Crass
Nothing divides punk rock more than bringing in those loveable anarchists Crass into the debate and Crass my friends are as important to punk as any other band in that musical genre yet frequently missed out in any history.
For some Crass in their attitudes, music and beliefs were the first to crystallise the potential of punk as a political force and to effect change by challenging both the system and the individual. Indeed Crass had the power to touch and change people’s lives through ideas and thoughts.
For others, Crass were the death knell to a movement that had progressed from having no rules and a scattergun approach to all philosophies and mores to what appeared to be a more rigid organised and political approach that was as restrictive and as intolerant as the very people and organisations it attacked.
Whatever your viewpoint the band certainly made an impact!
There is No Authority But Yourself is a Dutch film directed by Alexander Oey documenting the history of anarchist punk band Crass. The film features archive footage of the band and interviews with former members Steve Ignorant, Penny Rimbaud and Gee Vaucher.
Crass were originally formed as a two piece in 1977 by Penny Rimbaud & Steve Ignorant. The band was to be an extension of radical activities emanating from Rimbaud’s open commune farmhouse in North Weald Essex (which still continues today despite various adventures). By its nature the commune began to input into the band and as such the bands ranks swelled.
A one-off deal with Small Wonder brought the infamous Feeding Of The 5000 to the public’s attention. A 17 track 12″ EP was reduced to 16 when no pressing plant would touch it because of the controversial subject matter of Asylum and the track had to be withdrawn. It was replaced instead with two minutes of silence.
As a result of this Crass set up their own label complete with sloganeering, DIY artwork from Gee Vaucher, Anarchist broadsheets and a unique numbering system counting down to 1984. Coupled with film maker Patrick Duffield’s visuals as a backdrop to their live performances they had the complete package to convince the masses of their message ‘Anarchy & Peace’.
While often perceived as humourless they did engineer a few scams. They convinced a bridal magazine to give away a free track of theirs with one of the issues before they found out; they released a Christmas single and they also faked a tape of Thatcher and Reagan and released it causing questions to be asked in The House Of Commons! And let’s not forget the Pistols pose parody in the poster with Bloody Revolutions.
Throughout its history Crass was always a struggle against constant police intimidation, investigations into their activities and attempts to shut them down as a voice of protest.
Penny Rimbaud After seven years on the road we had become the very thing that we were attacking. We had found a platform for our ideas, but somewhere along the line had lost our insight. ..Throughout those seven years we had attracted almost constant direct and indirect State harassment, now, inevitably, they struck again.
1984 had arrived, rather worse than Orwell had predicted. Unemployment, homelessness, poverty, hunger. The police state had become a reality, as the miners were going to discover. .. We were hauled into the courts to face an obscenity charge that almost broke us. ‘We have ways of making you not talk’.
That summer we played what was to be our last gig together, a riotous benefit for the South Wales miners. …we all knew that the particular path that we had been taking had been exhausted. … We felt no compulsion to continue gigging. We were no longer convinced that by simply providing what had broadly become entertainment we were having any real effect. We’d made our point and if after seven years people hadn’t taken it, it surely wasn’t because we hadn’t tried hard enough. Best Before 1984 sleevenotes
Were Crass important? “Of course they fucking were!” (sic)
The story of Crass from the mouth of singer Steve Ignorant in a Punk77 interview from October 2007 just before he did the first of his solo Feeding Of The 5000 gigs.
I said Clash not Crass…
I had a brother and sister and they were buying records so I was aware of things like the Beatles. But it wasn’t until the first wave of Skinheads way back in 1968 that I first came across Ska music and Blue Beat. I had all the original Trojan albums, but I dunno where they’ve gone now. That was the first genre of music I liked and then through that, I got into a bit of Motown hence I’ve always liked lots of trumpets and stuff like brass sections.
I just toddled along listening to that sort of stuff, until the next sort of big thing for me, like for a lot of other people, which was David Bowie. I went off him a bit when he was into his cocaine thing and doing his ‘Young Americans’ bit. Didn’t like that at all; I just couldn’t relate to that. Then the Punk thing came about and that was because I was living in Bristol at the time, working in the hospital there and a girl came in wearing pretty odd clothes and I said ‘What’s all this about?’ And she said ‘It’s Punk Rock, have you not heard of it?’, and I went ‘No I haven’t’, she said ‘Well there’s a really good band playing tomorrow down the Colston Hall,’ which turned out to be The Clash. So I went along to see it and was just blown away and I knew I had to be into it. That was it, no turning back then.
