somewhere out there

Cognitive dissonance

Words: Noel Gardener

Illustration: Nick Blinko

As part of Plan B’s ongoing series on music mavericks and forgotten visionaries, we meet Rudimentary Peni, enigmatic, reclusive anarcho punks documenting society’s ruthless inequalities and exploring the furthest recesses of the mind.

Thousands of punk bands have used personal and political paranoia as a crutch for their song writing. Others have channelled genuine delusionary states into musical creativity. It’s questionable if anyone has managed to marry these notion’s in a way Rudimentary Peni have-a ruthless twinning of the surreal and the satirical tempered only by a deft and near-unmatched-in-punk musically.

The option of isolating one element of this Hertfordshire trio-Nick Blinko’s sociopathic lyrical volleys (dense, meta-referential rhymes seriously comparable to no-one save maybe Wu-Tang at their conspiratorial heights) from the elemental rush of their music from the visionary, mindrazingly intricate artwork drawn by vocalist/guitarist Blinko for each release-is simply unviable. From their formation in 1980, Rudimentary Peni have espoused an ethos where the marketing of rock music was held up as the tawdy parade it was, and in doing so made themselves The Complete Package. Sweet irony.

David Tibet of current 93 has been one of the most vocal and important cheerleaders for Rudimentary Peni, and especially Nick’s auxiliary activities in art and literature. “I had long been a fan of authors like Lovecraft and Machen, and I saw in Nick Blinko honouring similar obsessions to the ones that mattered to me, He explains. “ Nick and RP were absolutely sui generis: neither band nor the individuals could be copied in any meaningful sense as they were so absolutely themselves, free of artifice and fashion “.

As pre-Peni experimental synth ensemble The Magits, featuring Nick and the drummer Jon Greville, drifted apart, bassist Grant Matthews came into complete the RP lineup. Their commitment to recording in favour of playing live, which their considered a trying ordeal, provided foundation for a cloudy enigma that surrounds the band to this day, and also ensured their eponymous 12 track debut EP was about as good as it could have been. Delivered at predominantly hurtling pace, clipped and sinewy, it’s a self-evident punk record, yet it’s hard to overstate how alarmingly Other an effect is achieved-peaking perhaps with ‘Teenage Time Killer’, which has an intro which sounds like something Sonic Youth spent 15 years tuning their guitar to lock into.

If Rudimentary Peni is an anarcho punk record it’s only by virtue of context. The politics in the words convey intense itches of dissatisfaction, but chiefly look inward, or shun direct protest song for knotty penmanship. However, the time of the single’s release found the band visiting Crass at their Dial House commune, playing an inaugural London show with The Subhumans and Flux of Pink Indians, and recording a second EP, ‘Farce’, for Crass Records. Although it’s dressed in sonic sackcloth by the era’s generic clatter-fly production, there’s not a moment when the rage subsides, Nick’s vocal delivery perhaps it’s most intense ever.

“I suppose I first heard of RP quite a while after I became a fan of Crass,” recalls David Tibet. “ Not long after moving to London I became friends with [Crass associate] Annie Anxiety, and moved into her squat in South London. Through her I got to know Crass as well as many other anarcho punk bands, RP were one of the bands who most moved me, perhaps because I admired the intensity of their vision, as well as the fact that their fame of reference wasn’t the fairly standard-and perfectly valid and admirable-communitarian/humanitarian one.”

Consider, then, the insert that came with 1983’s Death Church LP: alongside broadsides against vivisection and bloated punk icons, Grant tells a weary tale of the Autonomy Centre, an anarchist setup swiftly scuppered by glue-fucked punks under the impression that this was a green light to do and take anything for free. Death Church is an exemplary creation, but it was assembled by a band cast asunder by Grant’s battle with cancer (thankfully conquered) and cast into a scene whose ideas failed to mask shortcomings. Little wonder they didn’t release another record until 1989’s tribute to H.P.Lovecraft, Cacophony, and undertook another lengthy silence until 1995’s Pope Adrian The 37th Psychristiatric, based around an incarcerated Blinko’s delusions that he was in line to become Pope. Since then, up until the new No More Pain, the band have adhered to their most comfortable format-15-20 minute EP’s of compact, anthemic songs, lyrics condensed into three or four lines per song. A constant backdrop to Peni activity has been Blinko’s artwork and prose, which has resulted in a series of exhibitions and two novels. David Tibet got back in contact with Nick in the nineties when both were featured in an exhibition of ‘Outsider art’; his print media wing, Durtro Press, publishes the second Blinko tome later this year, “There are 99 chapters, and it will be around 200 pages long,” informs Tibet. “It’s the verbal equivalent of Nick’s pictorial work. Claustrophobic, nightmarish, funny, perplexing, beautiful, and 93,000 other adjectives.”

Rudimentary Peni have been the architects of some truly immersive work, immersion which makes Tibet’s loving description of Nick Blinko’s art seem equally applicable to the records he’s helmed. “His usual absence of colour always makes me see it as colour, and when he works in colour it makes me think of how Klimt would paint the essential nature of germs and viruses. Apocalyptic hallucinatory horror? Children in a playground all possessed by the pit simultaneously and screaming and laughing?”

Noel Gardener talks to Grant Matthews and Nick Blinko

I’m given to understand that despite continuing to make punk records, RP listen to little or no punk rock during the creative process. How come the band has more or less stayed within the understood boundaries of punk music?

Grant: “Our listening habits have varied over the decades. From Echoes of Anguish onwards I came to the conclusion that I wanted to try to improve what we were doing within the understood boundaries of punk music. This notion comes from George Friedrich Handel; he wrote vast amounts of music during his lifetime, all of which was in a certain vain. By doing this, he would occasionally write something that was better than his earlier similar output. The influence of Indian classical music can be heard in the way in which some of our songs repeat while speeding up, a technique that can be heard in some Indian chanting.”

Are you uncomfortable with how much people are willing to buy (or at least sell) your debut novel The Primal Screamer for these days? (Three figure sums aren’t uncommon.) Did you write it with an audience in mind?

Nick: “One hundredth of such a purchase price could cause a difference elsewhere in the world. Is there only one way to spend money-a hundred lottery tickets or a novel? I had no idea who would read The Primal Screamer, nor do I have any concept of the possible readership of a new book.”

Do the members of RP still adhere to the principles of anarchy and the autonomy that were promoted on the sleeve of Death Church?

Grant: I was the only one who was into the political thing, though I never defined myself as an anarchist. When I helped out at the Autonomy Centre I noticed that in the absence of formal power structures, informal power structures take their place anyway. As far as compromising with society is concerned, society continues to exclude the likes of me anyway, so I’ve never been really been faced with those kind of dilemmas.”