“Death in rebellion is the only proof / That I was alive in 1985”
1985 – The Apostles
The final album released under the moniker Crass was Acts Of Love, in 1985. Although attributed to Crass, it would be more accurate to see it as a Penny Rimbaud record with contributions from other Crass people. It consisted of fifty short poems set to quirky discordant music that owed more – much more – to free jazz than punk rock.
Penny Rimbaud:“I remember when we were recording Acts Of Love – Andy coming into the studio and saying he’d like to do something like that himself, meaning he understood that I was trying to make a personal expression within the framework of where we were. I think that was a seed for him. He was a painter before he got involved with the band, and I think that’s how he saw he might be able to express himself, which is what he’s done.”
Eve told Radio Free France in 1984: “The stuff we’ve done before may not have seemed to be offering something of beauty, but we were shouting about what was preventing that beauty. The beauty was there as something intangible at the end of all the shouting. I think it possibly got a bit obliterated at times although I think people did seem to understand what we were getting at.”
RFF: Is acts of love punk?
“If punk is about throwing something out from a different angle, about something new, then I think it still is in the spirit of so-called punk.”
Gee Vaucher: “For me, Acts Of Love was the starting point anyway – the poems and the original illustrations were done a long time before Crass. They were part of the inspiration, part of the source of going on to say what we did. For me, it’s a return to those roots – not going backwards, but the source of inspiration within oneself. It’s a very natural extension of what we’ve done with Crass.
“It seemed to be going in the direction of causes. Young people would get caught up in causes and the whole barbaric nature of the cause that they were trying to confront. What we’ve tried to do is remind people of why they were putting themselves in a very dangerous position socially and personally, by making a beautiful record really.”
Joy De Vivre:“I think Pen was pretty devastated by Andy leaving and I think maybe Acts Of Love was something that came out of that sorrow. That he needed to get back in touch with a part of him that the band hadn’t necessarily included. And to include the band in it.”
Eve Libertine:“I think in a way it’s a cleansing. I think we got bogged down sometimes in the anger and could almost forget in the misty haze why the anger was there.”
In 1985, Pete Wright told Mucilage fanzine: “I think it’s two things, one side allowed ourselves space to try and discover and develop certain areas, we are still in the process of doing so, like launching ourselves into the dark with this new LP. On the other hand we do tend to withdraw occasionally from the arena to allow other people to get on with things. We don’t want to end up monopolising everything by continuously instituting moves. You have to stand back and clear the floor for people.
“Some people in the band have done an album set of fifty poems, it’s sort of classical and hasn’t gone out as Crass. We felt we’d been jumping and shouting about things for quite a few years, we tried to see what positive contributions had been . . . a demonstration of our own positive side . . . we wanted to produce something of beauty, quality and vision. Although all that has been underneath Crass from the start it hasn’t always been clear that Crass itself is trying to push things onto a different stage.”
In the same interview, Penny Rimbaud offered further: “I imagine most grannies would prefer it to most so called punks. I should think a lot of punks will be thoroughly pissed off, cos it doesn’t say fuck in every song. It will be interesting to see what happens, to see how many people reject it in the same way their parents reject punk.”
It seems curious and perhaps illuminating to note that Rimbaud’s view of punks – once so hopeful and optimistic – had by this point been reduced to the idea that they simply wanted to hear swearing. Of course, back at the time of their first recordings, it was true – albeit for more subtle reasons – but by now this could reasonably be interpreted as a sign that a tired cynicism about ‘punk’ had set in in the Crass camp, or at least in the Rimbaud head.
Phil Free: “It was words he’d written before Crass, but Pete did the bass lines – some of the greatest bass lines ever. Pen would hum a tune, Paul (Ellis) would work it out on the keyboard. Pete then did the bass and I did the guitar. It took a long time to do because it didn’t have the same relevance or the same urgency.”
Penny Rimbaud: “The things that have inspired me are not political works in the sense that Crass’ earlier works were. What has inspired me are the poems and paintings and pieces of music that have been left which are statements of that which is beyond the human spirit. In Monet’s Water Lillies, Brahm’s symphonies and Walt Whitman’s poetry, I see expressions of the unbeaten human spirit that has existed throughout history and despite history. One could reasonably say that throughout history, the powerful and the wealthy and the evil and malicious have conspired to destroy the human spirit. One could quite reasonably say that in modern society, everything is designed to destroy the human spirit. I would hope that Acts Of Love is a contribution to the documentation of the spirit.
