As the group began to take themselves seriously, so did those who were observing them. The great leap forward in this regard was the release of their first record.
Crass had approached old Exit soundman and close friend John Loder and recorded a new demo reflecting the harsher sound and the serious intent. Loder had built a studio in his garage in North London called Southern where he was busy recording jingles.
The songs on the demo pretty much mirror the versions that would turn up on vinyl. If you were searching for differences, you could say that both Ignorant’s vocals are a touch more Rotten-esque and Wright’s a touch more rock’n’roll. Tracks laid down were ‘End Result’, ‘G’s Song’, ‘General Bacaradi’, ‘Securicor’, ‘Angela Rippon’, ‘Major General Despair’,‘Owe Us A Living’,‘Punk Is Dead’ and ‘Tired’.‘Tired’ has some great effects on it and is better than the released version – why on earth they left it off The Feeding Of the 5000 is anyone’s guess. Both ‘End Result’ and ‘Punk Is Dead’ have extra lyrics. Though they’re largely indecipherable, ‘Punk Is Dead’ contains the lines ‘Punk was just a way of bemoaning the fact / a whole generation was afraid to act’ as well as appearing to contain the line ‘I’m sobering up’ which may be a nod towards the previous chapter, though Penny Rimbaud can’t remember. Perhaps if you can remember the early Crass gigs, you weren’t really there. The demo marked a far heavier sound,much more hardcore,mean and lean than the Steve Herman inspired first demo.
Steve Ignorant: “A friend of the band by the name of Tony Lowe counted among his various jobs doing displays in record shop windows. He gave a copy of the Crass demo cassette to Pete Stennet at Small Wonder Records. Pete phoned the band expressing an interest in meeting up and putting out a single. By this time we’d actually established the set. I think it was Pen who came up with the idea of doing a 12 single with the whole set.”
In another break from rock’n’roll traditions, the whole thing was recorded in one day, perhaps one of the advantages of having a rehearsal room in the same house you live in. A preview tape of the first Crass release, The Feeding Of The 5000, gave the band their first coverage in the music press, courtesy of Sounds journalist Garry Bushell, who would prove to be something of a nemesis over the next few years.
“The spirit of ’76 is alive and well and living in Ongar (in a commune),” began the piece, continuing, “Such is the strength of their beliefs that they hide themselves away in a cottage commune in Ongar where they pick potatoes for subsistence wages. Hippy punks, d’ya think?” The picture of the band – the same out of focus pic as on the record insert – caption declared that the band made The Clash sound like Child. Which, given the zeitgeist, must have made thousands of spikey ears prick up.
Describing Crass as “pretty unforthcoming about their backgrounds. They’re mostly disillusioned middle-class, aged up to Rimbaud’s 40 years,” Bushell is largely forgiving, however, describing the record as, “thirty minutes of invigorating energy”.
Penny Rimbaud’s wildly disproportionate response was to write Bushell a letter, listing the inaccuracies in the piece: growing your own food is hardly the same as picking potatoes for subsistence wages, and besides, Dial House was macrobiotic at the time so potatoes were out of the question anyway. Given that the general nature of Bushell’s piece was benign and positive, and the political atmosphere of the times, it’s tempting to wonder if class wasn’t something of an Achilles heel in the Crass camp.
Penny Rimbaud: “I wrote a very rude letter to him saying if you’re going to bother writing about us, at least get in touch. I know where he got the information from – Pete from Small Wonder – that was Pete’s little idea of how we were. He (Bushell) took offence at that, probably quite rightly. . .”
Shortly afterwards, Feeding Of The 5000 hit the shops, and it was a revelation in all sorts of ways: the price was revolutionary – 12 tracks for £1.99, at a time when the average album would set you back £3.99. At a time when many punk records were sold via mail order, and advertised by the specialist shops in columns in the back of the music press, this kind of a deal leapt out at you. It suggested, above all else, an integrity that many had been searching for but few, if any, had been offering.
Penny Rimbaud: “We wanted to do stuff as cheaply as we could because we knew people couldn’t afford to be buying records all the time. What I was always trying to do was to share whatever gains we had with as many people as possible. And that’s how the house has operated. Wherever we became advantaged,we used that to help as broad a part of the radical community of which we were a part, to expand it. The ‘pay no more than’ was because we knew well that if we sold stuff cheaply, places like HMV would sell them at their regular price.”
