ROCK’N’ROLL CONFIDENTIAL
PETER PERRETT
The Only Ones’ resurgent exile talks 30 years asleep, the “diseased world” of art and crying at films.
Original Perrett material: Peter, no longer flirting with death.
Steve Gullick
“I HAVE TO warn you,” drawls a familiar, death-warmed-up south London voice, “I’m struggling a bit.” A rehearsal using in-ear monitors has caused Peter Perrett’s ears to ‘pop’, he says, and he feels unusual. One of rock’n’roll’s great survivors, singer, guitarist and songwriter Perrett’s been navigating obstacles since the early 1970s, though decades of hard drug use – heroin followed by crack – means his canon with punk-era contenders The Only Ones, solo and elsewhere is slender. It’s also inimitable and scattered with gold, with 1978’s ageless, transcendent Another Girl, Another Planet its commercial peak. Now 72, and clean since 2015, he’s on a late hot streak, with new life-embracing double The Cleansing his third album since re-emerging in 2017. “On my Instagram thing,” says Perrett, “people comment, ‘I didn’t realise he was still alive…’”