“I would hope also that beyond and above the seven years that we were Crass the punk band that some spirit rose above all that. I believe that was the case – I believe the reason for our enormous popularity has been that people recognise the spiritual value of what we have tried to offer. The contribution of Acts Of Love is possibly nothing compared to some of the greater contributions but nonetheless I hope to throw another drop into the ocean. Van Gogh was a punk, Beethoven was a punk, Mozart was a punk. Throughout history, these people have contributed.
“Possibly Crass as a band made some mistakes in creating a sense of fear. Unwittingly and unintentionally but I think there are occasions in our work where we created fear and that’s a negative feeling, it’s a negative force. People should be aware, people should be informed. They should know what happened at Hiroshima and at the Nazi concentration camps – but if they live in fear of that then they live limited lives. We have to find that balance. All too often what appears to be informed opinion, what appears to be offering information is simply being used to intimidate, enormously to the advantage of the state. CND, for example, promotes fear because it isn’t an organisation attempting to look at vision, to offer some real tangible future, because it’s basically a negative force which is simply saying,‘We’re afraid of being bombed’. It’s having the reverse effect of the one it wants. So inadvertently and unintentionally it’s serving the interests of the state.
“When creativity is in opposition to destruction, inevitably destruction prevails. To a very small degree, that was one of the things that we initially didn’t realise. The moment creativity falls into the trap of being in opposition, it’s becoming defined – the whole purpose of creativity is that it’s channelling and describing undefined areas – its bringing form from formlessness. The moment the form is defined (by the authorities, by the state, by the schools, by parents, by the church) then we’re no longer in a creative situation. We have to be aware of the political and social conditions and we have to side-step them to allow our creativity to be free. Because if our creativity isn’t free, then we’re not actually offering anything positive – we’re not offering vision.”
Acts Of Love also put Crass where you’d least expect them – on Radio Two. Peter Clayton and Brian Matthews allowed themselves a moment of amusement on the Around Midnight show: “Now the next thing is quite the oddest record to have come my way for ages. You get in touch with a Penny Rimbaud, and when you phone her up it turns out to be a fella. Penny is a nickname because he was always thought to have slightly, er lavatorial thoughts.”
PC:“Well, as far as I can see that’s an Edith Sidwell poem produced accidentally by a self-confessed violent punk rocker. . .”
BM:“Oh yes, who’s been listening to Aubade.”
PC:“But probably not you see,”
BM:“Oh come on, it’s the same rhythm and everything.”
PC:“I don’t. . .”
BM:“Oh give over Peter, you’re being gulled and gecked.”
PC:“Well perhaps I’m being too nice but I think he did it by accident because I think nobody could come that close and know that he was coming that close. I think he’d be ashamed or startled. . .”
BM:“Well he’s not ashamed to work in a band called Crass and call himself Penny Rimbaud . . . where does shame come into it?”
PC:“I was absolutely amazed. It’s John Peel territory this!”
BM:“Ha ha! Yes, it is.”
As a swansong, Crass recorded the oddity 10 Notes On A Summers Day. The sleeve announced the band’s demise:“10 Notes represents Crass’s last formal recording. We shall continue to make statements both individually and as a group, yet no longer feel obliged to be limited by the inward looking format of the ‘band’.”
10 Notes was written, appropriately enough, in the summer of 1984, while Penny Rimbaud was at Summerhill School,‘working’ as the pool attendant. “It was written as a poem,” he says. “It describes where we’d ended up after all those years of frenzy and madness. You’ve put everything you’ve got into something, you’ve shouted and screamed; and then you suddenly find yourself on your own sitting under an oak tree, and you think,‘Fucking hell, what was that about?’”
10 Notes was bereft of chainsaw guitars, shouting and swearing, again closer to Penny Rimbaud’s free jazz roots than anything remotely to do with punk rock.“I went in and said we’re going to do it completely the wrong way round. The drum track was put on last. The first track put down was the piano track, which I played. I can’t play piano but I just went in and played about 20 minutes worth of piano. The whole thing was based around that.”