At the end of The Clash gig there were all these people shouting and saying ‘Your shit!’ and Joe Strummer stood there and said ‘If you think you can do any better go ahead and start your own band.’ And I was like what a great idea! At that time the Clash didn’t sound like their record, it was really rough and like when you hear something for the first time, sort of quite shocking. I did think yeah I could get some mates together and make that sort of noise. And I thought I could look as good as Paul Simonon; they all looked smart but he looked terrific onstage and it was that look that turned me onto it as well – it was great.
What generation gap?
I didn’t form a band in Bristol because I didn’t have any social friends there. My idea was to go back to Dagenham where I come from and get in touch with my old friends and start a band with them; basically to just muck about really. But when I got back there I realized they all got married in the couple of years I’d been away, had kids and steady jobs and stuff. They had to pay rent and mortgage and that’s when I ended up at Dial House. Pen [Peny Rimbaud] was living on his own and said ‘What you up to?’ I said ‘I was into punk rock and gonna start a band’, and he said ‘Well ‘I’ll be your drummer then.’ I thought that made it easier; we’d been friends for a long long time and I knew we’d have a good time together and could muck about. That’s all it was and even when we started we still didn’t think we’d get any further than the garden gate. When people came to visit we could shock a few people and we’d go ‘Yeah we’re in a punk rock band now’ – that sort of thing.
Penny then was in his 30’s – maybe 34 or 35 and I was 18- 19. So there was a difference but we thought well it’s Punk Rock, do it yourself and it shouldn’t matter what age, colour or what sex you are. We never used to think about it and who’se to say what you can and can’t do. And it just seemed to work because he had various contacts through people he visited and he sort of liked the way I was the working class yob element of it slightly unnerving people when they came around. And it just carried on from there really
The kids are just Crass….
For about two days we were called Stormtrooper. Luckily we didn’t keep that name as I don’t think we would have lasted long. It was my idea, not because I was a Nazi or anything, but just because I liked the word; I could see it on a T-Shirt. Mind you Pen’s idea was Les Enfants Terrible! (a surrealist film and book by Jean Cocteau) Fuckin hell (Lol) How could you go on stage and try to be aggressive with a name like that. Aint gonna work is it? I thought of Crass because of that line in David Bowie’s ‘Ziggy Stardust’ – “the kids were just crass”.
Cover versions?
Doing cover versions never came into it. From the start it was do it yourself, write your own songs, get your own gigs and make your own clothes. This was really early on and that was never even thought about. You have to remember even though the members of Crass could play their instruments, they weren’t musicians. None of them could read music and that included me. It was bizarre enough trying to get tunes together for the stuff we were writing. None of us were into jam sessions or anything like that, so none of them were gonna sit around for a couple of hours trying to learn to play. I thought it would be good to do a few Small Faces numbers but it was never a consideration at that time. [Fuck that would have been worth hearing – Punk77]
The Roxy Club & First Gigs – Banned From The Roxy OK
We actually played there twice. The one that ended up being stopped was I think maybe the 4th or 5th gig we done. The first one we did was the squatters festival, which was in Huntley (?) Street in London. I think the second one might have been at the Roxy and that one went off alright and we were called Crass then. That’s when I met a lot of the Deptford punks like Charlie who played in an experimental band called This Heat. I used to hang around with them a lot. The third might have been when Crass played at Covent Garden, they had a Festival there as well because it was being built at the time. But Pen couldn’t do it for some reason, can’t remember why, so Charlie from This Heat stood in for him. Some bloke filmed it on a video and showed a bit to me, so somewhere someone’s got some of footage of Crass without Penny Rimbaud. The disastrous Roxy one was the fourth or fifth gig.
