Lead singer/guitarist Nick Blinko is notorious for his witty, macabre lyrics and dark pen-and-ink artwork, prominently featured on all of Rudimentary Peni's albums.
Rudimentary Peni were formed in June 1980 in Abbots Langley, Hertfordshire, by Blinko (vocals, guitar), Greville (drums) and Matthews (bass).
237 (February 2003), Matthews explained how he came up with the name of the band: "When I was at school studying biology, we were told that in the fetal stage the clitoris is a rudimentary penis".
Mark Ferelli, a fellow musician, introduced Blinko to Lovecraft; the pair also pushed each other's pen-and-ink artwork forward via friendly competition.
The band continued to record and release material into the 21st century, including the album Pope Adrian 37th Psychristiatric (1995) and the EPs Echoes of Anguish (1998), The Underclass (2000), Archaic (2004) and No More Pain (2008), and have maintained a diverse cult following in the United States punk scene.
[8] A 2018 article in the US magazine Revolver stated that the band merges "eighties anarcho-punk into seething death rock via the nightmarish poetry of certifiably schizoid frontman Nick Blinko".