'Dirty Wet & Wobbly...' The Only Ones

THE ONLY ONES

  Getting together in London in the summer of 1976, The Only Ones were a four piece band fronted by Peter Perrett's dark, sardonic lyrics and glitchy, unstable singing.

    The poet Wallace Stevens once wrote a friend that the ocean was dirty, wet and wobbly -- which is a fair description of Perrett's voice: a voice that rides under the lyrics like a buried river of falls, pools and rapids -- an unpredictable display of fluid dynamics in action.

    The band got their first 7", Lovers of Today, out in 1977 on Vengeance Records and though that was well received, they really struck paydirt with Another Girl, Another Planet, released on Columbia in April, 1978.

    Despite this early success and the release of three pretty decent albums, The Only Ones succumbed to the RnR cliches of drugs and excess, breaking up rather acrimoniously in1982.

    Perrett spent quite a bit of the following four decades in the grip of heroin and crack -- how he managed to pull himself out of this and get back to making pretty good music is nothing short of a miracle.

    Perrett tours occasionally (on stage with his two sons!) and has put out two solo albums that are worth searching out: How The West Was Won (Domino/2017) and Humanworld (Domino/2019).

    Perrett may have cleaned up his act... but that voice -- it's still dirty, wet and wobbly.