Penny rejects any idea that this handily doubled up as good marketing technique: “Absolutely not. It was all designed to ensure that the purchaser got the best deal that they possibly could. We wanted to give people real value, and part of the reason we could do that was because we lived here – we grew our own food, we didn’t pay much rent or develop expensive drug habits or want swimming pools. So we were effectively passing on the advantages of us living cheaply. It’s the complete opposite to how most marketing is done.”
Steve Ignorant:“I didn’t care what fucking price it went out at – all I was interested in was getting a record out. But it was ‘keep it cheap, then people can afford it and still have enough for a packet of fags and a pint of beer’ type of thing. It was also because Dial House always tried to run itself self-sufficiently and so we didn’t really need any money from it. I can’t stress it enough – there was no idea of us making loads. We called it Feeding Of The 5000 because we didn’t think it would sell that many – we thought Pete was taking a big risk. But it turned out he wasn’t. . .”
Pete Wright:“If we’d sold our records at full price, they wouldn’t have sold.”
The first thing that stood out about the record was how much swearing it contained – certainly enough to make sure that this disc would receive no airplay anywhere, ever. And the anger in the vocals – raw, unprecedented, primal and very genuine anger – was quite frightening. Then there was the blasphemy on tracks like ‘So What’. Then, paradoxically it seemed at the time, there was overt peace campaigning of ‘They’ve Got A Bomb’, complete with CND symbol on the lyric sheet, and the feminist message of ‘Women’ screamed out over an out of tune radio.
The songs themselves were astonishingly confrontational in both content and presentation. The very first phrase on the vinyl leapt out at you and screamed – really screamed – ‘fuck the politically minded’, setting the Tourettian tone for the rest of the record. This again piled on the credibility. There was absolutely no chance of these little ditties appearing on TOTP or being heard on Radio 1. Feeding was a record that clearly wanted to take punk way back underground, to reclaim some of the privacy lost to the tabloid sensationalists from the reaction to the Pistols Grundy interview onwards.
The sheer intensity of the singing and the noise that underpinned them was also unprecedented. Steve Ignorant’s vocals were the angriest ever, until Pete Wright took over, sounding for all the world like he was going to have a heart attack in the studio. Joy De Vivre just screamed. There was precious little concession to conventional rock’n’roll to be found anywhere. And then there was the lyrical content, all squeezed into and typed out on a double album sized insert.
The very first track, entitled ‘The Sound Of Free Speech’ was simply silence. The ghost of John Cage, a cover version even. The lyric book of the second pressing explained why: “Once again the violent majority assert their bigoted reality through the silencing of others.‘ASYLUM’, an antichrist/feminist statement has been erased because no company would press the record if the track was left intact. With the first 5,000 pressings we decided to forward cassette copies to people requesting them. Since then we have tried to get ‘ASYLUM’ pressed ourselves plus ‘SHAVED WOMEN’, both with Eve Libertine on vocals. We will market it as soon and as cheaply as possible, hopefully around cost price. Sorry it’s all such a fuck up – CRASS.’
Steve Ignorant: “Pete Stennet phoned up and said that because the pressing plant was in Ireland, the people there had read the lyrics and were offended by them and refused to do it. He wanted to shorten it. But Pen said no, we’ll call it ‘The Sound Of Free Speech’ and just have silence.”
Of the first 5,000, several hundred punk rockers took them up on the offer and received the cassette of the track.
Later versions of the album, when re-released, reinstated the original track (a more basic spoken word track than the subsequent single without the backing noise). They also came with the – by then – standard fold out sleeve bearing the legendary Gee Vaucher poster of a severed hand hanging on the old barbed wire above the phrase ‘Your Country Needs You’.
In the absence of ‘Asylum’, ‘Do They Owe Us A Living?’ kicked off the record with perhaps the nearest thing the band had to an anthem. ‘End Result’ was another prime cut of deep dissatisfaction with life. Again written by Steve, he explains, “That was written about growing up with my parents and grandparents in Dagenham. All of that way of life that I didn’t want any more – it was just a two fingers up to that really.”
