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"When, in 1976, punk
first spewed itself across the nation's headlines with the message 'do
it yourself', we, who in various ways and for many years had been doing
just that, naively believed that Messrs. Rotten, Strummer etc. etc.
meant it. At last we weren't alone.
The idea of becoming
a band had never seriously occurred to us, it simply happened. Basically
anyone was free to join in and rehearsals were rowdy affairs that
invariably degraded into little more than drunken parties. Steve and
Penny had been writing and playing together since early '77, but it
wasn't until Summer of that year that we had begged, borrowed and stolen
enough equipment to actually call ourselves a band....CRASS.
Having finally
managed to rehearse five songs, we set out on the road to fame and
fortune armed with our instruments and huge amounts of booze to help us
see it through. We did gigs and benefits, chaotic demonstrations of
inadequacy and independence. We got turned off here, turned down there
and banned from the now legendary Roxy Club. 'They said they only wanted
well behaved boys, do they think guitars and microphones are just
fucking toys?'
By now we had
realised that our fellow punks, The Pistols, The Clash and all the other
muso-puppets weren't doing it at all. They may like to think that they
ripped off the majors, but it was Joe Public who'd been ripped. They
helped no one but themselves, started another facile fashion, brought a
new lease of life to London's trendy Kings Road and claimed they'd
started a revolution. Same old story. We were on our own again.
Through the
alcoholic haze we determined to make it our mission to create a real
alternative to music biz exploitation, we wanted to offer something that
gave rather than took and, above all, we wanted to make it survive. Too
many promises have been made from stages only to be forgotten on the
streets.
Throughout the long,
lonely winter of 77/78 we played regular gigs at The White Lion, Putney
with the UK Subs. The audience consisted mostly of us when the Subs
played and the Subs when we played. Sometimes it was disheartening, but
usually it was fun. Charley Harper's indefatigable enthusiasm was always
an inspiration when times got bleak, his absolute belief in punk as a
peoples' music had more to do with revolution than McClaren and his
cronies could ever have dreamt of. Through sheer tenacity we were
exposing the punk charlatans for what they really were, a music-biz
hype.
Our gigs remained
wild and disorderly, we were still too scared to play without a belly
full of booze and invariably we were in such a state that we'd realise
half way through a song that each of us was playing a different one. For
all the chaos it was immense fun, no one bitched about leather boots or
moaned about milk in tea, no one wanted to know how anarchy and peace
could be reconciled, no one bored our arses off with protracted
monologues on Bakunin, who at that time we probably would have thought
was a brand of vodka. Ideas were open, we were creating our own lives
together. These were the glorious years before the free alternatives
that we were creating became just another set of bigoted rules, before
what we were defining as real punk became yet another squalid ghetto. We
even played a Rock Against Racism gig, the only gig that we'd ever been
paid for. When we told the man to keep the money for the cause, he
informed us that 'this was the cause'. We never played for RAR again.
As the charlatans
increasingly headed Stateside, to get a sniff of that which refreshed
them best, we became hardened by the isolation. We determined to stop
fucking about with booze and to start taking ourselves that much more
seriously. We adopted black clothing as a protest against the
narcissistic peacockery of fashion punks. We started incorporating film
and-video into our set. We went into production of handout sheets to
explain our ideas and a newspaper, International Anthem. We
designed the banner that hung behind us to the end, and we committed
ourselves to see it through at least until the end of the then mythical
1984.
Later in the Summer of '78, Pete Stennet,
owner of the much missed Small Wonder Records, heard one of our demo
tapes and loved it. He wanted to put out a single but couldn't decide on
which track, so we recorded all the songs we'd written and made the
first ever multitracked 45. We named the album
The Feeding Of
The Five Thousand because
5000 was the minimum number that we could get pressed and some 4900 more
than we thought we'd sell. Feeding is now only a few hundred
short of going golden, though I don't suppose we'll hear too much about
that in the music press.
So, with our entire
stage set on record, wrapped in what was then highly innovative black
and white, the music press were able to commence on the barrage of
attack that has followed us throughout the years. They hated it and us
and their loathing positively overflowed. It is not grandiose to claim
that we have been one of the most influential bands in the history of
British rock, true we have not greatly influenced music itself, but our
effect on broader social issues has been enormous. From the start the
media has attempted to ignore us and only when its hand has been forced
by circumstances has it grudgingly given us credence. It's all fairly
simple, if you don't play their game, that is commercial exploitation,
they won't play yours. The music bit doesn't just buy its groups, it
pays for the music press as well. The charlatans were spread thicker and
deeper than we could ever have imagined.
