizer settings. I’m looking at these charts thinking ‘wow he’s got beautiful handwriting’. Then I realised they read ‘David Bowie guitar part’, ‘Brian Eno synth part’, ‘David vocal back up’. After we left and went to dinner, those guys stayed longer and were recording extra tracks on everything, hoping to convince us into playing it. There were parts where they join in with Bob and Jerry on ‘Uncontrollable Urge’ and ‘Jocko Homo’. Some synth parts made it in. I thought about sending the masters back to Brian saying ‘err what were you going to do if I didn’t stop you?’

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Were you initially optimistic about the advent of MTV?

Mark: Of course. Pop art and pop music: sound and vision. We were thinking of that back in ’74, even before that. Our sound man that worked with us in those early years, brought a surveillance camera with him. So there’s black and white footage that exists of the earliest Devo shows, with Jim on drums, Bob on guitar, Jerry on bass and Booji Boy on keys. It was super art. We modified the sound a few years later, made it more palatable. It was abstract. Although there’s been videos since the 40s, there were video jukeboxes. But we were telling stories with our videos. MTV did provide a location for sound and vision to happen. Unfortunately they just went the payola route, and ended up showing baby pictures for record companies more than art.

‘Whip It’ was a huge commercial hit. But how much of a burden did it become being pressured to replicate the song’s success?

Mark: I remember reading somewhere Sting said he can wake up in the morning and write a hit by noon. I thought, ‘how can you even think that way?’ We couldn’t think like that. That wasn’t our goal. We were just making our music. When ‘Whip It’ became a hit, it surprised us. But we absolutely went with it. It allowed us to penetrate into the pop marketplace and the entertainment world, so our message permeated. People that listened to ‘Whip It’ would go to the album and listen to ‘Freedom Of Choice’. “Freedom Of Choice / Is What You Want / Freedom Of Choice / Is What You’ve Got”. Some people got it, some people didn’t care and just danced their asses off to ‘Whip It’.

Why was now the right time to make a documentary?

Mark: We wanted our mission statement, and some sort of concrete version of what we were, recorded.

Bob: There were some books, and some cheap documentaries made about it by people that didn’t know us. We thought where the hell were they getting their information from. The truth could be told.

Because of your idiosyncratic look and sound, you were an open target for parody. What were your first impressions of Weird Al Yankovic’s ‘Dare To Be Stupid?’.

Bob: I took my kids to the Hollywood Bowl to see him because they wanted to see Weird Al. They were impressed that he did a DEVO song. It was ok with me. It’s a good song.

You identified how influential advertisement is in moulding opinions. Do you think people stand a chance nowadays with social media and the infinite barrage of information we get through our fingertips?

Mark: It freaks older people out. For the youth, it’s just part of their lives. Humans have become less natural. But kids are smarter than us in many ways. The phone is a powerful tool. I remember going to Encyclopedia Britannica. Now they can just look at their phones. I think that’s why younger people are showing up to DEVO concerts. They like Nirvana, for instance, and see that DEVO influenced Nirvana. Then see we’re playing a concert in town. Just from having this information in their hand.

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Photo credit: Barry Schulz

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Artists like Trent Reznor, Kurt Cobain, Danny Elfman, LCD Soundsystem, and The Kills have all said they’ve been inspired by DEVO. Does it ever surprise you how far-reaching your influence is?

Mark: No. We like our music. There’s so much crap out there. It was an alternative.

There’s only been one DEVO album since reforming in 1996. Isn’t the current era of idiocy ripe for inspiring new material?

Mark: Well, you never say never. Me and Bob write music every day for video games, movies, television shows. So, we write stuff all the time. There could be another record. We make jokes about DEVO using AI. I know the AI software I’d like, that hasn’t been invented yet. I’m looking forward to something where you pick all the information that the software would use to create new work from. So, Bob and I could put all of the DEVO music and the music we’ve written for other projects into it, our videos, artwork. That’s where it would source from. That would be fun. AI is in its infancy. We’ll see it get more interesting.

So you’re warm to the idea of AI in music?

Bob: I’m not.

Mark: I’ve heard stuff that when you first hear it, it cracks you up. You can detect it which makes it less interesting. Unless someone does something really creative. It’ll happen.

With the success of ABBA Voyage, would a DEVO hologram concert ever be on the cards?

Mark: I’d love to do one. With ABBA Voyage, they just wanted to make a point. They didn’t do anything creative with the hologram technology. That was the only downside. The sound in the room was superb, they had the room tuned real nice. If you love ABBA you’d be happy to be there. But just to have those guys standing there shaking tambourines? It was a waste of incredible technology. Maybe we’ll get a chance to do something someday. Right now it’s so expensive, and we’re low on the list for who financiers would back. Would they go with someone that’s getting a billion hits a day, or DEVO? A billion hits a day. If that’s all they’re working towards, they should make holograms of people staring at their televisions. So when people die you can have a hologram of grandma staring at the TV.

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I would’ve loved to have been in the room when you played your version of ‘Satisfaction’ to Mick Jagger.

Mark: That was exciting. You don’t have to do that nowadays, but you did back then. Just to even be in the same room as him was shocking. We were young, impressionable. We were nobody. Bob and Jerry were delivering meat, I was a maintenance man during the day. To be in the room with Mick Jagger was incredible – and he liked it.

After getting his approval, performing on Saturday Night Live seemed like a turning point. Would you say the show helped you reach your target demographic?

Mark: That’s a possibility. SNL, in ’78 and ’79, was new and it was shocking. It was amazing. Everybody would watch it. College kids would stay home to watch it on a Saturday night. It was enormously popular. Funnily enough, we actually played the week after The Rolling Stones. We came on the next week and played ‘Satisfaction’. I’ve had so many people over the past 45 years or so saying to me ‘you know, you scared the shit out of me.’

Even in recent years it seems you’ve been misunderstood, with your 50th anniversary tour being incorrectly dubbed your ‘farewell tour’. But you’re back on the road with The B-52’s. 

Mark: It was more the ‘welfare tour’ than the ‘farewell tour’. We needed cash. Bob loves to play guitar. He comes in here and writes music, for Rugrats or whatever. He loves to play guitar more than anything. For me, I love being on stage, but to me it’s like Groundhog Day. I’ve found the cure though. I’m working on a Pixar movie, so when we’re on tour I’m working on my laptop all day before we go on stage. The B-52’s, Lene Lovich, that tickles me. What a great triad. I can’t wait to see them live. You know The B-52’s will bring the house down. Lene is still an incredible singer. I saw her in the mid-80s at Whiskey A Go-Go. She can do things other people can’t do.

You’ve bemoaned the devolution of the human race and mocked consumerism for over 50 years now. What’s your verdict right now?

Mark: We’re in an extreme place right now. It’s impressive that this could have even happened. I guess there’s people that voted for our President and are getting exactly what they want. But he’s steering us deeply into an autocratic system. It’ll be interesting to see if democracy can hold its own in an autocratic world. I can’t tell you what’s in store.

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DEVO is set to release globally on Netflix on Tuesday 19th August 2025. Their co-headlining ‘Cosmic De-Evolution Tour’ with The B-52s launches on September 24th in Toronto and wraps on November 2nd in Houston, with two dates at Los Angeles’ Hollywood Bowl on 18th and 19th October. 

Words: Tom Curtis-Horsfall
Photography: As Credited