Rudimentary Peni

Rudimentary Peni formed in Abbots Langley, Hertfordshire in 1980, the trio of Nick Blinko (vocals, guitar), Grant Matthews (bass), and Jon Greville (drums) emerging from the British anarcho-punk scene with early ties to Crass. Blinko's obsessively detailed pen-and-ink drawings — every sleeve an artwork in itself — are as inseparable from the band's identity as his macabre, wit-laced lyrics, and his well-documented struggles with mental illness have fed directly into the music: the 1988 album *Cacophony*, thirty songs in tribute to H.P. Lovecraft, and *Pope Adrian 37th Psychristiatric* (1995), reportedly written during a psychiatric hospitalization, stand as the most extreme expressions of a body of work that resists easy categorization. Few photographs of the band exist. They have played perhaps thirty shows across four decades. The legend, as one reviewer put it, was built partly from deliberate evasion — and the music held up its end of the bargain.