It was an improvisatory process that Eve in particular felt suited to and enjoyed, unlike Steve. “I approached Ten Notes as ‘I’ll just be an instrument’,” he says.“That shouldn’t have been called Crass, that should have been Crass performing with Penny Rimbaud, because that’s his record . . . I just think it’s rubbish.”
George Mackay is equally forthright in his opinions on the piece:“It was just crap. When they tried to be positive, utopian even, it just wasn’t as powerful.”
Penny Rimbaud:“It was a parting shot – all very self-referential. It was obviously not something we could develop. Steve didn’t like it at all, Eve hated it till she got stoned one night and suddenly realised it was fucking brilliant. I think to say they were humouring me by doing it is a bit unreasonable, but I think there’s a certain element of that. It’s how I’d like to have gone. . .”
. . . and, of course, it is how Penny Rimbaud has gone, only this time with musicians who both understand and enjoy that kind of music.
On March 3, 1985, the miners called off their year long strike and Thatcher emerged victorious. It had been a desperately close battle, as might have been expected with so much more than the mining communities involved at stake. The working class had tried to break her but instead she had broken the working class, albeit temporarily.
After defeating a foreign enemy in the Falklands War, Thatcher had now slain what she called “the enemy within”. It was time to turn her steely death-stare onto other ‘enemies within’ who had to be unethically cleansed. The class war was in full flow and middle-England was on the lookout for new victims.
Stonehenge Festival, now including a plethora of new-age travellers, found itself high on the hit list. Glastonbury Festival grew more and more mainstream over the years – dropping the CND connection, embracing capitalism and eventually erecting a Berlin/Gaza wall around it to keep out undesirables. But Stonehenge was still free and growing each year at a rate that clearly alarmed the powers that be. As a yearly living advert for the viability of alternative lifestyles, the Festival was a startling success – an ideal roam exhibition.
The ‘Peace Convoy’ was a group of new age travellers so named because they’d gone down to visit the peace camp at Greenham Common one year after Stonehenge. On their way to Stonehenge Festival in 1985, they were ambushed by the police, who forced them all – men,women and children – into a bean field and dealt all there vicious beatings, destroying their homes in the process. Home affairs correspondent for the Guardian Nick Davies wrote the following day:
“There was glass breaking, people screaming, black smoke towering out of burning caravans and everywhere there seemed to be people being bashed and flattened and pulled by the hair . . . men, women and children were led away, shivering, swearing, crying, bleeding, leaving their homes in pieces. . . Over the years I had seen all kinds of horrible and frightening things and always managed to grin and write it. But as I left the Beanfield, for the first time, I felt sick enough to cry.”
ITN news man Kim Sabido concurred, speaking to the camera: “What we, the ITN camera crew and myself as a reporter, have seen in the last 30 minutes here in this field has been some of the most brutal police treatment of people that I’ve witnessed in my entire career as a journalist. The number of people who have been hit by policemen, who have been clubbed whilst holding babies in their arms in coaches around this field, is yet to be counted. . . There must surely be an enquiry.”
There had been an enquiry after the police violence at Windsor Free Festival in the seventies, but the Thatcher Government evidently felt no need for such frivolities.
As a result, Crass almost played a final, post-Andy Palmer gig. After the police had run riot at the Battle Of The Beanfield, the travellers regrouped elsewhere for a reconvened festival and Crass decided to go down to play a gig as a show of solidarity. If the police could act like that, pacifism was clearly out of the window.“We took some shovel handles, just in case,” recalls Penny Rimbaud. When they arrived, however, in an echo of their attempt to play the effort to revive Windsor Free Festival at the start of their time together as a band, there was no generator.
After the noise, silence. . .
Penny Rimbaud:“As long as we were operating as Crass, as a corporate body – and we were one of the first great corporations in that sense – we even had a better logo than most corporations – everything was fine. But as that stopped, things started becoming thornier.