Reviewers seemed to take particular offence at the song’s line:“They all live for that big blue sign that says / it says FORD”. As well they might – while a hundred lefty bands bleated about the right to work1 here was a song subliminally and sublimely suggesting there might be more to life than donating upwards of forty hours a week to capitalism. The theme was backed up by the first line of ‘Reject Of Society’ – “Not for me, the factory floor.”
Steve Ignorant: “I think Tony Parsons had a go at Penny Rimbaud because of that, because his dad grew up in Ilford or something – the working class thing. In those days, when you’d drive into Dagenham along the A13, there was a huge big sign that said Ford. All of Dagenham was built to cater for Fords. When I was at school, the two options I had was work in a supermarket or work at Fords. That’s what that song was all about. And my dad calling David Bowie a poof – that sort of thing.”
With ‘They’ve Got A Bomb’, and the CND symbol in the background on the lyric sheet, Crass initiated their part in reviving the fortunes and influence of the Campaign For Nuclear Disarmament and the wider peace campaign in the UK. It was a cause they would continue to promote throughout their career, though it was about as fashionable as the flares (along with sandals and duffel coats) many thought accompanied it at the time. The awkward gap in the song, where a silence splits the song down the middle was accompanied at gigs by a sudden darkness in the room and film of an atomic bomb exploding. The length of the silence, stretching any comfort of sense of rhythm out of the window, was far more unsettling than, say, the Pistols ‘ I Wanna Be Me’, and again betrays the artistic roots of the band and their willingness to try new ideas.
Elsewhere, both ‘Punk Is Dead’ and ‘Banned From The Roxy’ are superficially reactions to the Crass gig and subsequent banning from the Roxy punk club in London’s Covent Garden. Two more anthems, the drum and vocals dominance of ‘Roxy’ call to mind a prototype rap music, while ‘Punk Is Dead’ railed against the new punk stars as a new social elite, and it clicked.
‘Banned From The Roxy’ wasn’t overly concerned with being banned from the Roxy at all. It simply used the experience as a metaphor to release anger: first, a personal anger trying (and largely succeeding) to find justification for itself; then externalising the anger “against what I feel is wrong with this land”. Belfast, Mai Lai, Hiroshima: “The shit they get’. . .’defence? Shit! It’s nothing less than war, and no-one but the government knows what the fuck its for”. I enjoyed that bit too,Tony.
The intro and the song itself seem almost funky in the present day and age – you could do the hand-jive to the beat. But at the time, it was part of the spikey, film-noir, hirror-horror collage that deliberately shocked the listener out of a complacency that even the earlier punk bands hadn’t prepared the listener for.
The noise-collage behind the needlessly cynical ‘Women’ reflected the lack of direction in the song, though it also marked an important challenge to the average male listener on another level – traditional feminism had entered the punk fray, with the vocals symbolically fighting to be heard above the male instruments. It had hung around on the fringes with The Raincoats and The Au Pairs, but Crass was later to take it much further. As were the Greenham Women, of course.
Joy De Vivre:“It was a woman’s voice saying something fairly difficult about men and women. It’s also a picture of how women’s voices get drowned out,” she adds, pointing out that this was deliberately reflected in the way the background noise (none dare call it music) constantly threatened to overwhelm the voice.“What was going on was a platform where you could actually say something and challenge the normal picture of women being the victims and to actually address men as victims – it was kind of important to me. When I was younger I’d been to a few feminist meetings with much older women and I’d often felt dismayed by the man-hating stuff, but I also understood that it was necessary and inevitable. Not that I’m an apologist – I suppose it was just that whole thing that was going on between the political and the personal.” ‘
General Bacardi’ criticised the hippy generation’s failings, while simultaneously suggesting that members of the band had been involved with that. The hippy tag was something Crass would never really shake off, despite having left it behind – not a problem that would afflict Joe Strummer and his pub rock/ Stonehenge days.
‘Fight War Not Wars’ confused even further – the song simply consisting of that phrase repeated over and over again. Clearly not rock’n’roll.
During one of the weaker songs,‘Angels’, Crass use the old Exit technique of sampling random radio, complete with John Cage’s between-channels racket to great artistic ability, but appalling political judgement, particularly with hindsight: “I think perhaps Jim Callaghan is the more dangerous of the two, because he is more successful.” Callaghan was the Labour leader of the time – the more dangerous of the two. The less dangerous? Margaret Thatcher.
