Perrett makes a fresh start, again. By Victoria Segal.

Doing it clean: Peter Perrett’s new songs come with a bionic, titanium-reinforced bounce.

Peter Perrett

★★★★

The Cleansing

DOMINO. CD/DL/LP

YOU WOULD need to be made of marble not to pick up on the deep regret that churns underneath The Cleansing. “You’re just an old man/Who went too far out to sea,” Peter Perrett sings on Mixed Up Confucius, while

All That Time doubles down on that sorrowful drift. “All that time I thought I was having fun,” the former Only One sighs over enervated piano and strings, “just another wasted life.” That’s before Art Is A Disease, a cautionary tale about flogging yourself for a dream that might never pay out more than a handful of buttons and a pile of dead calendars.

The highs and lows of Perrett’s life are well-defined: a bright bolt of success with The Only Ones and their three albums, a modern standard under his skinny belt with Another Girl, Another Planet, and then ruinous stretches of addiction interspersed only by a brief ’90s return as The One. The narrative shifted, though, with 2017’s How The West Was Won and 2019’s Humanworld, records that forced a fresh perspective on a career that once seemed irrevocably withered.

The Cleansing continues this cheering trend, Perrett rounding up a cross-generational pool of musicians to realise his still-sharp vision. There are his sons, producer and guitarist Jamie and bassist Peter Jr, but also Johnny Marr – once thrown into a police cell wearing an Only Ones Baby’s Got A Gun T-shirt – Fontaines D.C.’s Carlos O’Connell, who co-produced and arranged three tracks, and Bobby Gillespie and Douglas Hart, the former Jesus And Mary Chain comrades reunited on the artfully scuffed title track.

If his support network is striking, it is Perrett himself who steals focus, his voice – a mysterious substance that seems to have been dug out from between the floorboards of a condemned building – so immediate that it almost seems like an unfair advantage over other singer-songwriters. I Wanna Go With Dignity piles up painful testimony to the lost, but offers solace in a glorious, almost tactile Stooges thump; Set The House On Fire astutely delineates the difference between setting the world alight and having a Richard Pryor-style accident. He might be physically frail – COPD, a recent broken hip – but these songs come with a bionic, titanium-reinforced bounce. A double album of them, too, which tells its own story.