Rudimentary Peni The EP's of RP
I am at an utter loss as to what to write about Rudimentary Peni. I often describe them as one of my favorite bands, yet I'm not sure if I fully understand them.
I'm not really sure if anyone fully understands them.
I chose to post this "compilation" of their first two EPs, Rudimentary Peni(1980) and Farce(1981), to share because to try and pick one of their studio albums would be a nightmare. Every piece of music these guys have produced is just as confusing as it is anything else. One album was even claimed to have been written from a mental institution under the illusion that the writer was the Pope. I'll talk about that later.
I guess I'll start with Nick Blinko. He's the guy in the picture above. He formed the band with his classmate Grant Matthews, and his friend Jon Greville in 1980, following the break up of his first band, The Magits. Instead of delving into the history of the group too deeply, I am going to summarize it rather simply so that we can get on with some of the stranger nuances of the band.
They didn't have an insanely interesting history when it comes to labels, live performances, etc. They did not like to perform live, and they often weren't very well accepted. At the time, a lot of "punks" didn't care for punks that didn't look like "punks". I distinguished these groups because I think any "punk" criticizing others in their scene for the way they look isn't very punk :) Anyways, yeah. They dressed fairly conservatively, and that's not what people wanted in early 1980's London.
And then we get to their lyrics. What the fuck? What is going on here? Am I in a psych ward?
Well, for Nick Blinko, the answer to that last question was yes. After one of the band's many break-ups(which, I'd like to comment, weren't usually due to disagreements; rather illness), Blinko started suffering delusion and detachment along with many other things, and became an against-will resident in a psychiatric hospital. It is rumored that he was there under the impression that he was Pope Adrian IV, who although was from the same town, died in the 1100's.
This is where things got a little foggy. No one knows, and probably never will know, whether or not the last part is true. Blinko has said it himself, reportedly, but due to the fact that a large portion of their career has been dedicated to toying with the concept of madness, many believe that the story seemed a little too fitting. After he was released the band released their album Pope Adrian 37 Psychristiatric, which is by far their most confusing album. There are very few coherent lyrics on the album, and many tracks consist mainly of Blinko repeating a non-sensical(at least to us) phrase. At one point on the album, there is one single coherent line that pokes through:
It’s such a shame, the Pope with no name/ She doesn’t know what she’s called/ Closure, confusion, it’s so sad/ delusions of grandeur, she must be mad!
This line brings up a few confusing points; 1. It is the only coherent line on the album. 2. Is it Blinko directly admitting his own insanity to the listeners? 3. Why is he a she?
Gender issues were never really a topic of RP's. I mean, despite some political lyrics, most of their catalogue dealt with death, madness, death, and death. So this was just kind of left there for us. RP, over their 30+ years of making music, have submitted themselves to maybe only 3-4 interviews that I've heard of.
I could go on and on about the strangeness and fogginess surrounding the band's history, but I'll try to wrap things up a little bit here. Blinko is also a renowned "outsider" artist, and all of the band's albums feature his crude yet insanely detailed pen and pencil on paper drawings. The one on EP's of RP is one of my favorites, featuring a skeletal fetus being bound by thousands of tiny pin points and lines, pointing out a theme they extensively explore - that the minute we are born we begin to die.
He has also written a book that I have searched for for the past 10 years. It is easily available online, but for some reason I've never done that and instead have checked every book store in every town I go to. Anyways, the book, titled The Primal Screamer is just as confusing as everything else about the band. There is not a lot of information about the book, but there are apparently so many direct correlations between Blinko's protagonist and himself that most believe that it is a loose auto-biography, at that it's just strange.
Other than that, the band went through other misfortunes, including a very close call with life-threatening cancer that saw the end of the band for a few years. This compilation of their first two EP's is much more listenable than their later albums. I find the rest of their catalogue amazing, particularly the lyrics, but this is a good starting point for anyone not yet ready to delve into the strange world that is RP.
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