Issue No. 3

The Only Ones
Marcus Shepherd

We're The Only Ones." "We're from England." This deadpan declaration came to me from Alan Mair, a Dickensian little character in a raucous velvet hat which he may have swindled from David Bowie. His last band, The Beatstalkers, shared management with The Duke in the person of Ken Pitt. Alan was then touring The States with his new band and was proud of their name. Their singer eventually scuffled out of the
dingy restaurant phone booth. They'd stopped for a bite to eat. But Peter Perrett wasn't hungry. He looked savagely dissheveled; tangled hair, tangled nerves, mascara running. Probably an ill-fated conversation. They both ordered tea. Proper Englishmen. It was 1980 and their eponymously titled record had just been released. I saw their show a week later and I heard the album and then I Knew. This was a Historic Band. History just didn't know it yet.

It's twenty-seven years later and History has caught up. There's not much more to espouse about that notorious first record. The way they were rushed through the recordings trying to meet Mick Taylor's deadline, as he had the studio booked one week after them. The way drummer Mike Kellie (ex-Spooky Tooth) came through like a mensch and nailed all the tracks in a couple of takes. The miracle that they finished
it at all, with Perrett and guitarist John Perry entering nightly cocaine tournaments with Keith Richards. I'd wanted to ask Keith about it when I interviewed him but The Stones had arranged for no pharmacological inquiries. I recently opted to ask Perry about it in what began as a Magnaphone Exclusive but he was swept up in a whirlwind of sudden fame. Mired to session-work (Marianne Faithfull, John Hiatt) since The Only Ones split, he'd been granted a godsend by the British phone company, Vodaphone. They used a cut from the record in their National Ad. As of this writing, The Only Ones are trouncing across Europe, after a quarter of a century, teaching young audiences the meaning of frenzy. The cut is called "Another Girl, Another Planet". It's shown up on more Punk
Anthologies than "Sonic Reducer" and was released five seperate times by CBS in an attempt to fling it into the Charts. All it took was a phonecall. A pity. It'sknife-driven guitar lines and Perrett's jangled-scarecrow vocals should've been enough from the onset. "Breaking Down" is pure Swing-Era Jazz, Kellie's beats hopping time-signatures like a plague of frogs. Small wonder that the only Punks they could Tour this band with were Television. "Language Problem" finds Perrett in absolute Artaud despair. The shrieks of a motherless boy in Hell echoe through black screeching clouds of feedback. John Perry's guitar outro in "The Beast" is immortal. It inspired us at Magnaphone to tell him "You were the bridge between the cerebral explorations of Hendrix and the visceral attack of Tom Verlaine." He fancied that. Although, he's probably Touring with Weezer these days

The Only Ones