My favourite release is definitely "Cacophony", but Grant is a better judge of that sort of thing really. At the very outset of Peni, I wanted to wear masks and use keyboards as well as guitars... I don't think I'd still be talking about the band today if we'd gone down that avenue of nondescript. Rather than try to keep up with any particular musical fashion or trend, we have a general policy of just doing what we want to do... which, with 'Cacophony' as the exception, has usually taken the form of either '77-style fast punk or Eighties-style slower, heavier tracks, but avoiding the usual trappings of heavy metal.
- Nick Blinko / Rudimentary Peni interview, The Day the Country Died: A History of Anarcho Punk 1980 to 1984, 2007
Incidentally, I own the grand total of one Lovecraft book, which I bought three months ago. I've been illustrating some of his stories over the years, the 'Cacophony' cover being an example, with the intention of issuing a small number of prints in a folder, but in the late Eighties I sold all of his books. His work fuses the macabre with immaculate, almost poetic prose (he began as a poet after all). I can't understand why serious critics hate it so, and it's only mentioned in such circles when some current novel is referred to as 'better than Lovecraft'... usually meaning that atmospheres are evoked then marred by personality piffle.
By the way, on 'Cacophony', the spoken segments between the tracks were intended to be the equivalent of Lovecraft's descriptions of dark matter, or as he put it, 'the mad spaces between the stars'!
- Nick Blinko / Rudimentary Peni interview, The Day the Country Died: A History of Anarcho Punk 1980 to 1984, 2007
RUDIMENTARY PENI release their magnificent second LP on this day in 1988.
For me, it was the most interesting thing that we had done musically, in terms of all those weird time signatures, and the lyrics are fascinating... even if I don't understand all of them! I just think that the band as a whole put in a really good performance, and it was the best thing Nick has ever done vocally; I think he was at the absolute pinnacle of his craetivity on that album. I don't share his interest with Lovecraft, and I think that is one of the main things that distinguished us from other bands of our genre.
- Jon Greville / Rudimentary Peni interview, The Day the Country Died: A History of Anarcho Punk 1980 to 1984, 2007