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.
