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...
