Jonathan Perkins
 Credits and CD information HERE
Draining Venus Available from www.cdbaby.com
 
Click Here for Draining Venus Track Information Working with producers Chris Thomas and
Joshua J. Macrae during 97-98, Perkins recorded
approximately 20 songs, sometimes in a "live band"
format and others based around a Casio-portable
keyboard.

The latter more experimental songs allowed Perkin
to draw from his many diverse influences;
Spike Jones, Shri Mataji Nirmala Devi, Avro Part,
Mantavani's strings, Screaming J. Hawkins, Karen
Finlay and James Blish amongst others.

Being stripped of more conventional bass and drum
rhythms, the songs take on a  more cinematic
audio-visual picture,
almost cabaretesque......"Jesus meets John Wayne."
 
"Miss World....Flogging a Dead....Whore"
 

Draining Venus: The Plot.
It is a pocket opera charting the
tragic/comedic rise and a fall and rise
of one Miss World in a
world of others.....

Featuring; two seekers, sickness,
innocence, sacrifice, sobriety,  relapse,
resentment, anger, fear, suicide,
self-help, self-mutilation, self-realisation,
serenity, shopping, shooters and shit !...
fuelled by a delicate cocktail of modern
echnology and archaic magic.......

  A spaghetti Western for rural-England.

 
Perkins appropriates from the world of popular culture and personal experience which defines
his work as part of the post modernist sensibility, turning away from the  modernist notion of
the individual maker of a precious original work of art. Perkins is an experience,
a culmination of consciousness.
 
Perkins like Orpheus, has passed through the mirror
and now seems to live
"as if on the other side of things".
 
Review by Jonathan Meades (June 2001):

This is wonderful... Draining Venus I mean.
I’d heard the tape but just excerpts certainly none of the bluesy stuff (the slide guitar is worthy
of the beautiful young man whose photo looks down on me and who died 32 years ago come
the 3rd of July)

Anyway since it arrived at lunchtime I’ve just sat here drinking Marcillac and smoking tobacco
no additives, sort of drenched in it. It is amazing stuff.
There’s so much going on: vaudeville, shanty, parody, hurt, dirt, wit - "rebirth certificate" is ace,

I’m just listening to Childhood Sweetheart (for the fifth time) "my future ex-wife",
"an old cold sore that’s weeping again", "bloodshot sunsets" you must know that this song
is a marvel.

It’s as exciting as listening to Lou and Love all those years ago with Steve Walton out of our
heads on a furnished flats floor - when tobacco always had additives and we drank Brandy
to come down from the stromonium.

It is fantastic to feel engaged by something I thank you for that.
And for the fact this has taken three hours to compose.
 
 
Look at ME
 
My Space www.myspace.com/missworldmissworld
 
MISS WORLD / PERKINS Management: info@1music.com