Rudimentary Peni - Death Church

RUDIMENTARY PENI - DEATH CHURCH

And then there was Rudimentary Peni with their début LP, Death Church.

Having come to the attention of a wide audience the year previously with their Crass label release, Farce, there still remained an air of intrigue about Rudimentary Peni nurtured by the fact that they rarely played live (and then only in London) and that there were no available photographs of them. On top of this, their name still managed to unsettle and perplex which was more than could be said of any other Punk band name.

Released on the Corpus Christi label, Death Church arrived in a regular Crass-style fold-out sleeve covered in artwork that looked absolutely incredible, like some excavated alien Quatermass object. The drawings that had festooned their first 7" EPs had been elaborately eye-catching but now given a much larger canvas in the form of a 12" album sleeve to work on, guitarist and vocalist Nick Blinco had utilised it to full effect, cramming it with his meticulously detailed art. Demented, macabre, twisted, hellish, disturbed and disturbing. Rife with religious allusions, like Hieronymous Bosch as interpreted by a lunatic.

Enclosed with the LP came an insert containing thoughts on a variety of topics including animal vivisection in schools, the falsity of parental love, and advice on leaving home; along with quotes from the Pistols and The Clash that in hindsight revealed a glaring hypocrisy, plus a piece lambasting Punk gigs for not only being a waste of time but for being populated by 'prats masquerading as stereotypes'.

Pertinent to Anarcho Punk specifically was a post-mortem of the Crass/Poison Girls-sponsored Anarchy Centre, attributing the cause of its death to rampant drug abuse, petty theft and vandalism. The final stake through the Centre's heart being when the landlord banned the putting on of gigs there, subsequently cutting off the main form of income from which the rent was paid: 'One thing that emerges from this,' the article and by extension Rudimentary Peni concluded 'Is that all you people out there have a lot to learn about yourselves before 'Anarchy' or whatever you want to call it will ever get a real chance to work.'

All this before the record had even been played.

Starting with a very slow and very simple, lone bass line; the drums, guitar and vocals suddenly crash in all together and the first song begins: "Three quarters of the world are starving, the rest are dead. Overdosed on insensitivity, nail varnished to crosses."

Like a psychotic Discharge haiku, the track 1/4 Dead depicts life as a tormented hell on earth, with Nick Blinco's strangled vocals sounding as if trapped within a glass cage of noise. The words are sung once then propelled by the speeding up of the music are repeated but at double the pace and after just 82 seconds in total the song is over and the listener has entered the world of Rudimentary Peni.

"It's escapist shit of a feeble kind, a fucked up institution for fucked up minds. Holy matrimony is a blissful myth wholly based on tradition, wholly based on bullshit." So begins the track Blissful Myth, a bitter and venomous swipe against marriage.

Because so very little information about Rudimentary Peni was available it was being left to search within their songs to find clues as to what had brought them to their unique but clearly troubled state. Were they the end result of having dysfunctional parents and unhappy childhoods? Had bearing witness to the failed marriages of their parents led them to their apparent disgust with the concept of wedlock as described in Blissful Myth?

On their Penis Envy album, Crass too had taken a jack hammer to the institution of marriage but theirs was an almost ideological argument whilst Rudimentary Peni's view sounded as though it was born from personal experience: "Think you love each other, think you're so in touch but it's the shit institution you love so much. You love so much."

The track The Psycho Squat offered further clues about the path that had led Rudimentary Peni to where they were: "Couldn't stand dummy and maddy no more, that's why I had to go to the psycho squat." So was it via the squat scene that had led them to falling in with The Mob and The Apostles, and to being involved with the Anarchy Centre? Was Nick Blinco even referring to himself or to a fictional character? Whoever it was, the squat Punk experience didn't appear to have been a very good one for them: "Now the fleas carry blood about my body, the whining spiel goes round and round. The mass debate never ends."

Mass debate or masturbate? There was so much wordplay going on that it was sometimes difficult to tell. If it was indeed 'mass debate' then what might any debate have been centred around? Punk culture, possibly? That always seemed to be a good one and a topic of debate Rudimentary Peni held strong views on as detailed in the track Rotten To The Core: "Have you realised that rock stars always seem to lie so much? John Lydon once said he cared but he never really gave a fuck. Said he'd use the money he made so that people could have somewhere to go but now he lives in the USA and snorts coke after the show... Joe Strummer said he'd use the money he made to set up a radio station to make the airwaves full of something more than shit. Have you noticed we're still waiting?"

Or would any mass debate have been centred more around higher ideas such as the forlorn state of mankind as expounded upon in the track Poppycock: "Poppies are the opium of the people, you prefer poppies to people. You take pride in genocide. There are no poppies in the USA, there are no poppies in the USSR. Poppy monopoly in the UK. Poppy monopoly OK..."