“There was an awful lot of personal things that had to be put aside through being a band – we’d made this agreement, we were very committed and very honest within that commitment. But what we weren’t looking at was ourselves. And basically I think we were waking up one-by-one and thinking, ‘Who the fuck are you?’ Because it wasn’t any longer Phil the guitarist and Pete the bassist, it was Phil and Pete and I was thinking, ‘Do I like Pete? Do I like where he stands now?’ I think there was a very distinct divide between possibilities, futures. You could almost bring that down to an activist divide between the pacifist and the non-pacifist element – that was under question. Different forms of honesty? Different approaches to what one believes is honest? Different aspirations? All sorts of things were coming forward and we weren’t very well equipped for that. We could deal endlessly with ‘what do we do if the police come out tomorrow?’We were brilliant at that, we’d learnt how to do that as a group of people; we were so fast. When we arrived at a gig, Joy would go and do the cooking, Pete would be putting up the stacks, everyone knew what they were doing. So the fact that we might not like one another didn’t even enter the equation.”
Steve Ignorant:“You’ve got Pete Wright going off on his tangent; Phil Free saying fuck-all; Joy de Vivre saying whatever Phil Free says is right; Eve Libertine out there on her own, like me; Pen & Gee rowing and Andy Palmer wanting to go off and have a relationship with Lou (his girlfriend). And it all broke down in the end. Then you end up with Penny Rimbaud writing these obscure leaflets about ‘would I pick up a gun and pull the trigger?’ and Pete Wright saying ‘either we get really radical or we don’t’ . . . what are you on about, you arseholes? We are in a punk band. We ain’t gonna change the fucking world.”
Only they did. Well, sort of.
Steve Ignorant: “Once the band wasn’t there, everybody looked at each other and thought,‘Well, if it wasn’t for the band,would I be living with you?’ It got really personal. What bugs me is that I don’t remember too much about it. I was quite happily – naively – going on my merry little way, thinking it was still alright. It wasn’t until people were walking out the door and actually leaving that I realised there was all this stuff going on. I thought it was all things that could be resolved around the dinner table like they used to be. But of course it was more than that, and there seems to be this resentment . . . things were said that were really painful and which each individual in the band still feels – it still hurts really. So it changed in that way. Although we still had punk rockers turning up from Italy,wanting to stay at Crass mansions and all that.
“It was really weird for me to see Dial House change like that. Before it had been so involved with Crass and it felt . . . different: what’s going on? What do we do? Then people started leaving. It’s odd, you’ve had something for going on ten years then it all falls apart, splitting at the seams.”
One way Steve dealt with his confusion was to write songs about the situation, songs that would surface later with his post-Crass band Schwarzeneggar as ‘Goodbye To All That’ and ‘Too Much Too Little Too Late’.
With more time on his hands, Steve “panicked a bit. I was in my early thirties and I thought, what do I do now? Because the only job I’d had was working in a supermaket and one year in a hospital. But apart from that, just being in a punk rock band. I thought the day was going to come when I’d have to get a job. So I looked in the paper and even back then there were no opportunities for me – it was all things like ‘lathe operator’ and ‘capstan setters’, whatever that is. So that was certainly an incentive to get off my arse and get in another band.
“When Crass finished, I didn’t have to worry about being on tour, about writing songs, about being nervous to be onstage. I could just do whatever I wanted to do, but what the fuck do you do when all the qualifications you’ve got is being a lead shouter in a punk rock band? And then suddenly I realised I’m not Paul Weller, who could just phone up whatsit from The Ruts and say, ‘I’ve got an idea for this single.’ There wasn’t that network for me so I had to start right from the beginning.”
As the band discovered their individual selves again, so the black uniform began morphing into more colourful garb. It wasn’t easy though. Penny Rimbaud recalls venturing out in a white top and being so uncomfortable that he actually went into a shop to buy something black to wear instead.
Steve Ignorant bought some “rockabilly peg trousers, like Madness” and “those short-sleeved American shirts with the nice little turn-up. And a nice little James Dean quiff ”. He also remembers a Penny Rimbaud visit to India as a moment of sartorial awakening. “He came back wearing white. . .”
Joy De Vivre:“I probably made the worst fashion choices of my entire life during that time! The things I chose from jumble sales were pretty awful! When you take off your black. . .”
Phil Free: “I had no idea what the hell you could wear! I mean, wearing black is quite easy. You might like this colour or that colour, but how the hell do you choose? And also it was still strong that we couldn’t wear denim.”
Joy De Vivre:“The band had finished. It had ceased to exist and what was left was people still trying to do that kind of life together. It was quite hard trying to find our feet without the band as it had been.”