To be honest I cant remember that much about it. I do recall I was pretty much out of it through nerves and excitement. A lot of my mates were there from Deptford so I was really excited with them being there and they were giving me joints and stuff so I was puffing away. I remember I was really bad coz I threw up on the street outside. Where usually I would have gone home to bed, I couldn’t coz I had to go onstage. I think Pete had had a few drinks but Pen, the way he wrote about it made out he was stone-cold sober but he wasn’t. He’d have drunk about 2 or 3 bottles of red wine before the gig. He was so gone he wasn’t recognizing bits of the drum kit when they turned up. You know out of all the the 1000’s of gigs I done you always gonna get a bad one eventually. It just happened to be a bad one that night. I don’t think it was the epiphany that Pen made it out to be but I think it was a turning point for him. In fact that went for all of us. It was stupid to do a gig wrecked because you may as well not bother and it made us straighten our act up; if we are singing serious songs then we should be serious about it. But looking back on it it was just one of those crap gigs; it was never repeated.
Playing Serious Songs and Political and getting up people’s noses
It wasn’t until ‘Feeding’ came out that we started getting a bit of recognition and even then it took a couple of months for people to turn up at gigs with Crass written on their backs. So up until that point, we’d just been writing these songs and material and performing it. We didn’t have any idea it was gonna be picked up or anything like that. I think most of us, myself included thought we sounded a bit crap, coz in my ears I thought to be punk rock you gotta sound like the Sex Pistols or The Clash or The Damned with that sort of rhythmic bass coming through and big drum sound. No we had the military drums and the weird noise coming along and I was not so sure about this but then it was really strange coz people picked up on it and bought all the records and everything and what we were doing and how we were playing it clicked with what they were thinking.
So we didn’t set out to deliberately make those songs as political as they later came to be. With the way that people either read into it or took away from it, or got inspired by it. Then what happened was the real seriousness came in when we started receiving fan mail and we realized that people weren’t just reading the lyrics as it wasn’t like ‘we love your music send us a badge’, it was when you write about this and what do you mean about that – really involved questioning letters.
So then when we were writing it was like make sure you can defend every word, coz people are gonna be scrutinizing what we are writing about. So the next bit was we could not be seen as not being serious.It turned into a fucking nightmare! (lol) No-more can I just write sort of football terracy songs, about I hate the government; now I’ve got to write why and then I’ve got to be able to defend it all – it was like a University degree sometimes. (lol)
Polarising people – the media – punk rock divide having a go at The Clash
The Clash thing for me wasn’t a vicious attack I went along with that because CBS promoted The Clash and it ‘wasn’t for revolution it was just for cash’ and The Clash did go to America and good luck to them because they became the big band they wanted to be. I always bought all their records (I couldn’t not) and they were the first band that inspired me. I always thought, though sadly it never happened, that one day I would meet Joe Strummer and we’d have a really nice time together because I think Joe Strummer understood what we were saying. So it wasn’t a vicious attack at all, whereas there’s the bit in ‘Punk Is Dead’ that goes ‘Steve Jones your Napalm…..’ coz I just think that bloke was a fucking idiot. I didn’t mind that at all.
People from the media like Tony Parsons got the arsehole with us because there’s a line in ‘End Result’ which goes ‘I hate the living dead and their work in factories. They go like sheep to their production lines. They live on illusions, don’t face the realities.’ Well that whole song was written about when I grew up in Dagenham, and when I was at school I had 2 choices either supermarket or Ford factory and so that’s what I was writing about there. So I wasn’t just saying that’s it stupid to go and work coz you do have to go and work because well you have to get money from somewhere.
What we didn’t like about the media was they would say come on over and do these interviews for Sounds, NME and then they’d take stuff you said out of context or change stuff and we just didn’t like it anymore.
Then you had Gary Bushell who was really just a gossip monger and who would start stupid things like Lol Pryor who used to manage The Business, and he put in Sounds ‘oh Lol Pryor reckons he can drink more beers that so an so’ and this sort of little resentment grew between Lol Pryor and this other guy. He would do things like that all the time and I would think like oh ‘stick it up yer arse, I’m really not interested, you know!’ If you complained about it he’d just put that in next week’s issue making you look like a right little whingeing twot. We were better off without them and anyway, we had our own PA system so now we can rule the world. We can change the system and all this sort of stuff. I think we were hoping that other people would bring out alternatives to the establishment of the press.
The band that plays together stays together!
Other members of Crass may have a different take on this, but for me my recollection of it was that I used to hang around with bands like Conflict and that was always down the pub together as a bunch of buddies helping each other out and stuff. Crass weren’t drinkers and so I have no anecdotes about when Crass went down the local or when Crass went to someone’s birthday and we all got out of it and did this and that you know. There are no anecdotes of that sort. After our recognition and higher profile more people latched on to it and wrote to us and the more serious we became. We had to comply with it, well not comply with it but to become more serious. We did have a laugh; we were having fun all the time. It just doesn’t come across in the songs or the stage act. It was like how do I perform them songs with a smile on my face? It just can’t be done.
