Ten years ago, the Only Ones announced they were reforming. Even in a world in which legendary bands are hardly ever allowed to rest in peace without being cajoled back to the stage for a final encore, this seemed a startling turn of events. It wasn’t just the acrimony with which the Only Ones had split up, fuelled by drugs and the failure of even their most famous single, 1978’s transcendent Another Girl, Another Planet, to make much commercial impact. (Now an unimpeachable rock classic, covered by everyone from The Replacements to the Ukulele Orchestra of Great Britain, it didn’t even make the charts on release.) It was that frontman Peter Perrett had subsequently vanished into a twilight world of heroin and crack addiction, barricaded in a crumbling gothic house, the doors fortified against police raids. When the Guardian met him in 2007, he had been in a state of chemically-assisted wakefulness for 48 hours. There were flashes of the mordant humour that ran through the Only Ones’ lyrics (“Junkies nowadays are really disgusting,” he huffed, when talk turned to Pete Doherty. “In my day, being a drug dealer was a respectable fuckin’ profession. Nowadays, it’s something you really feel ashamed to be associated with, the way most junkies behave”). But mostly the conversation turned on how unwell Perrett was, his lungs so ruined by crack that he claimed he could barely finish a song without an oxygen mask.
It was a story that most people would have bet on having only one, miserable ending. Without wishing to sound ghoulish, the idea that Perrett would be alive a decade later seemed pretty fanciful; the idea that he would be five years clean and in possession of a new album was nuts. It’s astonishing that How the West Was Won exists at all. The fact that Perrett seems not just to have emerged from the abyss but emerged with his musical faculties completely intact suggests there is something superhuman about him.
But he has. It’s all there, in the opening title track. A Sweet Jane-like riff decorated with ghostly slide guitar. The facility for effortless, languid melody. The voice – a nasal South London drawl, apparently unaffected by the lung disease its owner visited upon himself. And the lyrics, replete with the kind of entertainingly withering, Lou Reed-by-way-of-SE5 put-downs that powered Only Ones songs including Why Don’t You Kill Yourself and Curtains For You (“even your parents ran away from home to escape you”) along with, more unexpectedly, his thoughts on Kanye West’s wife. “Just like everyone else I’m in love with Kim Kardashian … in another timeline I would have stared at her all day long without ever wanting to see her from the front,” he sings. “God knows I love America.”
It sets a high standard that the rest of How the West Was Won matches and occasionally betters. The songwriting is polished and his band – essentially a repurposed version of his sons’ outfit Strangefruit – is tight, without ever losing a sense of louche character. The overriding theme isn’t redemption (“It’s too late for repentance of sins,” he sings at one point) so much as survival against the odds, a topic that he addresses with clear eyes and without self-pity. An Epic Story is one of several fantastic, bloodied-but-unbowed paeans to his wife and co-conspirator Xena, a woman who has clearly endured a great deal during their 47 years together. You get a flavour of how much from Troika, a song that casts an eye over what you might tactfully describe as their unconventional marital arrangements in the 70s, or Living in My Head, a depiction of stoned indolence set to music that crawls along, gripping and paranoid.
“I didn’t die, at least not yet, I’m still just about capable ... of one last defiant breath,” Perrett sings on Something’s in My Brain, the one song that directly addresses his years of addiction.
Musically, at least, “just about capable” is a huge understatement, something to which Perrett is prone: “Sometimes I find it hard to say no,” he drawls elsewhere, tongue lodged in cheek. A man who was once thought to have wasted his talent so conclusively that even Johnny Thunders felt impelled to plead with him to pull himself together, Perrett has pulled off something genuinely remarkable here. If How the West Was Won does turn out to be one last defiant breath, then it’s an astonishing twist to his story. But you have to hope it isn’t, and maybe Perrett does too. “Rock’n’roll is back in me,” he adds, and, for once, you can detect a hint of optimism behind the sneer.
