The Story of Crass

By George Berger

PM Press

Copyright © 2008 Omnibus Press
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-60486-037-5

Contents

Cover,
Title Page,
Copyright,
ANOK4U2?,
THE BAND & SUPPORTING CAST,
BOHEMIAN RHAPSODY – THE SIXTIES,
EXIT-STANCE,
HIPPY HIPPY SHAKE,
CH-CH-CH-CH-CHANGES,
721984,
NIGHT OF THE LONG KNIVES,
621984,
521984,
421984,
321984,
221984,
121984,
1984,
TO INFINITY AND BEYOND,
AFTER THE FACT,
EPILOGUE,
DISCOGRAPHY OF RECORDS MADE AND PRODUCED BY CRASS, & OTHER OUTPUT,
BIBLIOGRAPHY,
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS,

CHAPTER 1

ANOK4U2?

“This time it’s for real!” jeered Ronnie Biggs, guest-recording with the remnants of The Sex Pistols on the Great Rock’N’Roll Swindle soundtrack, and the paradox was complete. What had seemed like a life-line to a generation who increasingly felt like the rubbish left out on England’s streets was being presented by Malcolm McLaren and his cohorts as nothing more than an elaborate illusion – a rabbit pulled out of the hat, a simple act of misdirection.

The Swindle may have sought to confuse, and certainly succeeded in entertaining, but the lost tribes of England wanted more than that. For people who’d bought into punk as a way of life, ‘this time it’s for real’ was a phrase that could have, should have, meant something.

‘Helen! Never trust a hippy!’ cried McLaren in the Swindle. We giggled at the cheek, unsure as to whether there was a tongue in it. Ironic perhaps, that it was to be a group of people emanating from the hippy era that would put the trust back into our lives.

On a more positive, and perhaps relevant note, there was a benign revolution in Nicaragua, when the Sandanistas stormed parliament and seized power. So, in amongst all the despair, always seeds of hope and a sense of possibility. Elsewhere, Astrid Proll is arrested in London and Sid Vicious pogoes off this mortal coil.

“This time it’s for real.” The irony is complete. London 1978. Punk is dead.

Which leaves a whole generation of punk rockers without a soundtrack. Because by now, punk is far more than a bunch of alternative music fans. Indeed, it always has been. It starts as a fashion statement screamed out of a shop called Sex (latterly Seditionaries) in the Kings Road and evolves into a lifestyle screaming danger gear and rebellion.

Nature abhors a vacuum. As does capitalism, naming it the ‘gap in the market’.

Enter Crass. The rest is, or should be, history. But it is a history so far shamefully under-recorded. Here, then, is the history of Crass. As an early Crass poster cried, hanging tattered and torn outside the corpse of the Roxy Club in Covent Garden: ‘Germany got Baader-Meinhoff, England got punk. But they can’t kill it.’

They say the past is a different country, but the UK in the mid-seventies was a different continent. Or should that be incontinent – England was a mess when punk exploded into its avenues and alleyways.

In 1974, the miners had gone on strike and brought down the Conservative government. But subsequently the economy, under a Labour Government, had fallen to pieces. They were forced to go cap in hand to the International Monetary Fund to request an emergency loan. By 1976, inflation was running at over 23%, and unemployment had doubled in just three years from just over 2% to almost 6%, the worst since the recession of the thirties. The temporary blip of post war economic boom that peaked in the sixties seemed been replaced by a wider post colonial-exploitation bust that saw Great Britain being put back in her economic post-Empire place by colonies sick of being sucked dry to feed their mother country.

Factor in the long oppressively hot summer of 1976 and you’re getting a recipe for anger. A minister for drought – Denis Howell – was appointed and announced everyone had to reduce their water consumption by half or face water rationing. As the heat wave roared on, increasing numbers were admitted to hospital suffering from sunstroke and heart attacks. Motorways had problems with tarmac melting. The drought hardly helped the economy either, as thousands threw ‘sickies’ from work in order to enjoy the sunshine.

Factor in the mass acceptance of racial bigotry to all this and you’re running a serious risk of the anger exploding in a dangerous direction. This was a time when it was still acceptable for TV to run a comedy (Love Thy Neighbour) based on the racial bigotry of a white man towards his black neighbours; a time when Eric Clapton – a musician who had made a fortune from playing the blues – said live onstage that England had “become overcrowded”, advising the crowd to vote for Enoch Powell to stop Britain becoming “a black colony”. (Rock Against Racism would be set up in late ’76 as a direct response to these remarks.) In May 1976, the National Front received almost one in five of the votes at a UK by-election, while summer saw race riots during the annual Notting Hill Carnival as largely black youth declared temporary war on the police.

A time before ‘political correctness’ had ‘gone mad’, as the Daily Mail might see it.

“I think that the general feeling in society from the mid-seventies onwards was that both main parties had nothing to offer. Till then people thought society would automatically get better.” – Dave Morris (London Greenpeace, McLibel Two)

Anarchy In The UK at the time was publicly represented by the Angry Brigade – a loose group of anarchists whose bombing campaign targeted a wide range of fascist and capitalist targets without any loss of life. The targets were usually connected with the state, though interestingly they also targeted hippie boutique Biba, and accompanied by communiqués that sought to explain their actions and encourage the workers to join in. Which, of course, they didn’t.

