Fragmented and Disjointed are mischievously and knowingly apt. Jon himself didn't play on the single, it being the creation of just Nick and Drooper. A second single was also recorded the following year, A Pawn in the Game, with Alex Hawkes also lending his services, but it never saw the light it for various reasons that not even Nick himself can or cares - to remember. And with the premature demise of The Magits, Rudimentary Peni, a much more hardcore punk affair musically, began rehearsing in earnest at Jon's parent’s house and made their live debut in early 1981.
It was in a village hall outside of Watford, with the S-Haters and Soft Drinks; we played quite well... but the small crowd were unimpressed, deadpans Grant.
This dim view of performing live would lead to the band playing but once a month to begin with and increasingly less frequently as the years went by. Indeed, Nick was quoted in issue No, 1 IQ32 zine, as saying playing live is a pain in the arse, who needs it. With such an attitude, it's hardly surprising then that they never toured (the furthest they ventured south being Brighton, with Leeds being the most northerly of their one-off forays) but their distaste for public appearances merely helped add to the enticing air of mystery that suggestively shrouds them to this day.
I do remember that the few gigs we did bother to play in the early years were most disappointing, offers Jon in the respect that there would usually be some wanker that thought it was all about spitting at the band and generally being an aggressive, annoying tosser. Whenever did the idea that bands enjoy being gobbed at come from? I'm fucked if I know ! And most gigs ran a similar course, i.e., the majority of people clearly disappointed that we didn't have green Mohicans and multiple piercings. I think we were all aware that we were supposed to, but I don’t think any of us gave this to much though. Basically, if you were the sort of person to be put off by what we looked like, you were never going to understand or appreciate the songs anyway.
The worse gig we ever did was in Harpenden in 1981, reckons Grant. We had so much stuff thrown at us we had to leave the stage! In the early years, it was probably a combination of laziness and a lack of opportunity that prevented us from gigging. Then it was illness that stopped us...and in later years, it was generally half-empty venues and unappreciative crowds.'' Rather, Rudimentary Peni concentrated their efforts on recording, steadily racking up an impressive body of work, their innate ability be disturb and provoke the listener on some deep, almost primal level unrivalled in the punk scene.

the whole thing explodes into intense chaos. And 'insane' would be a word often mentioned in the same breath as the band's name, with Nick's lyrical meandering, not to mention his superb - albeit utterly twisted - artwork that adorned each and every release, owning much to his own questionable mental health.
It took me awhile to meet Nick, cos he was quite a reclusive character even back then, recalls Mark Farrelly, guitarist with Part One and a close friend of Peni during their formative years. He was especially close to Nick, sharing the same interest in macabre art and literature, and indeed their bands shared the same stage several times in the early Eighties. I’d seen Grant at the Anarchy Centre, but I never knew who he was; I hadn't spoken to him... but there was this other guy, a really good friend of mine, who used to call himself Scarecrow, and he was in a few Andy Martin (of The Apostles)-related bands... he's still around, he's done a lot of performance art over the last fifteen years or so. Anyway, he would put together these compilation tapes, and he was playing one of these one day and this song came on called Teenage Time Killer, and I was just fuckin’ blown away by it; it sounded so fucking peculiar... to say it was eccentric is quite an understatement, Scarecrow was sneering at it, saying that they were just a bunch of fucking sixth-formers', but I couldn't believe what I was hearing. And he pointed Grant out to me, and we ended up on the same train home that night, cos he was getting off at Watford and I was going back to Bletchley, which are both on the same line. Grant didn't drink, and I was really pissed, but we struck up a conversation, and because they lived relatively close to us, I eventually met Nick, and we really hit it off straight away, because we both had this very morbid outlook.
And I loved the artwork; it was fantastic, like nothing I’d ever seen before… and he discussed it with me all the time, because no one else was really that interested back then. I’d always been into drawing since I was a kid, but I’d more or less stopped, and then I met him, and he showed me this catalogue he got from Hayward Gallery in ’79 that was a big influence on his artwork, called Outsiders, and it was all what we know as Outsider Art now… you know, art from mental institutions, just fairly odd characters who had drawings in their pockets and stuff. And he showed me this thing and I could immediately see his energy, where he was coming from…cos he’d actually worked in a mental hospital, just outside Watford. He’d gone to Watford School of Art, and left because he couldn’t stand it, but he loved the very resonant world of Outsider Art.