The nearest thing to rock’n’roll was ‘Securicor’, featuring Pete Wright on vocals.‘Securicor’ is feasibly the best track – Pete Wright’s vocals are astounding, as is the notion that Securicor functions as capitalism’s private army. Equally ‘Sucks’ and ‘You Pay’ featured Pete attacking belief systems and praising anarchy with a vaguely eccentric vocabulary. To hear him screaming ‘It’s fucking stupid’ was disconcertingly fucked up, like spying on a nervous breakdown.
Apart from a rerun through ‘Do They Owe Us A Living?’, the final track was ‘So What’, a more punky and less arty run through the blasphemy theme that would later see a young punk in court for singing it at a priest. If ‘Asylum’was the arty Patti Smith antichrist statement, Steve Ignorant wasn’t holding back or dressing it up.“So what if Jesus died on the cross / So what about the fucker, I don’t give a toss,” he raged, in what at the time was a seriously extreme way of tackling a hitherto taboo subject.
Looking back on his writing of the song, Steve recalls “My attack in ‘So What’ was daring God – where’s this thunderbolt of lightning? I read this book Brighton Rock, written by Graham Greene. He became a Catholic because his wife was one and, as is often the case in these situations, he became more Catholic than she was. All of his books were dealing with that thing, and in Brighton Rock, there’s a character called Pinky. He’s asked by his girlfriend if he’s a Catholic and he says, these atheists don’t know nothing. Of course there’s hell, torments and agonies. And I thought, yeah, he’s right, because it’s far easier to believe in all that down there than it is up there. So I wrote ‘So What’ against all of that thinking that maybe there is something in it, being a pistol at the back of my head that if I’m not good, I’m going to be in purgatory. And that’s bullshit – you shouldn’t have to live your life like that. I think I’m a pretty good geezer in the things I’ve done.”
For the average punter, however, the biggest shock was the viciousness of the attack on religion.
Steve Ignorant: “When I was at school, I’d always had this idea of being a nice bloke, I wanted to be a missionary. I’d met this teacher,who was a Christian, and he introduced me to a book called The Cross And The Switchblade, which is about a priest who gets a calling from Jesus to go into New York and help the gangs stop killing each other. Even as a non-Christian, it’s still really interesting to read about his life. He actually converted a couple of gang members, one of whom was called Mickey Cruise, who became huge in the Christian movement over there. That book really turned me on to it.
“In a funny way, I wrote ‘So What’ to see if there’d be a bolt of lightning if I wrote ‘So what about the fucker, I don’t give a toss’ . . . and there wasn’t, and there never has been. So in a funny way, it was daring.”
The attacks on Christianity and the person of Christ were extraordinary and must have made most listeners feel that they’d led lives more sheltered than they’d ever imagined.“It was articulate,” says Pete Wright. “Penny’s take on Christianity and culture was very articulate.”
As well as being the artist responsible for Current 93 and an old friend of the band, David Tibet is a Catholic:“I always considered such attacks as an attack on the Imperium of Christendom, rather than on Christ Himself. It has a profound and marvellous heritage, most primarily in recent times in, of course,Tolstoy.
“But I do feel that their occasional attacks on the person of Christ were misconceived and impotent. It never disturbed me, but I felt that when they got on that track (passionately though they no doubt felt about it), it lessened the completeness and complexity of what they had done.‘Reality Asylum’was an amazing work, but I felt that the anger was misdirected and infantile. I don’t think Jesus died alone in any of the fears that Pen surmised he did; but I guess we won’t know that this side of the Second Coming. When Igs sang the lines of ‘So What’ I felt disappointed at such pointless venom.
“The biggest problem I had with their recorded output was what I felt to be the excessive use of profanities, which made their work easy to overlook or dismiss as merely foul-mouthed outrage for its own sake. They had something amazing and liberating to say; the message would have been clearer still without the swearing, and it put a lot of people off them who would have been remarkably moved by the clarity and beauty of Crass’ vision if they had not been put off by the obscenities.”
