Prior to 2024, you’d always find the words ‘Peter Perrett’ appended with the apparently obligatory description ‘from The Only Ones’, the band he originally split from in ’81. You’d also find his name bandied about in circles debating the subject of unfulfilled potential. But not now.
Perrett’s latest, deeply personal (double) album, The Cleansing, realises every iota of Perrett brilliance, addressing decades lost to drug addiction, and the inevitable approach to life’s conclusion. The finest record yet to address the ever-more/nevermore-pertinent issue of septuagenarian angst, it’s a late-career masterpiece.
What stimulated you into writing the particular set of songs that make up The Cleansing?
My songs are always personal, but they’ve become even more exposed on this album, feelings that I might not have expressed previously. I feel more capable of being sentimental, but always with the absurdist, gallows humour that finds pleasure in the absurdity of personal circumstance and the state of the world. We all try to find our own place in the world, and my place is to be an outsider with a unique perspective, and hopefully I’ve expressed that.
Last time we spoke I asked you about a prolonged period that you spent in a state of total drug-induced oblivion, and you said: “It wasn’t that long, it was only from ’81 to ’88.” Which does seem like quite a long time.
Yeah. ’81 was when the band broke up. That was when I had 24 hours a day, seven days a week to take drugs. While the band was there I dabbled but it wasn’t a continuous thing. I started to try and get clean in ’88 and was clean for a month. I was clean by ’93, when I formed The One, then as soon as I started gigging I started dabbling again, and by ’96 was using. From ’96 to 2010 was my worst. So it was 35 years, basically, apart from a month here and there.
The Cleansing is not an album you could have written without having lived the life you have.
That’s what I like to tell myself, that it was all for the greater good. Because I’ve always got to say that drugs have got a downside, obviously, but it’s a counterbalance thing.
Your sons are all over the record. Making music together isn’t something many of our generation had with their parents. Generational disapproval might have facilitated the birth of rock’n’roll, but it certainly didn’t improve familial relations.
When I was young I hated my parents. Well, I didn’t hate them, I just thought they were useless, boring and had nothing to do with my life. So I treated them with complete disdain and disrespect. I totally regretted it, because they both died when I was 30, so didn’t live long enough for me to grow into an adult and tell them I loved them.
So I’m really fortunate and probably don’t deserve the contact I have with my children. They were the ones who, once they saw me getting healthy, encouraged me to come and play a song with them, because they both had their own bands. It was due to their encouragement that I got back to work, because I probably wouldn’t have bothered otherwise.
Obviously, The Cleansing would be an absolute doozy of a final statement… God forbid.
At the moment I’d be happy if The Cleansing was my last album, but I’ve already recorded the vocals and rhythm guitar for another five songs since then, so there’s already something there for the posthumous album.
Maybe you should write material from the point of view of someone who’s no longer with us.
I’m afraid that you’re apportioning me with talents that I’ve not yet discovered.
The Cleansing is out now via Domino.