Crass – Do They Owe Us A Living (Animated Cartoon) – Punk Rock Cartoons
Another thing is I was always shitting myself from terrible stage fright which I still suffer from! When I get frightened I get like don’t come near me, get this sad look on me face and tend to shun people. It wasn’t an act believe me; just fear. I always think it was a shame that we didn’t as a bunch of people just use to hang out. We used to hang out at Dial House or Crass Mansion as I liked to call it, not that it was a mansion, but that’s where we used to hang out. If I wanted to go out down the pub it would have to be with other people apart from Crass. It was a great shame.
Err Steve you’re not singing on this album – Penis Envy (1981)
At first, I thought well ‘fuck you then!’ and then I thought I kinda like the idea of that as I kinda liked the wind up of people expecting it to be me, to be boy yobbie. Shouting away there and it turns out to be, well fuck me it’s just birds singing. Listen to it and you might learn something. No one except Patti Smith was doing it, although she wasn’t as hard-line as Crass were. Like the Feminist issues and trying to approach that and it’s like the women should be singing about it.
Up until then, the only thing I had to do with feminism was the burn your bra thing and Germaine Greer. I tried to read the ‘Female Eunuch’ but God that’s so boring. I tried to read SCUM (society for cutting up men) by Valerie Solanis and I hated that – all that cutting men’s balls off sort of thing. So for me it was refreshing and interesting to learn about this idea of feminism, but not as a hate thing just not wanting to be oppressed and that made me think of the way I perceived women.
Eve Libertine above
Joy De Vivre Right
Same as the racist issue now when you look back on the way you used to talk and you think how could I have done that? But that’s how it was in those days and the interesting thing about that record is that I think it did promote other females in the audience to do vocals and stuff. It also started blokes thinking about it and trying to write nonsexist lyrics.
Our audience at that time comprised 70% me and 30% women. Or maybe even 80%-20%. Not a lot of women there. At the same time, I only remember about three black people in the audience at Crass gigs. There we were trying to bring together black and white – unite and fight and all the sort of stuff and while we were singing out there they were nicking all our car radios. Great!!! (lol)
Crass and the music biz – in the charts and Top of the Pops?
I don’t recall that. There used to be a newspaper purely for the record business and I remember at one point John Loader phoning up really excited because we were selling more records than AC/DC. It was bizarre and I think it was ‘Nagasaki Nightmare’ that made it into the sales charts at number 19. If it had continued we would have been eligible for Top Of The Pops but I don’t remember ever getting an offer from them. I was surprised when John Peel gave us a session at the BBC. I just didn’t think he’d be into it but obviously, he was. To actually be played on the radio was weird; I didn’t expect that at all.
No, and that was the beauty of it really. The way the Crass machine used to run gigs would actually be done through letters. We didn’t have mobiles in them days or computers and email; just landline telephone or Royal Mail. We used to hand out leaflets at gigs and stuff, we’d meet local support bands playing and ask ‘anyone know where we can play in wherever?’ and then they would say we know so and so in Preston here’s the phone number. Other times people would just phone us and say ‘We’ve got a scout hut in Worcestershire will you come and play it next Friday’, ‘Yeah Ok, we’ll be there’. It couldn’t happen like that nowadays, well maybe it could but I couldn’t it really. It worked like that all the time. There were a lot of bands like Conflict, Poison Girls and Dirt. All of that bunch of people later came to do records on Crass’ label. Ian Astbury of the Cult used to follow us around on tour sleeping in doorways and stuff with Colin out of Conflict and look where he ended up. I’ll ask him if Crass reformed could we support him. (lol)
Crass the brand
The reason we always put a Crass symbol on whatever record we did was that people flicking through the records at record shops would know instantly it was a Crass thing and would buy it on the strength of that. This gave whatever band we put on there a chance to sell records. So it was a marketing ploy. As you know it had a ‘pay no more than this’ message on it so I don’t think we made any fucking money out of it to tell the truth. If we did I don’t know where it’s bloody gone but that wasn’t even an issue.
