“Something inside me would like to make my best-ever album,” Peter Perrett said. “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.” Whoa. Serendipity. I’ve been listening to Cash’s final brace this past week, shortly before Perrett’s latest. So great, so understanding of their place in the world, drawing on experience and memory but never allowing age or bitterness to be a barrier to communication. So dignified. So resonant. Cash’s greatest work, no question.
Can the same be said here? The opening song on Peter Perrett’s third solo album and unlooked-for second creative life (2017’s How The West Was Won was his first album in almost 30 years) is called I Wanna Go With Dignity, and it rocks as hard as anything on even The Only Ones’ 1979 classic Even Serpents Shine.
The Cleansing is a marvel. Perrett sings like a man possessed on songs that manage to sound helplessly romantic and deal with everyday realities simultaneously, his expression undiminished by the ravages of time. In places he sounds like another great survivor, Marianne Faithfull. The second track, nightmarish visions and faith rekindled, rocks just as hard as the first, as do pretty much most of the other 18.
His sons Jamie and Peter Jr star on coruscating guitar and bass, alongside a parade of righteous acolytes (Johnny Marr, Bobby Gillespie, members of Fontaines D.C. and Dream Wife). The sound will not be unfamiliar to anyone who’s heard Another Girl, Another Planet, but it does not slip into mewling parody or needless nostalgia. Shimmering, oscillating pinnacles of sound. And the deadpan wit on My Secret Taliban Wife (‘Best thing I’ve seen in my life’) could be prime Wreckless Eric back when he had the whole (wide) world in his arms.
Oddly enough, ghosts of the past do not haunt this music, not really. It sounds so aware, so current, so present. And Perrett can still sing a heartfelt slurred ballad with the best of them – witness the chiming, melodic Set The House On Fire and wailing soliloquy There For You. Peter Perrett may be 72, but I reckon he’s got several more of these inside him yet.
His best-ever album? Could well be.