Feeding Of The Five Thousand came out at a very fortuitous time, swearing-wise. The Jam had just changed the lyrics of ‘The Modern World’, replacing ‘two fucks’ from ‘I don’t give two fucks about your review’ to ‘a damn’. Whatever reasons this was done for, it smelt like a bad case of sanitisation. Generally, the move towards more acceptable ‘New Wave’ and even ‘Power Pop’ bands could easily be seen as industry-led attempts to replace punk with a kind of ‘punk-lite’ that retained the more crass elements of the style (if you’ll forgive the pun) whilst neutering all the content that made punk so special in the first place. Of course, even much of this middle-of-the-road music was enormous fun, but it left a gaping hole for somebody like Crass to come along with a record so extreme – particularly in the swearing department – that the load was clearly too wide to perform a U-turn in the direction of Top Of The Pops or Multicoloured Swap Shop. The band, then, were not for turning, but were all the F-words an effing tactical mistake?
Penny Rimbaud took the anti-bourgeois line to defend the tactic in 1984: “If the rationality, compassion and reason in our work is lost in a few ‘fucks’ then the people it’s lost upon shouldn’t fucking listen to it in the first place cos they’re not worth bothering with. Cos they’re never going to change their position if common language is going to get in the way of them and positive thinking. So I absolutely support the use of fucks. The person who believes in something doesn’t care how it’s expressed – it’s of no concern at all.
“The primary thing people have to overcome is their social bigotry. Most working class people don’t care too much about fucks being in the song. Most middle-class people are going to care quite a bit about it. Fuck is a class issue.”
Only someone middle-class could say that.
“I always tried to find ways of not swearing,” says Steve of the songs he wrote, which leads to the obvious conclusion that he failed quite spectacularly. Perhaps Steve sums it up best: “I dunno, it’s just swear words. When I write a song now, I deliberately don’t put them in, because it’s too easy.”
If there was a dada-esque intention to confuse with the record, then it certainly succeeded. Was this a product of rural hippies who like so many others had run to the countryside in the sixties to drop out? This was certainly the feeling you got from a ploughed field on the sleeve and a CND symbol on the lyric sheet. Or was it a product of urban punks, as suggested by the inner-city collage on the other side of the sleeve, and tourettian vocals that took anger to an unprecedented level? Confusion. Contradiction. Dada.
Up until this point, the early punk bands and pioneers had always made you feel inadequate. It wasn’t much fun to be told, while at the peak of your youth and ready to take on the world, that punk had died by the end of 1977. It nagged at the back of your mind that you’d missed the boat, that you were some kind of imposter, that these people were right and all you had was a history you’d missed out on by the narrowest of margins. A ‘second generation’ of punks was inevitably going to form a second generation of bands, if only for how ungracious and ungenerous the first wavers had been about them.
Tony D: “Pete of Small Wonder gave me this cassette and a copy of Christ’s Reality Asylum and a copy of International Anthem. I thought the writing was great but the cassette was shit. Great literature, crap sound. But then I played it more and more and realised what they were singing about and I changed my mind, I thought the music was great.”
“Open the door to the lovers of outage / Let them try something new”
Penetration, Lovers Of Outrage
Outrage was punk’s calling card. It was as if the outrageous clothes – for which Vivienne Westwood & Malcolm McLaren must be given credit – sanctioned all manner of other outrageous behaviour. Whilst most people used the space this created to have a bloody good laugh, Crass saw the opportunity for something more tangible.
Joy De Vivre:“[With the advent of punk and Crass] Dial House did become a very communal and outreaching space. Maybe that wouldn’t have happened if there hadn’t been this incredible intensity before. It’s easy to dismiss it as pretentious crap but I don’t think it was. There was always an intensity and passion about it. Like the way none of us wanted to be stars – we didn’t want to be terribly impressive and avant-garde – it’s just the mode of operation.”
Phil Free:“There were deep and lengthy discussions about what constitutes ‘avant-garde’ and ‘outrageous’. . .”
Joy De Vivre:“I don’t think it was particularly outrageous. . .”
Phil Free:“At the time it was. I think it was outrageous to us as individuals and as a group to be doing stuff like that.”
Joy De Vivre:“Because it was pushing boundaries. . .”
Phil Free: “ It’s not that you thought ‘we must push boundaries’, but you were going somewhere where. . .”
Joy De Vivre:“Yes, you don’t so much go out thinking that, but you end up doing it because that’s what you’re interested in doing.”
