MAXIMUM ROCK N ROLL

With this second release, even more people were starting to take notice. Again without the benefit of a tour, the band was noticing interest from people who had never even seen them play live.

Grant, "The audience liked it and the music press described it as "surprisingly good." It climbed the indie chart, which the first EP did not, and we got a lot of appreciative mail."

Under the wing of Crass and with their distribution, the band were more and more a part of the growing anarcho scene that Grant had been interested in since the development of the Wapping Anarchist Centre.

Grant, "We liked the Mob, Rubella Ballet and the Erratics. Above all, however, I thought the Sinyx were awesome, and on a good night they could kick all our butts. I still think their style and chord structures are some of the best that punk has to offer inspired simplicity."

To be free from the necessity of touring, and also to keep the band from being their life's framework, the three members still continued to have outside lives.

Grant, "Some worked, some did art, and I was at school."

But it was in the middle of this success that the band suffered one of its worst setbacks and personal tragedies when Grant was diagnosed with cancer. The news came while writing songs for what would be their debut full-length.

Grant, "It was cancer. I fought hard and survived. That's all I can say really, except that I've never been able to shake off the sense of mortality since."

Despite playing down the seriousness of the situation, Grant and Nick's songwriting must have been affected by the situation. While some songs remained from the early days, others were made during Grant's fight.

Grant, "Whilst writing some of it, I was going through the fight for survival, at least one of the songs on that album was written by me whilst sitting in a cancer ward wired up to a drip. Other tracks go back to the Farce era, such as "Inside" and "Dutchmen"."

By the time the band were in the studio recording the record, they decided to call it quits for the first time. Not knowing that this would become almost cyclical for them, it was not a happy time.

Grant, "By this time the band had split up, so it was all a bit of a downer. About two months earlier I had just recovered from cancer, and so was no longer quite the naive youth of the previous year. It was quite interesting and rewarding to do, but no longer exhilarating. Doing our own production enabled Nick to return to a less restricted vocal style."

With this in mind, the two main songwriters were matched in their lyrics in terms of dark themes and perfect musical accompaniment. One of the great aspects of Rudimentary Peni's delivery, especially on their first album, is their combining existential horror with barely contained anger. Most other punk bands of the time were clearly working in one direction or the other. Rudimentary Peni's unique approach was largely due to the unexpected high-energy approach to what would otherwise seem like depressed landscapes of futility.

The resulting album was called Death Church ("Don't know. That was Nick's idea," Grant) and was the most complete expression of the band as an egalitarian unit.

Grant, "It was the usual mixture of Nick and I. Of all the things we have recorded, I would say that Death Church is the most democratic, in the sense that it does not come across as being more Nick's project or mine. People think that they can detect which songs were written by me and which were written by Nick, but when tested they often get it wrong, which is interesting."

Death Church is certainly one of the most unique (and most popular) records associated with the anarcho punk scene. The songwriting somehow seems completely unique and interesting, while at the same time concise and almost minimal. Recorded and mixed in a mere four days, the record gives no hint at cheap production values as the recorded tracks even stand up today.

Unusually haunting, minimalist imagery runs through much of the lyrics starting with the opening mantra of "1/4 Dead."

3/4 of the world are starving
The rest are dead
Overdosed on insensitivity
Nail varnished to crosses

The lyrics are often completely given to the imagistic with its navigation in the paranoid and alienated.

The black cloud gathers and smothers my brain
As I cry another tear in the struggle of pain
Another hurdle to clear is it all the same?
Is the conquest of pain my only aim?
As you walk out of the Valium of death
A sad feeling limps around your brain
Funny farmer sowing seeds of discontent
Pumping nerve gas around unfeeling veins
War junkies perish in the wreckage of their brains
Mindwarp earthlings seek to change our path
Stench crawling over the snow
Bilious bodies terrorized by fast food sugar demons
Unhappy nuclear bomb doubt families
Meltdown in the melting tin pot boilers
Another crutch splinters and snaps
Time to heal the split atoms now
Happy Farm

Other lyrics saw the band taking more direct approaches to political oriented songs while maintaining their unique approach.

I tell you about the animals
How they suffer how they die
You try to hide your guilty doubt
From me with an appeasing smile
You never want responsibility
For this murderous cruelty
The wasteful piles of blood soaked bodies
You won't let your conscience see

Blasphemy squad
Thriving on hate
In the warfare state
Like piss in a pod

1902 inside a British concentration camp
Where 20,000 Dutchmen including children die
Do you feel any pity for these murdered men and women
Who died at the hands of the British Empire
Victims they may have been
But innocent they were not
They were murderers just the same
With their own code of hate