Look backwards and England looks backward. The only spaghetti we had came in a tin (or a junction); our three television channels started at lunchtime and finished before midnight; videos were yet to come into the public arena and foreign holidays were just taking off as Spain became a popular destination. No matter that it was still a fascist dictatorship – Franco may have died in 1975, but democracy wouldn’t happen until 1978. Anna Ford caused a stir by breaking the sexual apartheid to become the first woman newsreader.

England looks backward but was desperately scraping around for something that may point forward. The emphasis on ‘new’ had percolated through the seventies: slums were pulled down en masse in cities to be replaced by shiny utopian tower blocks. Just twenty years after the end of rationing, the consumer society was rife. People consumed for the sake of consuming: trendy new electrical items, coffee percolators, soda siphons; if it was new you had to buy it, regardless of whether you needed it or would ever use it, and if it was a ‘status symbol’, all the better. Credit cards and cash machines were introduced to encourage more spending, even if you didn’t have the money. The never never. Still you kept buying. New new new. But where was the new music?

In December 1976, The Sex Pistols swore on the teatime family viewing Today programme and punk went overground. Anger and anarchy. Outrageous clothes that were statements in themselves. A generation of parents recoiled in horror and a nation of straights were suitably disgusted. Punk jumped from being almost a secret confined largely to London and Manchester, to being tabloid headline news. Depending on who you ask, it was the end of the beginning or the beginning of the end for punk.

Fast forward to 1978 and the initial punk explosion had blown over, particularly in the eyes of the media. The cathartic scream had been screamed and in some ways the dust was settling. Of the initial heroes (in an age of none), The Sex Pistols had been sent to America to die a needless death and The Clash were busy deciding they weren’t so bored with the USA after all, and metamorphosing into a successful middle of the road rock band. The music industry was promoting a roster of bands under labels like ‘new wave’ and ‘power pop’, doing what it had always done best: taking a movement, watering down its essence and repackaging it for public consumption in a way that kept the accoutrements and readily identifiable ephemera whilst surgically removing the spirit. Bands like The Boomtown Rats leapt up the charts whilst The Jam self-censored the lyrics of This Is The Modern World, adding to doubts that they had ever been a punk band in the first place.

But the punk spirit wasn’t so easy to brush under the carpet. To a legion of British youth, punk meant more than that. Because, like the great post-war youth movements before it – beatniks, teds, mods, hippies etc – punk gave the individual a route to personal liberation and self-discovery; a place for outsiders, romantics, lovers of outrage, people who sought a life less ordinary. And once discovered, it felt way beyond a simple fashion to be discarded when the forces of attempted control declared that it was time to move on to a soulless mod revival or water down to a soulless power pop tune.

Punk had, to varying extents, preached a dogma of DIY – the idea that anyone could do it. Helped by the supposed rudimentary nature of the music, punks across the land took this onboard to form bands and write fan-magazines. Strangled fanzine (not Sniffin’ Glue as is often credited) emerged with a cover showing finger placements for three chords – “here’s three chords – now form a band”.

The DIY ethic had, at this point in time, only been a half truth at best. Whilst the rhetoric suggested a new generation emerging from a new, hippie-eschewing, musical Year Zero – “I’ve just come straight up from nowhere, and I’m going straight back there” as Buzzcocks put it – the truth of the matter didn’t quite stand up to the rhetoric. The Pistols and The Clash were both tight, musically competent rock’n’roll bands. The Clash in particular were no spring chickens or first-timers. And, despite the personal posturings of Malcolm McLaren and early Sex Pistols interviews (“I hate hippies, I hate long hair” – John Lydon), the punk movement had at least as much in common with the ideals of the preceding hippie movement as it did apart from it.

That all said, there was a nation out there who had bought the rhetoric and were to slowly turn it into a reality. As the first-wavers of punk scuttled off to get their establishment pay-checks, there was created a vacuum as hordes of punks – ever increasing as waves of younger kids kept joining the furore – were all dressed up craving somewhere to go.

In this context, to be confronted – and confronted really is the only way to describe it – with the first Crass record ‘Feeding Of The Five Thousand’ was simultaneously a shocking revelation and a feeling of near-salvation. Having been forced to hear Ronnie Biggs cackling ‘this time it’s for real’ almost felt like an insult to the hopes and dreams of a generation. Then Crass came along and you felt that this time, it could very well be for real. Here was a band who, for better or worse, seemed to take ‘anarchy’ seriously. And maybe even know what it meant.

“If you have embraced a creed which appears to be free from the ordinary dirtiness of politics – a creed from which you yourself cannot expect to draw any material advantage – surely that proves that you are in the right?” – George Orwell

To a bored teenager, ‘Feeding Of The Five Thousand’ was different and unprecedented in so many ways. Perhaps older generations would have noticed how much was borrowed from the hippie counterculture or the great art movements of the past, but either way Crass had produced a record – or more accurately a package – that screamed blue murder in your face: screamed its integrity, screamed its love and screamed a scream that defied you to stand up and be counted. It was a record that dared to suggest punk was (or at least could be) part of something bigger and more important than a five-minute fart in the face of authority.

