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Peter Perrett: The Cleansing review – a late-career triumph that dances in the face of death

Despite its themes of decline and mortality, the 72-year-old former Only Ones frontman is full of joie de vivre on this wise and empathetic record

From its title to its dimensions – a double album twice as long, at 70 minutes, as 2019’s Humanworld – to the cross-generational array of collaborators, including Johnny Marr and Carlos O’Connell of Fontaines DC (whose presence inevitably carries the tang of homage) it’s hard to avoid the sense of a last splurge from an artist who has unexpectedly managed to make it into his 70s, despite his best efforts to the contrary. You might expect a certain degree of rueful reflection from a cleaned-up septuagenarian surveying the wreckage of his past, which The Cleansing duly delivers on Do Not Resuscitate, Set the House on Fire’s saga of improbably enduring love and the closing Crystal Clear: “You thought you’d teach them all the lesson, but it seems you weren’t that clever.” More startling is what happens when Perrett turns his gaze outwards and the amount of empathy he displays for others: the litany of suicides in I Wanna Go With Dignity, the girl spiralling out of control in Disinfectant, the object of There for You, struggling with their mental health (“it’s too late when people die … I don’t want to let you down”).

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