We could see what was going on; that suddenly lots of bands had sprung up singing about nuclear war and Margaret Thatcher and all wearing black and we wanted to try not get polarized or preach to the converted. That’s why we always went for quirky bands say like Lack of Knowledge. You cant say they were punk; they were more Kraftwerky like. Annie Anxiety, Cravats, Snipers and The Mob – we really tried to give it variation. It would have been really easy for us to get a strong punk catalogue together. But as we said to Colin from Conflict ‘Look at some point your gonna have to do your own thing on another label coz we are gonna have to start putting restrictions on’ as he wanted to put the names and addresses of seal clubbers on his record. We said well we don’t really agree with that so that’s why we then had the policy of every band just does one record. If they want to do more with us it then goes on to the other label which was called Corpus Christie then they can do what they like.
Changing people’s lives – Crass’ Corporate responsibility
We felt a massive amount of responsibility. I still don’t know what to really say to them when people come up to me today and tell me Crass changed their lives. I felt responsible for whatever we produced and to be good. It had to stand up there and be 101%. I couldn’t sell out on those people; my conscience wouldn’t allow it. We knew there was no way that Crass could have gone on TOTP; there would have been at least 5000 people screaming and shouting at us down the phone and not coming to gigs. Mind you there was no way they would have let us do songs like ‘Owe Us A Living’ on TOTP. Now I’m trying to think of a Crass song that ain’t got a swear word in it and I can’t think of one. Of course we were so hard-lined, hard-nosed and stubborn about it that we would have said ‘fuck you’ anyway!
I’m reminded by Crass everywhere and its impact. Where I live now up here in Norfolk, there’s a little village just down the road called Stanhope (?). It’s just a little market town and there’s a pub there and they’ve got Crass songs on the jukebox and people are still interested. I went on holiday once to Greece and met a bloke from the bar there and got talking… ‘What do you do?’ ‘well I’m a singer in a band’, ‘Oh what sort of band?’ ‘You know don’t think you would have heard of them, it was this band called Crass.’ ‘Fucking hell you’re Steve Ignorant.’ He’d been singing ‘Owe Us A Living’ in the shower that morning. It’s a funny thing but wherever you go in the world I’m always gonna bump into someone that knows or plays Crass. So we didn’t need TOTP. I saw the Sex Pistols on there and they looked so fucking stupid doing it, and old Sham 69 with Jimmy Pursey and that water pistol. Fucking hell. I’d do that and get a real gun and put it down there!! (lol)
Trouble…
There was intimidation from the Police to stop us playing and we used to get our phones tapped; we knew that for a dead cert. There used to be a long road that led up to the Crass house and they used to drive up and down with all their lights on. The local Bobby would pop in for ostensibly a cup of tea and he’d be looking along the herb rack and all this sort of thing (lol) Punk rockers used to get off at North Weld or Epping station and the police would deliberately send them in the wrong direction or stop and search them in the street. As regards to them stopping us playing, they couldn’t really do that. We were however banned from Bournemouth I think. We weren’t meant to go even within the Town limit. We did some gigs under a different name called Shaved Women but that was only because we would play small venues, lots of people could get in and plus we would get a lot of Skinhead trouble at the time so that helped avoid that.
I think everyone was going through that sort of violence at gigs at the time. Conflict and Flux of Pink Indians and all those bands also got a load of trouble at their gigs. Coz at that time it was do it yourself; you don’t need security; we can stand up for ourselves, but that didn’t quite work out like that. But as much as there was horrible gigs like that, there was really good ones as well…
I had certainly changed my view on anarchy and peace towards the end of Crass. Thinking back on it if it hadn’t been for the other members of Crass I think that’s the direction I would have gone in; the direct response. You know sod that! I’m not letting anyone trash my fucking gig. Anyone belts me gets it back twice as hard. I am a pacifist, but it doesn’t mean you can slap me round the face. I think that’s the way I would have gone, but we tried it, we tried the Ghandi nonviolent thing and sometimes it worked and sometimes we got the shit kicked out of us. For Conflict the way they worked was the way they dealt with it and the Omega tribe did it like that. It’s a pity for Conflict coz they are always getting it tarred as ‘Oh violent bastards’ well they should have seen the violent bastards coming through the windows trying to bash people up. That really wasn’t fun.
