The Peel Sessions Album

I knew and loved The Only Ones' 'Another Girl, Another Planet' when I was in my late teens, but wasn't aware of the band's catalogue beyond their best-known song. At some point during my university years I took a chance on a cassette copy of their Peel Sessions Album, then newly-released. At first hearing I wasn't sure I liked the session version of 'Another Girl...' as much as the single version; but subsequent listens changed my mind, and I grew to love many of the other tracks too.

When, at length, I found a cassette copy of the band's third album Baby's Got a Gun, I was disappointed by it: I did not care for the production on it at all. I later tried again with their compilation The Immortal Story, but again, found I liked it much less than the Peel Sessions, which, as one Discogs commenter pithily put it, is "like a 'best of' but with even better versions of all their best songs". I let the matter rest there, but then the disposal of my cassettes in the late '90s left me with none of their music. Until this January, that is, when I ordered a vinyl copy of this old favourite from a Discogs seller.

The songs on the album are drawn from four sessions recorded between September '77 and May '80. Peter Perrett was in fine voice throughout and the band behind him wonderfully purposeful & cohesive. I straighforwardly admired Perrett's lyrics in my youth, but revisited later in life, some are harder to take, with their grim accounts of addiction and trauma. There are many well-wrought lines, but they can be callous (e.g. 'Why Don't You Kill Yourself?') or self-absorbed (e.g. 'No Peace for the Wicked': one could easily imagine a young Stephen Morrissey taking careful notes while listening to it). At their best, though, these songs are sublime: 'Another Girl, Another Planet' of course, but also 'The Beast', 'Prisoners', 'From Here to Eternity', and 'The Big Sleep'.

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