Photo: Press
How The West Was Won is one of those miracle records. An album that shouldn’t, can’t exist. A record that seems to have fallen out of a wormhole from some odd alternate universe in which Peter Perrett – one-time frontman of The Only Ones (of ‘Another Girl, Another Planet’ fame) and renowned 30-year drug recluse – cleaned up after 40 years of solid heroin and crack abuse a the age of 65 and, in an intense creative spurt out of nowhere, made his debut solo record twenty-one years after his last release (1996’s ‘Woke Up Sticky’ with The One). Doesn’t happen, right? In the eternal conflict between long-term drug addiction and music, music wins the odd battle but drugs generally win the wars.
It’s quite well known with me that it’s either one or the other,” Perrett says. “I don’t seem to be able to focus on two obsessions at once, and for me to do music to the best of my ability it has to be my primary obsession. In the seventies when I was in The Only Ones I had distractions like women, partying and all the cliché rock-and-roller things that they enjoy in their down time, but to do things properly I have been totally focused because it’s a privilege. I feel like I am the most productive I have ever been.”
Out of the wilderness, into the unlikeliest of limelights. With Perrett accompanied by his two sons in his punkish retro Americana backing band, this musical Go Set A Watchman comes drenched in the new-found self-awareness of the recently recovering junkie. The title track is a witty, meandering treatise on the state of the modern world, ‘Something In My Brain’ deals with his sudden wave of post-drugs creativity and his lifelong romance with his runaway teenage love Zena shrouds the record’s more wistful moments. Dreamy, philosophical and lost in love and narcotic reflection – “I’m living in a head that was never mine to use,” Perrett muses on psych droner ‘Living In My Head’ – its almost exactly the sort of album you’d expect from a 65-year-old who claims to have lived just 25 Earth years, and most of them in bed…
Why do a solo album now?
“I suppose I've only got another couple decades left in me, so I thought it was as good a time as any really. I wanted to do it, and that was a real big step, that I actually wanna play music again. If I was gonna play music again with any passion it had to be something new, so recording a new album was the obvious thing to do. I didn’t wanna just play old stuff, you know? Hopefully there's a few people that appreciate what I did in the seventies and that have been waiting a long time, I did briefly become active for a couple of years in the 90's but I haven't exactly been prolific in my attention to detail as far as getting what I do best done. Once my attention was sort of focused again, I thought I better hurry up and do it.”
You reformed The Only Ones to tour in the 00’s, did that spark your musical rejuvenation?
“Not really, I was there in person but not in mind. I enjoyed it on a certain level, it was almost like a religious experience with fans that were emotional because they never thought they were gonna see us again. But until I was in a position to do something new it wasn’t really one hundred per cent fulfillment. It was like foreplay but wasn’t the real thing. It re-acquainted me with the fact I still owned guitars - well I didn’t own guitars but I could borrow my children's guitars. It was enjoyable, but it was as much as we could do to function as a tribute to our former selves. I don’t think that we were in any position to put the work in that needed to be done if we were to make a new album. That’s just as much me as anybody else, because as I said, I was there physically but not mentally and I had to wait until I was a lot more healthy and focused before I could even attempt to write new songs again, let alone recording them.”
‘Something In My Brain’ suggests you’re undergoing a real rush of creativity, a torrent of songs.
“Well seven of the songs were written between the summer of 2015 and the summer of 2016. Once I’d started writing and there was a reason to write, in as much as I knew I was going to be recording an album and releasing it on Domino, then it all happened really quickly. Altogether there was probably about forty songs that we rehearsed, twenty that we focused on, recorded sixteen and then chose ten. These days that was quite a quick process, but nothing like the old days when we would write a song, record it the next day and then record the album a couple of days later. It wasn’t that fast, but for modern times it was quite quick.”
Was it the old story of cleaning up, getting healthy and the music coming back?
Yeah, obviously! [For the past twenty years] I wasn't playing the guitar, you know. In my head I was writing lyrics occasionally, writing them down on scraps of paper but losing most of them because I'm not very organised about stuff like that. But I didn’t play guitar in that time, and unless I play guitars I don't really write songs. The first step was having gigs booked in the summer of 2015 and those four gigs, I didn't want to walk on stage not knowing what to do, so I thought I had better rehearse for them. Once I started rehearsing, I started playing the guitar and found out I really enjoyed it, because sometimes you can forget how much you enjoy something if you don’t do it for a long time. And once I started enjoying it I started picking up the guitar when I wasn't rehearsing, and once I pick the guitar up, I write songs. It's something that I can't actually help doing if I am holding a guitar. Once Domino said they wanted me to do an album for them then I started writing songs in earnest and trying to get them as perfect as possible. When I was young I used to think everything I did was perfect, I didn't try and hone things down and think about every note, whereas I was really anal about this album.”
Were you being creative at all during that period?
“In my head yeah. I was having fantastic dreams, which is creative in a way, like an internal universe that you explore - I went to every corner in that universe. But not in the physical sense of 'doing stuff'. I've probably only lived about 25 or 30 Earth years. It’s just something that happened, I don't regret it because if you start regretting things you start double-guessing everything you do. Some people will say it’s a waste but I am where I am now and these days and this experience are something that I am enjoying.”