Achieving Crass’ aims and their place in music
I think we did yeah. Ok we didn’t change the system; we didn’t get Anarchy and peace and all that. Everyone living in TV and blue sky every day, cups of tea on the lawn. But what we did get out of it really was to create an awareness of things like alternatives, politics, current affairs and vegetarianism you know and I think that’s where if your talking in terms of success I think that’s where that lies, because I haven’t got my own recording studio and I don’t go to parties with Elton John and stuff. You wont see me walking down the red carpet at Leicester Square or anything. For me I think that’s where the success lies. As I say I can go to just about any country in the world or any city in England and I will bump into someone that knows Crass. So we did achieve setting up a network and inspiring people to take it further than we could have took it.
Footage filmed for a Dutch documentary called Neon which also featured Poison Girls.
Crass written out of punk history…
For a start there’s not that much footage of Crass Live. Video cameras weren’t around in those days or if they were they were expensive and huge heavy bloody things. No punks in those days could afford that. There’s some photographs around. In a way I’d have loved to have seen Crass perform live coz it must have looked amazing. I’ve spoken to certain people who have described us as ‘overwhelming and really terrifying but brilliant’ but of course I never saw it. The only thing I do get peeved about is when you get a program on punk and we are not even mentioned. It will skip from Billy Oddball and Generation X then it will zip over to Green Day or something like that. Where’s all the ‘Stop The City’ bits or even if you aren’t gonna mention Crass where’s the mention on all the hard-line alternative stuff that went on? Coz the alternative charts in those days was taken up with bands like Crass, Conflict, Flux and all that sort of stuff. It does annoy me a little bit but sod it it’s just the way it goes.
What do you like about Punk? When I got into punk I was just a kid but I loved the clothes, music, colour and don’t give a f**k attitude. My idea of women came from people like Gaye Advert, Joan Jett and Siouxsie and as I sat there eating beef burgers and chips for my tea and listening to The Stranglers, life was a peach. I loved the record sleeves and I didn’t care whether a band was on a big label or small … as long as they did the biz that was ok for me.
But I was being naive coz music wasn’t just music. Music was a means to a political end – a codification of a belief system that others could pick up and slavishly follow from record sleeves and lyric sheets. Here were the new puritans who criticised everything left, right and centre and offered in its place some unfeasible nirvana which, if the world they wanted came to pass, would be full of people like themselves. Arrrrrghhhhhhh!
By the time these funsters came punk was already being sidelined. It had run out of steam, and the cry was going up ‘Punks not dead’ You have to say Crass managed to fracture it more. To the anything goes, imagination and the colour of punk they gave us black clothes with rigid austere stencilled slogans. In response to the vibrant record sleeves, they gave us… yep more black and white sleeves with yep more stencilled slogans and grim collages.
Religion, meat eaters, marriage, politics, war all received the benefit of their wisdom….. worse than this they spawned imitators who also made our lives misery.
And what did Crass achieve…. fuck all… they preached to the converted with their uncompromising stance and yet for one brief minute had a chance of influencing people when the single Bloody Revolutions was going to be on the TV music programme Top Of The Pops. I wanted it to be on…. out of curiosity…. you know the same sort of thing when you throw an aerosol can into a bonfire just to see if it explodes. And what was the song about … an 8 minute diatribe in the tradition of Led Zeppelin’s Stairway To Heaven against revolutionary Marxists… Wow tell ’em like it is Crass. Another Crass target was religion… ooh pick a hard one. They chose all the white targets that don’t fight back… in our multi-ethnic society of which they were trying to forge a new society notice they missed out Islam and other cultures coz those cultures don’t take kindly to it and tend to respond with equal fanaticism. Or more likely the right on Crass didn’t want to be perceived as racist. How can such an overtly political group miss out such a large but integral section of our population ? …. Why .. coz they talked a load of bollocks! Anarchy and peace my arse!
Look at the words to ‘White Punks on Hope’…” They said that we were trash, well the name is Crass not Clash. They can stuff their punk credentials cause it’s them that takes the cash. They won’t change nothing with their fashionable talk, their RAR badges and their protest walk, thousands of white men standing in a park, objecting to racism’s like a candle in the dark. Black man’s got his problems and his way to deal with it….” Sums Crass up. They slam violent protest etc but the black mans answer was (and in my view legitimate) the Notting Hill riots. Why do they separate out the black man from us? In their utopian society are we not going to co-exist ? For all their faults at least The Clash made a difference to people’s lives with music. Crass gave us nothing but hot air and in a world of politicians there was never any shortage of that.