I think it had a big influence on his approach to music as well…
Yes, when I was seventeen, I was dispatched to the London asylum working as a ward orderly, confirms Nick. Although by the time I worked there, it was called Shenbury Hospital. Soon, such village-like institutions were not deemed too cool, thus care in the community (community asylum) arose, and Shenbury Hospital, like most of its kind, is now all housing.
There’s nothing wrong with art school though. I attended a few too early and might well have done better at about nineteen. Oddly enough though, my doctor, who I rarely see now, suggested that I reapply...and yes, the shrink has seen my artwork!
The band’s first London gig was with Flux of Pink Indians and the Subhumans at the Red Lion, Leytonston, on 18th September 1981 (what a bill for £1.50) and cemented the Band’s connections with the burgeoning anarcho-punk-scene.
Almost inevitably, the next single, Farce, was produced by Penny Rimbaud and came out through the Crass label during July 1982. A slicker, and weedier, take on the raw malevolence of its predecessor, it nonetheless showcased Peni’s unique sonic signatures for a wider audience, and made No 7 in the Indie charts.
Grant: In the summer of ’81, I went down to their [i.e. Crass] place with a fanzine writer [Don of Stage One]. I gave them a copy of our first EP and they offered us the change to do a record on their label. I think Farce is fine, though Nick’s vocal performance was somewhat inhibited by Penny’s production. We wanted to make a fast, intense, high-energy punk record, and within the limitations of the budget, I think we achieved that.
I thought it was a bit of a let-down myself, proffers Mark, Mainly cos Penny lost something in the sound. The work he did on Crass records is fantastic, but when he came to produce Peni, he definitely lost something that was present on the first single. I mean, just where the hell did that come from anyway?
But the guitars are very thin and trebly on Farce… the whole sound is very clinical, like a white space-type recording: the first EP was really dirty and mushy. And Nick’s voice on Farce is just shit, it sounds stranded. However, the band’s real masterpiece was to arrive in the shape of their debut album, Death Church, which was released by the Crass offshoot, Corpus Christi, in September 1983, spending three months in the Indies, peaking at No. 3. Wrapped in an intoxicating, meticulously drawn poster from Blinko (a sprawling depiction of mass graves, suppurating wounds, deformed angels and weeping phalluses), it saw the band applying the brakes considerably and exploring the more subtle shades at work in their sound. Mixing the morbid (Cosmic Hearse and Vampire State Building) and the surreal (Martian Church and Alice Crucifies the Paedophiles’) with the obligatory earnest politics (the stunningly bleak ¼ Dead and Dutchmen) and even several songs about animal rights (Flesh Crucifix and Pig in a Blanket), it’s a dizzying dip into dangerously dark water. Since its release, many have aligned the introspective psycho-illogical lyrics with Nick, and the political commentary with Grant, a conclusion with the latter strongly warns against.
Never assume that Nick wrote one thing and that I wrote another; people are usually wrong when they try to do this. To sum up though, we have both been responsible for writing both music and lyrics, but in different degrees and at different times. There is no set pattern to it, and there are no set rules about what will or will not be a subject for a song... but certain themes tend to attach themselves to different records. Jon did not write any lyrics though, nor any guitar and bass parts.., apart from the last two seconds of Cosmetic Plague, he did, however, write all the drum parts... Nick and Grant would come to me with basically complete song's elaborates Jon, on the band's writing process, that they would have worked out with a basic drum machine track, if any drums at all. I would add what I saw fit rhythmically, and it usually worked straight away. Grant and I just seem to click in terms of playing.
The album was done at breakneck speed, of course, recorded and mixed in two days, but it felt good. It just worked, first time, virtually every time. And again, with the mixing, came the realisation that this was turning out to be a good recording. The album also includes the poignant Cloud Song and Inside, songs delivered at a sombre pace that are steeped an hints of devastating personal revelation... possibly a direct result of Grant contracting lung cancer during the album's gestation period. He happily managed to help cure himself however, with, as well as the more orthodox treatment for cancer, the healing powers of meditation and visualisation (a direct quote from the bassist lifted from one of their few mainstream music paper interviews, in Sounds, 1989).