Phil Free hints at another source of the schism between Crass-viewed reality and the rest of the world:“You think about something and maybe you rehearse something, but when you go outside in the harsh light of day or in the village hall or wherever you’re doing it, it suddenly takes on a different colour, a different perception. So you try and brass your way through it.”
Released the same week as the Fall album Live At The Witch Trials, the record was received badly by the music press. Underneath the title ‘Obscene oaths do not a revolution make’, Sounds journalist Garry Bushell began: “It’s so hard to take Crass seriously. . . They flirt with fascistic uniforms – how risqué – but they claim to be anarchists and hide behind CND badges – how relevant. They write lyrics a/lot/like/this and sometimes LIKE/THIS and being middle class they think class doesn’t matter. . . Crass lyrics are a reiteration of Teach yourself Anarchy (learnt in half an hour, guaranteed ineffective) punctuated with lots of fucks for street cred (bet they went to Univesity) . . . you’re full of shit, spirited shit maybe, but let’s face it, Crass? Precisely.”
In NME,Tony Parsons took a similar view:“. . . very good value, very angry, very trite and very boring. The Clash and TRB’s politics are facile but inoffensive, whereas Crass are facile and offensive, directing their self-righteous superiority, vehement cluck-clucking and anachronistic three-chord thrashing at such disgusting rubber duckies as security guards (you wanna cosh the driver, cut a record with Ronnie?), factory workers (you gonna support the dead sheep if they quit and move into your Epping commune?) and, of course, them, one system, society (rage and rant but keep it non-specific spread the guile, make it painless, make it product.) . . . this is a nasty worthless little record. . .”
Nasty it might have been, but it would prove to be far from worthless. Crass responded to these two reviews by printing them in full on the next pressing of Feeding, under the headline ‘Reputations In Jeopardy’. The review as part of the product.
Bushell’s abrupt U-turn can be attributed partly to Rimbaud’s rude letter, of course, but maybe also the press release booklet that accompanied the album to reviewers, Life Amongst The Little People. This was a Penny Rimbaud rant about a failed attempt by Crass to play at a failed attempt to revive Windsor Free Festival and a meeting at NYC airport with a macho American GI.
It began:“Pete of Small Wonder asked for a press release to accompany our record, The Feeding Of The Five Thousand,we’re not interested in the colour of hair or ages, or how many teeth we’ve lost or how many strings there are on a guitar, or why this or why that. This release gives some impression of where and how we work.”
The introduction homed in on sartorial decisions:“We wear black / a reflection of values / your values / a reflection of values / our values / all values / contained on the meat-rack / the corpses in the butchers cart / you pile them up / we wear black / we are hidden by your prejudice.”
As you read through the diatribe, it’s easy to see how Messrs Bushell and Parsons could find the whole package ungenerous and disagreeable. The booklet ends:“We seek a future that is our OWN, away from the oppression history and tradition. We seek some reality that is OURS, yet all around are the LITTLE PEOPLE.”
Another challenging aspect of the Crass image was that they were largely of a different generation to the punks championed by the music press. The fact that two of the guitarists were bald seemed only to add to the generation gap. In normal circumstances, this would count heavily against a rock’n’roll band – you couldn’t have imagined it with any of the first wave of punks, much less with most other ‘pop’ music – but given the subject matters they dealt with, and the extreme methods of delivery, it lent Crass a certain gravitas.
Fellow, er, older person Charlie Harper, the omnipresent UK Subs main man opines: “We were much more politically aware, we were teaching the younger ones what was going on. How they were being cheated, how they were being put through school like a factory: they were being brought up to be factory fodder. And if they weren’t factory fodder, they were cannon fodder. We were trying to preach that kind of gospel. We thought no-one was listening to us, but it kinda spread. We saw it almost as a political duty.
Punk wasn’t meant to last – no-one really wanted it to last. I saw it more as an art form than anything else.” “[Punk] was never exclusively a teenage movement,” says Pete Wright.“That’s what it became. Things were missed about punk because people look at 1977/78 and it seems prejudiced about age and background. We ran an open house policy, and if there were any prejudices, you weren’t welcome. We were more about a meeting of minds than a society. It depends where you think punk came from. It’s difficult to transport it out of London. In the winter of ’77, it was a great thing that involved a few thousand people. Couldn’t really find a way of upping the ante. What do you do with attitude? The problems that existed for us then exist now. We didn’t really have an overview of ourselves, but we knew that creatively, we could do damage. We were a generation older. If the thinking was linear, then we should take responsibility for that. When I think about how naive I was at 15, 20 or 25, the pressure we were putting on kids (as a band) were enormous.”
