Peter Perrett

“Something inside me would like to make my best-ever album,” Peter Perrett said in 2007. “Seeing Johnny Cash doing his best work right at the end, makes me feel like just because I’m old doesn’t mean I’m useless.”

There is typically talk of a ‘second coming’ but much less, if at all, of a ‘third coming’ but that’s what Perrett’s third album The Cleansing epitomises. Following the second coming of its two predecessors – both unexpected given his 2017 solo debut How The West Was Won was Perrett’s first album in almost 30 years, whilst his pattern of vanishing from sight was broken by 2019’s follow-up Humanworld – The Cleansing doesn’t only match his best work but expands it: an ambitious double album comprising 20 songs, with his uniquely narcotic and alluring melodies, gorgeous South London drawl and ravishing rock dynamic now allied to a wider span of musical arrangements and lyrical concerns. Alongside his trusted team of sons Jamie (guitar / production) and Peter Jr (bass) plus members of his live band, Perrett is assisted by a roster of starry guests including Johnny Marr, Bobby Gillespie and Fontaines D.C.’s Carlos O’Connell. Lead single and opening track ‘I Wanna Go With Dignity’ is instant, indefatigable proof: a tight three minutes and 25 seconds laced with Perrett’s deadpan wit and alarming honesty. A new era, then, with a new energy, and a new approach.

“I feel that, the older you get, the more reflective you get,” Perrett says. “I’d always been flippant about the way I approached life, only living in the moment, but then you start to look back at the choices made. I wanted to be more focused about what I wanted to say. I’m still writing about love and the human condition, but perhaps more sentimental, and less abject cynicism, than usual. I also am more focused about the music. Before, I’d put down two guitars, bass and drums, and that was the song: I didn’t give the process much thought. But then we started opening things up.”

With The Cleansing, the saga of Peter Perrett can finally, and irrefutably, move on from his first coming with The Only Ones, one of the most distinctive and charismatic of all new wave bands with a thrilling live reputation. The band thrived from 1976 to 1981 – almost despite themselves given the drug consumption of those times, and when they finally imploded, Perrett’s increasing drug habit saw him go to ground. Perrett finally re-emerged in the mid-‘90s fronting The One, a valiant but short-lived effort to recapture former glories, and again when The Only Ones reformed in 2007, though the band only played live and never recorded a new album. Having never done things the easy way, it seemed almost like fate when the pandemic turned up the year after Humanworld was released, and given the precariousness of Perrett’s health, it was only reasonable to expect that he might not record again, and indeed, it was touch and go for a while.

After recording Humanworld, Perrett had written two songs, ‘I Wanna Go With Dignity’ and ‘Back In The Hole’, the latter a similarly sweltering rocker that confronted the spectre of long-term depression, partially triggered by Perrett and wife Zena’s advanced emphysema. When Covid hit, the couple were considered amongst the most clinically vulnerable, and for 18 months (March 2020 to September 2021), they barely left the house – though Perrett was able to write songs. When they finally emerged, Perrett went to see Fontaines D.C. – Jamie Perrett was friends with their guitarist Carlos O’Connell – and attended the “after-after-party,” as he recalls, and promptly caught Covid. Whilst in triage, Perrett slipped and broke his hip.  

Eight months of physiotherapy later, at least Perrett had even more songs stockpiled. After recording vocals and rhythm guitar at home, Perrett played the tracks to O’Connell, who had just moved two streets up from the former’s home and jammed along to ‘Disinfectant’. “I really liked what Carlos played,” says Perrett. “We went into the studio, and he ended up playing on eight tracks.” That includes ‘All That Time’, originally recorded with two guitars, bass and drums but replaced by O’Connell’s string arrangement, to guild Perrett’s tender vocal, with the classic addict’s lament, “All that time I thought I was having fun… took no time to question what we’d done.”