Phil Free:“It was a massive social bond. I kept a diary one time where we had two thousand visitors in one year. . .”
Joy De Vivre:“I did a lot of cooking – made a lot of bread!”
Phil Free: “I suppose there came a point when you were living on understood shared experiences, if not necessarily what you think now. So how are you going to suddenly say I don’t want to do this?”
Joy De Vivre:“Also I think, trying to retrieve the information and the emotional tenures of the time, there was a feeling that one needed to do something terribly different. And if somebody, like Pen, wanted to do that, then we’d all be behind him.”
Phil Free: “There was also a huge amount of stuff going on. Gee’s mum died – she lived in the house while she was dying; Pen’s mum died; Pen’s father had died; Eve’s mum died; the kids were leaving school.”
Phil Free:“One of the things about the band is that Pen is quite fundamental to it. I remember at one stage him saying that it was all between Steve and him, and nobody else was really that important. But the thing that kept it going for seven years was everybody else. Otherwise it would have just lasted a couple of months. Pen certainly drove things. He always had ideas, never stopped having them. But he always needed people to bounce them off, to work with him and carry him through the ideas.
“Realistically, a lot of times the ideas were as untenable for him as they were for the rest of the world. We can all draw a house, but we can’t necessarily put the bricks in place or dig the foundations or supply the power. And one of the functions within the band was maintaining the band, otherwise it wouldn’t have lasted.”
Joy De Vivre: “When you get a group of people together, you may have one person who’s particularly vocal and eloquent. But in the group, you do affect each other, and Pen’s ideas were no more stable than anyone else’s.”
Steve Ignorant continued writing songs, including ‘Happy Hour’, which he would perform with both Conflict and later The Stratford Mercenaries. He felt free to start enjoying life a bit more.“It was brilliant because I wasn’t questioned any more; I was just left alone. I could look at the barmaid’s arse without being branded sexist. I could have milk in my tea without being called a bastard cos I wasn’t a vegan. By that time, it had got really extreme. To get out of that was such a relief cos it was such a fucking headache, you know?
“I went to an anarchist book fair and I thought what’s the lowest of the low that ‘Steve Ignorant from Crass’ could do? I’ll be a shoeshine boy. So I shined shoes. People were saying the shoe polish had meat in it. ‘Haven’t you read your multinational corporation booklet?’ I did a pretty good job as it goes – I might do it again someday.”
On New Years Day 1989, the remaining members of Crass who were still living at Dial House had the mother of all rows. It started with an innocuous conversation about smoking, but ended up with all the personal differences that had been “put aside” when Crass made their decision to get serious, coming home to roost. Over ten years of suppressed frustration and communication exploded into a vicious row, the effects of which still seem to ripple today, over 15 years later.
Penny recalls:“One of the band had just stopped smoking, and he was trying to persuade his partner to give up smoking. I just rather innocently said ‘Well, statistics don’t mean anything. More people are killed on the road every year than die of smoking-related diseases etc etc.’ I was bullshitting as much as he was. It was some stupid little thing. There was a terrific difference at the end between the direct violent action and the direct non-violent action. We’d managed to hold that one at bay for seven years. I couldn’t go on pretending that I still believed in the ethic that we’d been promoting for all those years. I was a profound pacifist and I’d still like to be.”
“It seemed to get unnecessarily aggressive”, remembers Eve. “Whereas other times someone would say ‘I don’t think smoking is good’ and someone would say ‘Well I’m smoking anyway’ and you let it go. But it seemed to be a reason for saying something else.”
Phil Free: “It wasn’t an enormous row, it was just a strong conversation. People wanted space. People didn’t need to be there but didn’t know how not to be there. When you’ve lived in a place for ten years, where do you go? I’d moved in there because I had nowhere else to go. The last cottage I’d lived in was £2.50 a week! And I’d got no means of income.”
Joy De Vivre: “Which is quite frightening, leaving without anything. We left with two chairs and a table and a mattress.”
Pete Wright, Joy de Vivre and Phil Free all left Dial House. Luckily, Mick Duffield helped Phil and Joy out – he was doing well in the film business and had bought himself a flat in which they stayed. Mick was still actually living in a squat, hanging on till the bitter end.