There’s this classic image of you as a recluse, lost in drugs for years. Was that the case?
“A recluse? Well I never went out of the house and I hardly ever got off of the bed. Sitting on the bed, laying on the bed, whatever I was doing on the bed was all I needed to amuse myself. I wouldn’t go to the toilet on the bed, I would occasionally get off to go to the toilet but a lot of time was spent that way. It has quite a limited appeal but it kept me happy for quite a long time, probably more than I should be proud to admit but that’s the way I spent my life and it kept me out of trouble.”
So you didn’t have a ‘drug hell’?
“It all depends on what you think of as being ‘hell’. To an observer, if I was observing myself I might've thought it was hell, but I was living it and it didn't feel like hell, I was happy in my dream world. There were moments obviously, like when we had our second child and they were taken away from us, that was pretty hellish but luckily we were together enough to fight. Compared to the hell that ninety per cent of the world’s population live in, I had a great time.”
What made you clean up?
“Survival instinct. My health was deteriorating and Zena's health was deteriorating to a point where it was imminent that something had to change, otherwise there was only one destination. We were forced into it really. It's funny how the survival instinct, you might not even know its there, but it can kick in at the very last minute and change your direction, and it changed my direction in a way that meant I had a lot of time on my hands. Zena being someone who's actually very constructive about stuff, she was the one that booked the gigs and forced me to pick up the guitar again - she believes in my music so much that she dedicated her whole life to keeping me afloat. I wouldn’t have done anything if it wasn’t for her.”
So you made a conscious decision to give yourself a few more Earth years?
“Yeah definitely, because you realise that you've been given a life to live and you only get one. I would like to believe in reincarnation but I can’t see the point in it, because apparently you don’t remember your previous life so I don’t see the point in being reincarnated if I can't remember Zena and I'm not gonna meet her in the next life. So if you've only got one life then I think it’s the only duty we owe ourselves and our creator, whoever that is, to keep living. To extend life as long as possible is a duty that we owe ourselves and the people that love us and care about us as well.”
There are several love songs to your partner Zena on the album - how does it feel being a part of such a classic love story, teenage runaways who lose themselves in hedonism but are still together after all these years?
“I mean, what did I do to deserve it? I haven't lived the classic well-behaved way that people should approach their lives, but I was just lucky I met the right person early on, before we both got fucked up. We were like best friends or soulmates from when we were both innocent little kids, and from those seeds a great love story can evolve. It's what kept us going, it gave us the inspiration every day to carry on living, and I realise it doesn’t happen to everybody. That’s why, when you say, 'were any of the decades I missed in my life in earth years hell?', no they weren't, they were heaven because I was with the person that I love. That’s all you need in your life to survive the apocalypse. We've shared some times but we are still positive because we make each other laugh every day at our misfortunes and our fortunes. Shared experiences can make everything positive.”
You merged from drug hibernation to play a show with The Libertines back in 2004 - were they kindred spirits?
“[laughing] Yeah, I spent a bit of time with Pete, and Carl I met briefly and he seemed a really nice guy. I spent some time in their company and you know, it was fun, ups and downs but, yeah, it was fun. When I played with them, I hadn't played in a really long time and the guitar I actually played was a black Strat I used to have. Before the gig I gave it to their roadie to put new strings on without realising it was in no state to be played. It needed total re-fretting because it hadn't been played for decades, but I didn't know that. So when it came to play that night, the open strings were in tune because the roadie had tuned it up but the moment you put your finger on even the second or third fret it was totally out of tune. So it wasn't musically great but it was fun being on stage.”
The album’s title track seems to be a wry comment on the modern world covering everything from Western imperialism to Kim Kardashian’s arse. What are your thoughts on the crazy mess of politics and culture in 2017?
“I don't think I’m in any position to ram my ideas down people’s throats, whatever you believe you're always going to upset half the people. I used to think that if people don't agree with me I don't want them to listen to my music and be my fans, but now, as I’ve got more mature I think that if they like my music even though they know I am at the opposite end of the political spectrum then that, in a way, compliments me. If I can just make people smile, and think, and ask questions then I think that’s all a musician can do these days. It's not like the sixties when you could write protest songs and there were civil rights movements and things could get changed up. I think music is just entertainment, especially in these times. I see how upset people get on Facebook and things like that and think there's no point adding to it, it doesn’t achieve anything. I suppose, if you were standing on the gallows and the trap door was about to open I think gallows humour is the best friend you've got. It might be observations about western imperialism, both munitions-wise and culture wise, but I purposefully couched it in humorous observations just to make people smile.”
Is there more music to come?
“I'm not very good at making plans for the future, but yeah I've got some songs that I can't wait to get back in to the studio and record. It's weird, ‘cause in the seventies you’d record something and it would be out a month later, whereas now there's all these plans, everything's edging towards this masterplan of trying to release something. I recorded stuff in the past but its like two or three lifetimes ago and no way am I the same person I was back then. As far as being a human being functioning in the world I feel like a total newcomer. It's like the first album I've ever made.”
It's like you're on another planet?
“[Laughing] Yeah, Exactly!”
Peter Perrett has his new album How The West Was Won coming out on Friday 30 June