“With ‘All That Time’, Carlos talked about Leonard Cohen, and how my voice could work in different musical environments,” Perrett recalls. “The fourth and fifth strings of the guitar drone throughout, and the words are repetitive too, because I wanted to get across the repetitive nadture of that lifestyle. Jamie and I completely rearranged ’Art Is A Disease’ and ‘Women Gone Bad’ at home (Pathway Studio), and at that moment, The Cleansing became a double album, because we started developing previously neglected songs – but they’re all good songs.”

‘Art Is A Disease’ is Perrett’s favourite lyric on The Cleansing, concerning “musicians addicted to their art, which sums me up,” he says. “It can be a life sentence if you’re convicted,” he sings. “Art’s a disease that mocks the afflicted.” Perrett’s present clean bill of health means there is only one more song about addiction – the self-explanatory title track. “I’m just lucky to still be able to write songs. If I didn’t have music as a therapy, I can imagine getting really depressed.”

‘The Cleansing’ is the first time that Bobby Gillespie (backing vocals) and Douglas Hart (synths / drum programming) have appeared on the same track since The Jesus & Mary Chain days. Like O’Connell, Gillespie – another near-neighbour of Perrett’s – and Dream Wife guitarist Alice Go guest on eight tracks apiece; Kristin Kontrol of Dum Dum Girls sings backing vocals on three and Go’s bandmate Rakel Mjöll has a verse to herself on ‘World In Chains’.

Other guests include Violeta Vicci (violin, viola), Jim Sclavunos of The Bad Seeds (various percussion), Fontaines drummer Tom Coll and former Only Ones teenage fanatic Johnny Marr, who was not only thrown out of the band’s dressing room for picking up one of the band’s prized guitars, but also once spent the night in a police cell wearing an Only Ones T-shirt.

“I wrote ‘Solitary Confinement’ and recorded just my acoustic guitar and vocal, to give Johnny a blank canvas for his guitars,” says Perrett. “He’s on ’World In Chains’, which had a lot of space too for Johnny to add some more great parts.”

‘World In Chains’ is a rescue song, rediscovered when a set of Perrett’s demos from 1990 mysteriously turned up on You Tube. He’s kept the lyrics from the first half of the song, one of Perrett’s trademark sagas of love, lust and obsession – often with more than a whiff of fatalism – but he’s rewritten the second half, a more sober view of relationship breakdown (“Needing to reboot the system”). After 55 sometimes rocky years of marriage, Perrett reserves some of his new-found sentiment for Zena (especially ‘Fountain Of You’ and ‘Set The House On Fire’), and for those who are no longer with us. ‘I Wanna Go With Dignity’ is dedicated to the late Fiona H Stevenson (AKA Fay Wolftree), and its lyric was part-inspired by the late David Cavanagh, both of whom interviewed Perrett. ‘Do Not Resuscitate’, however, dispenses with sentiment for an unflinching look at ageing. “I know some of the subject matter is death, suicide and depression,” Perrett notes, “but I feel there is an uplifting atmosphere to the album, because I’m obviously enjoying recognising what is going on around me.”

The Cleansing is also notable for Perrett’s observations of the world outside, written from the perspective of a man who realised how much had changed (not least himself). A delicate ballad that subsequently kicks up dust as a twangin’ rocker, ‘Survival Mode’ is, “advice to myself and to others about navigating the vagaries of social media,” says Perrett – a damaging addiction of a different kind. Talking of which, the wry, grooving ‘Secret Taliban Wife’ is how an Iranian comedian (who befriended Perrett via Instagram) refers to herself after being described by an internet troll as Taliban Barbie – “and she’s not even from Afghanistan!” says Perrett. Thematically linked, ‘Women Gone Bad’ (named after a pulp novel featured in Kurt Vonnegut’s novel Mother Night) was written after Perrett recently played a solo show in Norway’s Arctic Circle (with R.E.M. guitarist Peter Buck in his backing band!), in a region which infamously held witch trials in the 17th century: “It made me think about how society has treated any female that doesn’t conform,” says Perrett.

Cleansed, revitalised, survived: one of rock’s great non-conformists is in the form of his life, and one of rock’s great comebacks is primed to keep going.