The thought that Crass was different entered the mind before you even had the record. Several specialist record shops of the time advertised their mail-order wares in the back of music weekly Sounds. Of these, a shop called Adrians is the most memorable, but the best one for punk records was Small Wonder. Based in Walthamstow in East London and run by a chap called Pete Stennett, Small Wonder also had its own record label, which released a steady stream of fiercely independent punk records from the likes of Patrik Fitzgerald, Menace and Punishment Of Luxury.

At the bottom of their weekly advert, Small Wonder advertised the Crass ‘single – 17-track 12 inch. £1.99’. At a time when albums were generally retailing at £3.99, this was little short of a revelation. It seemed equally mysterious that somebody could release a piece of vinyl with seventeen tracks on it yet call it a single. Semantics perhaps, but possibly also the suggestion that here was a band who were taking punk as seriously as the punters who, at this time, were feeling increasingly left out (at best) or sold down the river (at worst) by the big punk bands.

Here was a band who circled the A in their own name. This was a big deal at the time. Whilst many punks littered their copious graffiti with circled ‘A’s, often bestowing them on bands who would never dream of accepting the honour, this was pretty much the first time an important band had gone along with the concept. It should be remembered that this was a time before arguments about the finer points of anarchism or the reality (or otherwise) of utopian dreaming. No, at this point, it mainly meant simply that Crass was of the people.

The sleeve too was challengingly different. Firstly, it was a ‘double-A’ side: each side of the sleeve was printed ‘upside down’ from the other, giving the appearance that either side could be the front. Riding on the coat-tails of a movement that had romanticised all things urban, one of the sides featured simply a ploughed field with a figure in the distance carrying a banner, like some kind of refugee from a Red Square military demonstration, except this banner featured the Crass symbol. The other side featured a more typical collage of inner-city post war decay, with a child mysteriously levitating in the middle of the shot.

The record came with a pull-out crammed with all the lyrics (which was just as well, as many of them were spat out with such phlegmy speed as to be virtually indecipherable), and further mini-collages.

The record came with a pull-out crammed with all the lyrics (which was just as well, as many of them were spat out with such phlegmy speed as to be virtually indecipherable), and further mini-collages.

Who were these people? If punks had appeared to ‘straight society’ to come from a different planet, then planet Crass appeared to be off the radar to most punks. Whatever else it had achieved, ‘Feeding Of The Five Thousand’ certainly made Crass arrive with a bang and not a whimper.

But somehow it also seemed to be more than the sum of its parts. Down there, in amongst all the swearing and the anger and the outrageous viewpoints … somewhere in amongst the chaotic collage of primal screaming, you could sense something deeper, something that suggested that here was a band who were offering a vision more real, more practical and more achievable to your average Joe Bloggs than the Pistols ever managed. Lydon had been and remained (and often remains) an inspiring role model in terms of having an attitude that equipped you to deal with the ugliness of the world. But it still lacked a real world application inasmuch as his own life was very much that of a musician, and the music business will let you say and do anything as long as you’re selling product. Crass appeared, somewhere in their murky depths, to be offering something else – something further out there and yet nearer. More real.

Here was a band that challenged even punk prejudices on many levels – they were a mixture of generations: whilst vocalist Steve Ignorant was clearly of the punk gene, drummer Penny Rimbaud – aside from having a girl’s name – was in his mid thirties, which was ancient! And the band featured women in uncertain roles – vocalists Eve Libertine and Joy De Vivre were credited on the sleeve but only Joy sang at all on the record and that was only one track … what was going on? Already the idea was being subtly presented that here was a band that existed beyond the stage.

Reactions to ‘Feeding …’ split punk down the middle. Crass was easily dismissed with one word by their detractors – hippies. Armed with Malcolm McLaren’s clarion call never to trust hippies, many punks would despise Crass with a venom rarely reserved for bands. And other punks – and later other people – would see in Crass a vision paradoxically delicate and beautiful that suggested a better future out there for the sculpting …

THE BAND & SUPPORTING CAST

Gee Vaucher – artwork/radio/piano

Penny Rimbaud – drums/kettle

Eve Libertine – vocals

Pete Wright – bass guitar

Mick Duffield – films and filming

Phil Free – lead guitar

Joy De Vivre – vocals

Steve Ignorant – vocals

Andy Palmer – rhythm guitar

SUPPORTING CAST

John Loder: Sound man for Exit, ran Southern Studios where he recorded most Crass output, and acted as Crass manager.

Dave King: Ex-Dial House resident, designed the Crass symbol Dave Morris: political activist and free festival veteran who for years was part of the radical London Greenpeace group. Possibly better known as one half of the McLibel Two.

Pete Sutton: old friend of the band who attended art college with Penny Rimbaud and Gee Vaucher. Pete lived in a caravan on a farm near Dial House for ten years.

(Continues…)Excerpted from The Story of Crass by George Berger. Copyright © 2008 Omnibus Press. Excerpted by permission of PM Press.
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