Jamie Perrett: Glory Days – Single Review

Currently touring the UK and Europe, providing actual and musical support to Peter’s muse, Jamie Perrett has a couple of things to get off his chest, and it’s not Norovirus. 

Reinvigorating the timeless family drawl and in the middle of releasing a brace of songs before an official release later in the year, this is the balls, reports a deeply impressed MK Bennett

There is a famous photograph from the Seventies, some impossibly warm location somewhere the British would find exotic, Marrakesh, Casablanca, Tangier, where, as Wiliam Burroughs knew, money could buy you anything. There is a room with two figures in it. One of the figures, a child called Marlon, is crawling around, likely in his own shit, as his father, Keith, lies on the bed, oblivious to the world, high on the best powders and ointments money can buy, while mosquito nets sway in the breeze behind him. It seems almost alien, an image for the Daily Mail to boost their sales on a slow news week, and despite its aesthetic, like a clandestine film still, it is heartbreaking.

You assume Jamie can relate to this better than most, bar the insect repellent, because his father was /is a genius too, with the attendant lack of social skills that almost always involves though somewhat less monied, and these things should not be mentioned unless they are relevant. Not everybody gets the gift passed down, and talent often skips a generation, but the correlation between these two men, the connection of ability and voice, is startling. Just as startling as the psychology of his upbringing, which the stories suggest he took control over at an early stage and filled with music. Music saves souls and lives, and it takes a particular sensibility to recognise this and nurture it, father to son or son to father, it could be biblical, Old Testament style.

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Glory Days is an absolute blast, a reckless and beautiful rocker with a natural pedigree but a modernistic outlook and style. The drums wander in and start an argument with the guitar over who will be louder, but by the time we hit the chorus, it’s not important anyway. That turn of phrase, the acid wit, that punch-hard lyricism remained familial, too, unless the incredible chorus isn’t “Your glory days in glory holes are over.”, and that seems to be exactly what he is singing. It deserves a Grammy for that line alone, and the bitter, hard-won bile of the rest is justified too.

There are hints of Iggy Pop, The louche throwaway attitude of Mr Doherty’s various bands, early 90’s garage/grunge (Mudhoney, etc.), and, of course, his old fellas’ work too. Impressively self-produced and self-written like his previous track Age Of Reason, released just before Christmas, if the lyrics are any indication, then he is fast turning generational trauma into Art, and as the son to the father, there’s nothing whatsoever wrong with that.

If you assume he has a lot of unreleased emotion that he is channelling via the words and music of this three-minute delight as the second verse begins, while the bass goes for a walk that you don’t want it to come back from and the guitars are bricks breaking walls and the dynamics climb and climb, consider this before you believe him to be the miserable bard or the hard done by kid, his online merch currently consists of one T-Shirt with the legend “Jamie is the Only One” printed on it. It is that sort of petty, beautiful spite that made this country great. Onward and upward until eventually, maybe it is his name legitimately sitting atop the family tree.

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