I don’t hate Crass in fact I still play tracks like ‘Shaved Women’, ‘Bloody Revolutions’, ‘Berketex Bride’, ‘Gasman Cometh ‘and ‘Do they Owe Us A Livin’ and so on and so on and enjoy them but take them seriously? I don’t think so.
Rock ‘n’ Roll don’t change sod all! It just came into my head tho; an event in Rock’n’Roll that did make people think and react. Remember Queen playing in Brazil to massive hundreds of thousands in the audience. They started playing ‘I Want To Break Free’ and Freddie Mercury came on in drag and the crowd rioted. They thought he was taking the piss coz they revered that song as a symbol of freedom for the downtrodden in a continent overrun with dictators. Now that is real life not Crass singing Banned from The Roxy. Puts it all into context. What were Crass? Just another name on the back of a jacket preaching to their converted flock. File them along with Sham 69. Back then, and even more so now, I don’t need someone telling me how to live my life; and the day I believe something on a record I’ll have shit for brains!
Crass – Reality Asylum / Shaved Women
(Crass Records June 1979)
Reality Asylum was a re-recording of the track they were forced to leave off the Feeding 12″ and was coupled with Shaved Women. Shaved Women is an absolute earworm of a song that bizarrely maybe the only Crass song you can dance to because it has such a groove! Fantastic song! Features Eve Libertine on lead vocal on both sides.
It seems like a lot of people don’t like this song but this is one of my favorites! Crass was all about the message and the cause. As a feminist, I respect and love them so much for bringing much-needed awareness to women’s issues, especially in the male-dominated punk community. Screaming babies: we women have been conditioned by society to shave our bodies, just 1 example of the soft power the patriarchal world exerts over women. Shaved bodies=screaming babies=KEEPING US IN OUR PLACE. @CheapDumbFun, YouTube, 2011
Penny Rimbaud Eventually we found a pressing plant willing to deal with Asylum, so we re-recorded it along with Shaved Women, printed the covers at home, sold it for 45p, and totally broke ourselves.
On its release, the Reality Asylum single ran into immediate troubles. Complaints from the ‘general public’ led to police raids on shops throughout the country and a visit to us from Scotland Yard’s vice-squad. After a pleasant afternoon sharing tea with our guardians of public morality, we were left with the threat of prosecution that hung over us for the next year. Eventually we received a note informing us that we were free, but that we’d better not try it again. The nature of our ‘freedom’ made doing it again inevitable and so the endless roundabout of police harassment set itself in motion; it has continued to this day.
Feeding Of The 5000 (February 1979)
Crass’s The Feeding of The 5000 both galvanised and polarised whoever came into contact with it whether journalists or punks. Looking at it now, it’s arguably the perfect punk artifact from cover to music to lyrics to outlook. Back then it was a record, a poster, its lyrics and cover pored over and passed around and transferred from squat to squat.
Originally a 17-track album, recorded quickly in October 1978 and squeezed onto a 12″ EP, it was reduced to 16 when no pressing plant would touch it because of the controversial subject matter of Asylum. The track as shown below doesn’t hold back in its assault on Christianity and was withdrawn and replaced instead with two minutes of silence.
The music is hard and uncompromising and sets its stall out. Proudly DIY, its machine gun drumming, trebly guitars set to maximum distortion with Steve Ignorant’s yob vocals spitting out anger and frustration and the hope for a better way – that punk wasn’t just clothes and the same record company shit, but a force for change – in the dark times of Thatcher and Reagan.
Pete Stennet (Small Wonder) The one I remember most is Crass’s The Feeding Of The 5000. I was introduced to the Epping band by a friend of theirs Tony Lowe, who used to dress our windows every now and again. He had this tape of theirs and when I listened to it, I was blown by away by their attitude, lyrics, artwork and look. I was at the whole thing which was recorded in one go. It was a seminal moment and I was dead impressed with the band at the time. The whole Crass record was on a 12inch single and that was deliberate. It was my idea to sell at £1.99 to make it as cheap as possible. Punk77 Interview, April 2022
Crass – Banned From The Roxy (Steve Aoki’s Basement Tapes Remix) – drum and bass stylee!