Of course, there was always a danger that the Crass gravitas could turn into something less healthy altogether, which Pete acknowledges: “We became leaders in that area. We were all aware of our guru status. We appeared not to promote ourselves. Although some people got damaged, we did a lot of good. It came from people’s ability to be articulate. You find bands that are successful in their context and behaviour is the expression. Intellectual arguments come from intellectual backgrounds.”
Steve Ignorant: “The release of Feeding saw a quantum leap in the bands’ popularity – it was what a significant portion of the great punk public had been waiting for. The ‘real’ punks had been waiting for a ‘real’ punk band to come along and Crass was in the right time at the right place, saying the right things.”
Crass stepped into a void: the old capitalist cliché of having a unique selling point (their obvious sincerity) and a gap in the market (the wake of the good ship punk, looking back at the ship breaking up willingly).
Steve Ignorant:“I remember the first time we played the Acklam Hall and quite a few people tuned up. We were used to playing three-quarters-empty echoing places with the sound of pool games going on. Then suddenly all these people turned up with Crass written on the back of their jackets. And we were filling places like the Acklam Hall &Actionspace.”
When places filled up, they filled up very specifically with punks – seas of leather jackets, bondage strides and crazy coloured hair, all wanting to see a punk band that wasn’t, for the most part, punks.
Joy De Vivre:“For me, it’s not so much punk as that punk allowed that platform and that anti-war voice. We used the punk stage, but I don’t know how punk we really were in some ways.”
Joy rejects, however, any thoughts that Crass was jumping on a bandwagon, preferring to think of the Crass-stance as a band who operated in the enormous free speech crater that the punk bomb benignly left in its explosive wake.
Phil Free:“The theory was that anyone can do it. You can have your say. And of course, we were actually crap: the singing was just shouting with a random chord sequence.”
“I didn’t want to be a glamorous presence,” says Joy.“I just wanted to get up there and yell my piece.”
When Crass yelled their peace, they also yelled their anarchy. What proved to be one of the most contentious parts of the Crass image was that of being anarchists. Proper ones. Maybe.
In a radio interview Penny Rimbaud was asked if the band were anarchists:“ We talk about this a lot and we always end up saying we’re people first. We would agree with most anarchist theory; equally well,we would agree with most pacifist or feminist theory as well. What we want to put across as people is that the world’s a mess. It’s a cruel and barbaric earth to live on, and we want to say,‘Well, we’re saying no . . . we don’t agree with what’s happening to the world – we won’t be ruled, we won’t be governed,we won’t be told what to do – it’s our life,we’ve only got one of them. It’s our planet, we’ve only got one of them. And we want to reclaim it,we want to say it’s ours. And the more people who individually say that, the more individual people can live. It doesn’t matter at all about the government, they can get on with their rules and regulations. We’ve got to learn to step outside of that and form our own rules, for ourselves, for each individual. And if that comes at odds with the status quo, then we must oppose the status quo, which is what we do on a lot of levels.”
While Steve Ignorant had no qualms about describing himself as an anarchist back then, he’s more reticent now. “I’ve realised now that I don’t know what to call it, where my political thing comes from. My ‘anarchism’ – or whatever it was – didn’t come from an anarchist background. I tried to read Malatesta once and I just got bogged down in it. And I’ve never read Kropotkin and Bakunin or any of those people, it just didn’t appeal to me. It didn’t make sense to me. I know that for reference if I need to look at those books I can, and I know they’re making important points, but I know that for me, where I was coming from was the black and white sixties movies like A Taste Of Honey, John Osbourne and a film called To Sir With Love.
“One day we were all talking about books around the table,” continues Steve. “Pen was talking about Tolstoy and I chipped in with To Sir With Love, and was met roars of laughter, it was quite a joke. When there was the yearly clear-out of books, out it went. But the Maigrets stayed. That book To Sir With Love is about one of the first black men to go into the East End of London and teach unruly white kids how to respect themselves and other people as human beings. Which I thought was the basis of anarchism,wasn’t it?
