Peter Perrett returns

The last time Peter Perrett released an album, 1996's Woke Up Sticky, it was at the top of the year's best releases.

The 3 albums he made with The Only Ones from 1978 to 1980 set the template without which the Manic Street Preachers would have been a pub rock band, The Libertines a Kinks covers band and The House Of Love stuck at home listening to Bob Dylan outtakes.

Perrett releases a new album, How The West Was Won, on June 30. The title track owes something to the Velvet Underground's Sweet Jane, but that didn't stop me ordering the album. You just know that many of these new songs will be freshly minted classics.

There's no word on a tour. Did you see The Only Ones live 10 years ago? Brilliant stuff. Perrett, though, is unpredictable. He had to be smuggled out of America, seven dates into a 20-date support tour with The Who, after deliberately running over a six-foot Chinese car park attendant who had been hassling him.

If there won't be any Perrett gigs, then perhaps his new label Domino could form a tribute band. A young Johnny Marr got kicked out of The Only Ones’ dressing room more than once. Robert Forster sang The Only Ones’ The Whole Of The Law at his 2010 “15 songs about London” gig, mimicking Peter Perrett’s louche drawl perfectly. He then offered his services as a singer if anyone was going to start an Only Ones tribute band.