Shindig! Issue #157 – Peter Perrett

PETER PERRETT gave us a brilliant 20 Questions for issue #157. Here’s a brief extract about his school days in ’60s London

PETER PERRETT was almost born a rebel. As a teenager in the ’60s he defied authority. When The Summer Of Love came to an end he discovered The Velvet Underground, who defined him. After trying to make it in the music industry for a few years, The Only Ones broke through in the late ’70s, casting Perrett as a romantic bohemian punk poet. Class A drugs may have ravaged his life during the ’80s and ’90s, but he miraculously reappeared, almost unscathed. 

A clean and humorous 72-year-old Perrett talks to JON ‘MOJO’ MILLS about the past 60 years.

“I never learned the game at all. Never. I learned that you can’t expect anything”

S!: You were expelled from school, as you were deemed a “disruptive influence”. Did you see parallels in Lindsay Anderson’s movie If… a few years later? What was it that riled you about the stiff-collared middle-class institute?

PP: There were three of us working-class poor kids who got a scholarship – paid for tuition and board. My mother had to get a job just to pay for the uniform. It was a blueprint of what those schools were like. Even in the early ’60s it resembled Tom Brown’s School Days. By the end of the decade, as the ’60s was quite a tumultuous decade, things had changed. And they even got girls in the sixth form. But when I went there, it was still pretty brutal. We had rifles and went on parade and did manoeuvres in Epping Forest – just in case there was an invasion, and we had to defend our country. I liked to tell myself that it traumatised me and that’s why I became an angry young man. But I think I had the anger inside me before I went there, so I can’t use it as an excuse.

Your parents weren’t allowed to come and see you when you first arrived. It was hard to get used to that at the age of 11 in an environment that was quite oppressive in lots of ways. When the parents were allowed to finally visit, some of the others would have Jags and Rolls and Bentleys and things. My dad didn’t drive up into the car park because he didn’t want to embarrass me in front of everybody else. He parked his work’s Anglia estate well out of sight. I confronted it as a challenge. They will not break me. My attitude was just to get in as much trouble as I possibly could, but not with the intention of getting expelled. That took four years. I was being told what to do 24 hours a day, as I was trapped there. It wasn’t like day school. You could hate that from nine until four, but at least there was some relief when you went home. It really was like If…

My only other world was the transistor radio, which I’d listen to underneath the pillows, so I didn’t get caught with it. That was the escape. The only escape I had was music. At that age, music meant everything to me. It was my complete world. 

To read the full interview order issue #157 here