Penny Rimbaud wrote in his book Shibboleth
In the summer of 1978 having been picked up by Small Wonder a quirky and vehemently independent record label, we recorded our first album “The Feeding of the Five Thousand”, so called because five thousand was the minimum number we could get pressed, and some four thousand nine hundred more than we thought we’d sell.
There are no accurate figures for its actual sales, but it is reputed to have sold up to 100,000 which would have qualified it for a gold record!
Ironically the reviewer for the album for the NME was one Tony Parsons who had made his name as a young gun enthused by punk who then either backstabbed it with his fellow journalist Julie Burchill for money or did the ultimate punk thing with their iconoclasm. Unsurprisingly young Tony found Crass not to his taste describing it as “a nasty, worthless little record.”
For Sounds, it was punk champion Garry Bushell who favoured the terracy football and fighting yob chants of what he named Oi punk bands. It’s highly likely that some of those brave skinhead fans of that music would be the ones who would go to Crass gigs and violently attack the bands and fans.
Bushell was no fan of anarchy and peace but saying that, his initial review/news feature was pretty balanced.
Both would go on to write for right-wing newspapers.
Crass – Stations Of The Crass (1979)
Penny Rimbaud Since early ’77 we had been involved in maintaining a graffiti war throughout Central London. Our stencilled messages, anything from ‘Fight War Not Wars’ to ‘Stuff Your Sexist Shit’, were the first of their kind to appear in the UK and inspired a whole movement that, sadly, has now been eclipsed by hip-hop artists who have done little but confirm the insidious nature of American culture.
To celebrate our success with the spray can, we decided to call our next album Stations Of The Crass, the cover of which was a photo of some of our work on one of London Underground’s stations. Stations featured the first ever six-fold wrapper and came with a sew-on patch that we printed at home.
By now, Pete of Small Wonder was beginning to tire of the kind of police attention that we were drawing to his shop, so we borrowed the money to release Stations ourselves. It sold so well that after only a very short time we were able to pay back the loan and get the covers folded by machine rather than doing them at home by hand. Best Before 1984 sleevenotes
“Cause a disturbance, cause a fucking noise.” urged Crass and just as both the Sex Pistols and The Clash had inspired others to pick up guitars and form bands, in the wake of The Feeding Of The 5000 and Stations Of The Crass new bands would also soon begin appearing, totally and utterly inspired by the Crass vision. The difference between these and the first wave of Punk bands, however, was in the politics. Whereas bands from Punk’s first wave may have aligned themselves broadly with the Left, the so-called Crass bands would make no such concessions and instead would set out to develop their own personal politics; championing such causes as vegetarianism, environmentalism, peace, feminism, and anti-capitalist activism. They would become known as the Anarcho Punk bands.
The Feeding Of The 5000 was the musical equivalent of brick-through-a-window protest. Stations Of The Crass was a mind bomb exploding in slow motion that would leave an indelible mark upon a huge number of people caught in its blast. On first hearing, it was an exhausting listen due to the deluge of ideas, the level of intensity and the depth of seriousness within its tracks so I Ain’t Thick, It’s Just A Trick, the last studio-recorded track on side three of the album, comes somewhat as a relief due to it being a foot-stomping, full-on, catchy Punk chant in the style of Sham 69.
Though the subject matter keeps to the by now regular Crass themes of conformism, commodification, education and religion; the saving grace if not coup de grace is its football terrace-style sing-along chorus: “Oh yeah? Oh yeah? Well I’ve got it all up here, see? Oh yeah? Oh yeah? When they think they’ve got it all out there, see? They can fuck off, they ain’t got me. They can’t buy my dignity. Oh, yeah? Oh, yeah? Let me tell you, I’ve got it all up here, see?“
I Ain’t Thick, It’s Just A Trick was the sound of Crass paying lip-service to Punk Rock as a three chord, ramalama sing-along but for all that it was an inspirational and up-lifting way to end the album. That’s not forgetting to mention the fourth side of the album which was a raw, harsh-sounding recording of Crass playing live at a venue in Islington, London, in August of 1979.
Stations Of The Crass would go on to sale a phenomenal amount of copies and would prove to be an absolute classic record that would stand the test of time far better than, for example, the début album of The Clash. Much more importantly, however, it would have a profound effect upon a significantly huge number of people; changing the way not only in how they think but also in the way they would for ever more live their lives. Won’t Be Governed Blogspot, May 2015
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