Rudimentary Peni

(Translated from my original Italian text by Eric Rucker)

With hindsight, the most important group to have emerged from the extremist English Punk scene may well be Rudimentary Peni. Led by a genuine obsessive, Nick Blinko, this trio (Blinko, Grant Matthews on bass and John Greville on drums) from Abbots Langley, the small town near London which produced England's only Pope, stand apart from the mass of hardcore groups not so much for the violence and brevity of their songs (which, incidentally, are hard to beat) as for the absolute essentiality of their music, their rhythmic variety and their above-average grasp of melody.

Their first two EPs are an unprecedented, full-frontal attack which few records can match; Rudimentary Peni (Outer Himalayan), recorded in 1981, contains twelve tracks, each faster and more deafening than the last. In raw, violent anthems like Media Person, B-Ward and Play, Blinko speeds up Joey Ramone's hysterical rigmaroles and Johnny Rotten's vicious invectives, deforming them with his own guttural caprices, somewhere between a werewolf in heat and a native American shaman. The Peni's refusal to waste a single second of music might hint at a certain monotony, but there is actually much more variety than one might imagine, and in songs like Teenage Time Killer and Him Hymn, it is the unusual guitar riffs which drive the harmony. Each track has a precise identity, and throughout the record, a `black' vein of esotericism continues to emerge (in Gardener, the group even attempts a kind of raga-punk).

Released a year later, their second EP, Farce (Crass), is just as ferocious, if perhaps a little less imaginative. Sacrifice and Cosmetic Plague are among the most frenetic rock and roll songs ever, the pace so insane that sometimes Blinko has to scream without having a chance to catch his breath, making for strange vocal effects. The esotericism of the previous record has become a "cosmic malaise" marked by a pervading atheism ("God is nothing more than an obsessive lie", or "Death has begun and Jesus loves no one"), sometimes degenerating into nursery-rhymes, as in Farce, or psychopathic, obsessive delirium as in Zero Again.

Death Church (Corpus Christi, 1983) marks another step forward, cementing the reputation of Rudimentary Peni with a series of tracks marked by eccentric and blasphemous black humour (Vampire State Building, Alice Crucifies The Paedophiles).

Rudimentary Peni continue to work in the underground, managing only rarely to record, but whatever they produce is always a bolt from the blue: this is the case with their masterpiece, Cacophony (Outer Himalayan, 1987), their most visionary work, and one of the most radical in the history of British punk, where they take their fragmentary methods to the limits, the original version consisting of fifty tracks: many are simply ingenious fragments (such as the Gothic hymn, Sarcophagus), or bizzare melodies with martial rhythms (like the pulsing, panting Dead Loved or the sepulchral hymn American Anglophile), while others are much more musical than anything else the band has previously produced. Some songs make use of "regular" melodies (Dream City's hook would be the envy of any revivalist) and the instrumentals, in particular, display a peculiar "fusion" of Sonic Youth, Public Image Ltd, Joy Division (above all in Evil Clergyman) and even "grunge" (Brown Jenkin).

The epileptic Crazed Couplet, where a gargling vocal babbles over another voice whose crazed screams set the rhythm, shows that Punk is never far away, but the record as a whole is permeated by a farcical atmosphere, the grotesque dance of Periwig Power remniscent of the "pataphysical" madness of Pere Ubu, and the exotic excursions of Beyond the Tanarian Hills bringing to mind the Residents' expressionist pantomimes, not to mention Captain Beefheart, whose lunatic bluesrock inspires the peurile pow-wow of The Only Child and the lascivious rockabilly of Lovecraft Baby. Cacophony is, in effect, a vaudevillian operetta, but this is "black" vaudeville, a series of scenes from a grandiloquent Grand Guignol overflowing with black humour, from the jovial overture of The Horrors in the Museum to the stiff hymn Gentlemen Prefer Blood.

Cacophony is, in fact, the Ummagumma or the Trout Mask Replica of British punk.

The band continued to release material, although at longer and longer intervals. The 12-song EP Archaic (Outer Himalayan, 2004) maintains the same claustrophobic atonal mood of the early works.