MY FAVOURITE THINGS - THE CLEANSING

Back in the late 70s and early 80s Perrett was the singer and writer for The Only Ones, a weird, intermittently convincing (to my ear) mix of Lou Reed and John Foxx (Ultravox). If you know them at all, it would be for the 1978 single, Another Girl, Another Planet. I’ve been working this weekend through their back catalogue and I’m disappointed that I paid them so little attention.

The new solo record (there have been others - 2017’s How The West Was Won is fantastic) is bracing and yet also laconic, modern and old-fashioned, defiant and desperately sad in the way that anything to do with getting old is inevitably sad. The single here - I Wanna Go With Dignity - is going to feel like an end-days anthem to those of us who survived Thatcher by hiding deep in the council housing estates and listening hard to the sermons of Joe Strummer.