Peter Perrett: The Cleansing review – a late-career triumph that dances in the face of death

Peter Perrett’s third solo album opens with a track called I Wanna Go With Dignity. You could suggest that’s par for the course: a certain morbidity has hung around Perrett’s writing from the start, perhaps an inevitable consequence of his lifestyle choices. “I always flirt with death / I look ill but I don’t care about it,” opened Another Girl, Another Planet, the most famous song by his old band the Only Ones, part of an oeuvre that also included Why Don’t You Kill Yourself?, Creature of Doom, Curtains for You and From Here to Eternity. He was still at it 35 years after the Only Ones split: recorded after he had finally conquered his addictions, his debut solo album How the West Was Won opened with a fantasy of killing himself and ended with Perrett wishing he could pass “in a hail of bullets”.

Nevertheless, a genuine sense of finality does hang around The Cleansing. Perrett himself has compared it to “Johnny Cash doing his best work right at the end”. From its title to its dimensions – a double album twice as long, at 70 minutes, as 2019’s Humanworld – to the cross-generational array of collaborators, including Johnny Marr and Carlos O’Connell of Fontaines DC (whose presence inevitably carries the tang of homage) it’s hard to avoid the sense of a last splurge from an artist who has unexpectedly managed to make it into his 70s, despite his best efforts to the contrary. “I don’t want to overstay my welcome,” he keeps singing on its opening track, a man with chronic obstructive pulmonary disease, aware of his mortality.

Remarkably, his health issues don’t seem to have affected Perrett’s voice much – you can make out a hint of huskiness, but it’s otherwise pretty much the Lou Reed-by-way-of-south London drawl of the late 70s. What’s striking about The Cleansing is what he’s singing. Perrett’s most famous songs exist in an icy emotional landscape in which a blithe disregard for his own welfare is matched by a marked callousness towards others: whether by default or by design, they seemed to unsparingly capture a junkie’s fatalistic self-destruction and numbed solipsism. You might expect a certain degree of rueful reflection from a cleaned-up septuagenarian surveying the wreckage of his past, which The Cleansing duly delivers on Do Not Resuscitate, Set the House on Fire’s saga of improbably enduring love and the closing Crystal Clear: “You thought you’d teach them all the lesson, but it seems you weren’t that clever.”

There’s similarly hard-won wisdom on Solitary Confinement and Survival Mode; the spectacularly bleak Less Than Nothing, meanwhile, depicts old age and failing health in the kind of unflinching terms with which Perrett once depicted anaesthetised indifference. More startling is what happens when Perrett turns his gaze outwards and the amount of empathy he displays for others: the litany of suicides in I Wanna Go With Dignity, the girl spiralling out of control in Disinfectant, the subject of There for You, struggling with their mental health (“it’s too late when people die … I don’t want to let you down”).

The sound is equally striking. Anyone who knows Perrett’s work might anticipate the songs being well written. You can aim a number of criticisms at his back catalogue, from the over-production that bedevilled the Only Ones’ albums to the fact that there just isn’t that much of it, but when he’s managed to rouse himself into making records, his songwriting abilities have seldom failed him, and they don’t here. For a man who recently told an interviewer “my body is crawling on its knees and my mind’s dying on its feet”, The Cleansing sounds remarkably vital and dynamic. The music swings and punches and roars along: a mass of distorted guitars, occasionally underpinned with a Suicide-evoking electronic pulse, as on Women Gone Bad, or the title track. If it feels faintly bizarre to say that a set of songs largely concerned with decline, death and regret are possessed of joie de vivre, it’s nevertheless true. In fact, that might be one of the secrets of The Cleansing’s success: the world-weariness of the words is never reflected in the sound.

Given his history, fans could be forgiven for special pleading on Perrett’s behalf – a round of applause for still being alive – but The Cleansing doesn’t require special pleading. Its two predecessors were surprisingly good, this is genuinely great. Circumstances dictate that you’d struggle to call it a fresh start, but it’s a distinct emotional shift away from the music that made him a cult hero. It feels oddly like Peter Perrett stepping out of the shadows cast by his former band, even as he stares down the gathering darkness.