“So maybe I was anarchist. I grew up with David Bowie and that turned my head, what he had to say. And I’ve got far more time for what he’s got to say than bleedin’ John Lennon! Or even Elvis Presley – I’m sure in his time he was a bit of a rebel, but for me it was David Bowie. And I was interested in what The Sex Pistols and The Clash had to say. If you to ask me I am an anarchist. I suppose it’s the closest thing to what I believe, but I’m not going to loads of bloody rallies or meetings to sit in a semi-circle and chunder on about the miners’ strike in Poland in 1918 or whatever.”
Penny Rimbaud: “In all honesty, I wasn’t aware of anarchism until about one year into Crass. I knew what it meant in the loose term of the word before, but in terms of a label, it was more by default. We’d got a peace banner to tell people we weren’t interested in kicking shit, and we put up the ‘A’ banner as something to get the left and the right off our backs. It was then that we started getting asked what we meant by that. I realise that outside of my own libertarian stance, I didn’t know what the fuck it was about. It was then I started looking at what it actually meant in terms of its history. I hadn’t actually had that much interest in it and I can’t say I have now to be honest. When I was at school, I had extensively read about the anarchist involvement in the Spanish revolution – I really studied it, not as part of the curriculum, but because it interested me.”
“Look at me – I can set you free”
– Carry No Banners, Menace
As time went on, Crass put up more and more banners until the stage finally resembled some kind of anarchist Nuremburg rally. As years went on, the ‘Crass bands’ would ape this with obligatory slogans on old bed sheets. Originally, however, the motive was a little more simple.
In 1984,Andy Palmer told Radio Free France:“There were both left wing and right wing influences who were trying to co-opt what we were saying, which was largely why we adopted the anarchy symbol, just as a fuck off to any politicos. Then we came up against the established anarchists, and their establishment idea of what anarchy meant, and as far as we could see, putting anarchy and peace together was a complete contradiction to the idea that they had of what anarchy was, which was chaos and no government, general violent revolution, which was the opposite of what we were trying to say. So we put up the peace banner together with the anarchy banner. And then the peace movement came along and said that their idea of creating peace was through politics and political demonstration. So freedom came into it as well – individual freedom. Since we started using those terms, we’ve been trying to get out of the pre-conceived meanings that people will put on them all the time. Any form of definition like that eventually works against itself.”
Penny Rimbaud: “We were increasingly being forced into that and that alone, that we were forced into withdrawing some degree from them.”
Steve Ignorant:“You’d turn up at places and you’d be playing in front of something like Maurice’s Late Night Bar, which wasn’t really fitting. So we thought we’d cover it up, a bit like theatre, and rather than have their décor,we’d have our décor.”
Steve Ignorant:“We played in a place called Ferryhill. It was during the Falklands War and a lot of the squaddies were on leave. We didn’t know but at midnight, the place turned into a disco. The people started coming in while we were still packing away. The women started asking questions about our banners, and asking punks how they did their hair. Then their blokes came in, clocked them being interested and started flexing their muscles. The fact that we had banners up started people asking questions and added to the atmosphere.”
Now truly up and running, Crass’ artistic backgrounds and vivid imaginations quickly expanded from gigs with banners to a multi-pronged multimedia attack on the status quo and the establishment. The written word was another branch. With a bit of money under her belt, Gee had earlier started her own paper, International Anthem, with the strapline ‘A nihilist newspaper for the living’. Still in regular contact with Pen back in England, Gee had enlisted his writing services, along with those of Eve, for the first issue. It sold through an independent network and radical bookshops. This was now followed by further issues, with Andy Palmer also producing a magazine The Eklektik.
Another sign that the establishment was keeping at least half an eye on the activities around Dial House was the treatment of its inhabitants at airports, as Gee Vaucher recalls:“I was getting stopped a lot at the airport coming into England at the time. They were trying to do me for carrying seditious material – quite pathetic really. So I was taken down below – I insisted on my phone-call. We had a standby lawyer by then, through John (Loder) and he acted very quickly – got the lawyer onto it, and they let me go.”
1 Musicians! Work! As if!