Or perhaps it would have been centred around life, its meaning and everything as depicted in the track Cosmic Hearse: "Floating round the universe, fucking in our cosmic hearse. You know time don't ever end, can't evade those dead Zen men. You're the meat in big Buddha's dinner..."

There's a good argument for art never having to explain itself and that particular argument sat perfectly well with Rudimentary Peni. Like Conflict had done on their To A Nation Of Animal Lovers EP, Rudimentary Peni had brought under control their previously frenzied and delirious blasts of noise as presented on their 7" EPs and now held total mastery over their craft. It was now as if the songs on their album were like a pack of savage dogs brought to heel, held by firmly gripped leashes that at any given moment could be loosened, allowing the dogs to break free and attack indiscriminately.

By exerting such control, rather than losing any of their power the songs had instead become even more intense and even more volatile. More than any other band affiliated with Crass, Rudimentary Peni were artists - master craftsmen within their hardcore Punk field - outsider artists - carving out sonic sculptures, composing provocative poems and drawing extraordinary pictures. They were also under no obligation to explain themselves to anyone, which simply made them even more fascinating and even more disturbing.

One subject carried over from their Farce EP that required no explanation was their atheism which still boiled over with sheer disgust. In the track Army Of Jesus, profane and twisted images are evoked as in: "Stone the crows and fuck the pigs and pass the ammunition to Jesus, the holy ghost in mohawk hair has crept in every fucking where. Ten tons of the babe's foreskin and fifty thousand skeletons of Jesus... Though the world ate all your shits, they're still allowed to starve. The Turin shroud can't cover up your evil smelling cloud. Deliver us from Jesus, forever and ever. Bloody men."

Hope - and indeed, love - lay not with organized religion but within the individual self, the first step toward any notion of this being the realization of the total horror of life. Religion was nothing but the enforcement of that horror through apathy, lies and indeed, hate "in the warfare state".

As conveyed by Crass, saying 'No' was a good starting point and whilst Rudimentary Peni were echoing this, they were also underlining the necessity of having to face yourself, as relayed in the track Nothing But A Nightmare: "The pile of shit inside your brain in which you live is not your own, you live out all the lies you're given. You're too scared to face yourself, so you're too scared to please yourself. Living in your dream-world is nothing but a nightmare."

But even more important than this was the requisite to love yourself, as stated in the track The Cloud Song: "Have you ever realised you must love yourself? If you don't, how can you love anybody else?"

Whilst in the track Blasphemy Squad, following a chorus of "Never forget, never ever forgive. Wash your mouth out with pope," they declare "No need to feed from corpus Christi. No need to cower, inside you is the power."

How Rudimentary Peni must have relished the idea of naming their LP Death Church, and then having it released on a label called Corpus Christi. How very apt. How very, very fitting.

Another subject that needed no explanation was their vegetarianism. Eating meat was simply wrong, with no reason and no excuse for it. Not only did meat mean murder but it meant also murderous cruelty perpetuated by greed, abdication of responsibility and a paper thin illusion of tradition: "What makes you want this torn ripped flesh so desperately?" they ask in the track Pig In A Blanket "Are you worthy of having this suffering brought about to fuel your greed?"

Whilst in the track Flesh Crucifix, they conjure up one of their most horrific, startling and unsettling images of all: "Carnivores are like tombstones. Cremating animal carcasses, cremating animal shit coffins. Carnivores are like flesh tombstones." Think about it.

The album ends with the song entitled Dutchmen, which is presented as an almost straight narrative describing the murder of 20,000 Dutch men, women and children inside a British concentration camp. Whilst the British were guilty of their murder, the Dutch men were guilty themselves of the murder of Zulus, who in turn were guilty of tribal murders: "It's just the same in Northern Ireland, Poland and Afghanistan," they declare "They're just fighting for the right to enforce their own oppression through the bigotry and blindness of their moral law."

In the world as described by Rudimentary Peni, morality was a moveable feast. A feast that was moving all the time.

Immediately after the release of Death Church, rumours circulated that one of the band members was dying of cancer and that the album was Rudimentary Peni's swansong - their last will and testament - making it all the more poignant and all the more meaningful. It turned out that the rumours were true and that bassist Grant, did indeed have lung cancer.

From such a fraught scenario a monument to desperate living had been wrought that would forever stand as an unorthodox paean to the spirit of freedom. By good fortune, Grant in the end overcame his illness but many years would pass before Rudimentary Peni would ever play together again.

In the meantime, all that was left were the songs and the highlighting of the very simple fact that life was very fragile and very precious. A very simple fact that seemed to escape the vast part of humankind but in particular seemed to pass all those in positions of power...