Nonetheless,
realising that we were a threat to its control, the first offers started
coming in from the enemy. Mr. Big tried to buy us with cheap wine and an
offer of 50000 pounds if we'd join 'Pursey's Package'. He also informed
us that he could 'market revolution' and that we'd never succeed without
his help. It was the first of many offers that we refused, we never
looked back and, incidentally, we didn't hear too much more of Jimmy
Pursey.
When
Feeding
came out in the Spring of '79, the first track had been silent and
named The
Sound Of Free Speech.
The pressing plant had decided that the track that had been there,
Asylum, was
too blasphemous for their, and your, tastes. Such is the true face of
censorship in the 'Free World'.
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.
It was around this
time that we did our one and only radio session for John Peel. From then
on our growing reputation as foul mouthed yobs precluded us from being
given airplay, although we did appear on several chat-shows which led to
us being temporarily blacklisted by the BBC. Apparently, expressing
dissident views on the Falklands is not acceptable to the listening
public who jammed the BBC switchboard with complaints.
To offset claims in
the press that we were nothing but leftist/rightist thugs, they never
could quite make us out, we started to hang an anarchist banner
alongside our own. At that time the circled-A was rarely seen outside
the confines of established and generally tedious, small-time anarchist
literature. Within months the symbol was to be seen decorating leather
jackets, badges, and walls throughout the country, within a few years it
spread worldwide. Rotten may have proclaimed himself an anarchist, but
it was us who almost single-handedly created anarchy as a popular
movement for millions of people.
At the same time,
having discovered that CND did actually still exist, albeit in a
downtrodden, self-effacing manner, we decided to promote its cause,
something that at the time CND seemed to be incapable of doing for
itself. From then on, despite screams of derision in the music press, we
also displayed the peace symbol at gigs.
Our efforts on the
road slowly brought CND back to life. We introduced it to the thousands
of people who would become the backbone of its revival. A new and
hitherto uninformed sector of society was being exposed to a form of
radical thought that culminated in the great rallies, demos and actions
that continue today.
The true effect of
our work is not to be found within the confines of rock'n'roll, but in
the radicaiised minds of thousands of people throughout the world. From
the Gates of Greenham to the Berlin Wall, from the Stop The City actions
to underground gigs in Poland, our particular brand of anarcho-pacifism,
now almost synonymous with punk, has made itself known.
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.
Stations continued to sell and soon we
were able to consider releasing material by other bands.
Crass Records was
created and we kicked off with a single from
Zounds
[actually, Penny,
Donna & The Kebabs
was first...jb],
the first of well over one hundred bands that we have introduced to the
unsuspecting public.
In the Spring of 1980, having played
several benefit gigs for the defence fund of the jailed anarchists,
known paradoxically as 'Persons Unknown', we were asked by them on their
release if we could contribute to the creation of an Anarchist Centre.
We recorded
Bloody Revolutions,
with Poison Girls' Persons Unknown on the reverse side and the
centre was opened on the proceeds. For over a year an unhappy liaison
existed between the old school anarchists of Persons Unknown and the
anarcho-punks. Eventually the ideological pressure got too great and the
centre closed.
The relative ease
with which we were able to raise money for the center demonstrated to us
the enormous power that we had to generate not only ideas, but the
wherewithal to make them possible. By now we were drawing large crowds
to our gigs so we decided that the best use to which we could put the
situation was to play nothing but benefits. Over the years we were able
to create funds for a wide variety of different causes.
It now seemed time to launch a feminist
attack. For some time we had been aware that we were being labelled as a
bother band and that the feminist element within our work was largely
ignored. We released
Penis Envy
and the music press,
missing the point entirely, heralded it as having been made by "the only
feminists physically attractive enough to make you sure they're singing
out of choice rather than revenge". What do you do with these guys? The
reaction from many Crass 'fans' expressed similar prejudices, but from
an entirely different angle. They wanted to know why we'd only got
'birds singing'. The devil or the deep blue sea?
The final track on Penis Envy
entitled
Our Wedding, a
satire on slush MOR romantic bullshit, was offered by 'Creative
Recording And Sound Services' to Loving, a magazine specialising
in the exploitation of teenage loneliness. Loving proudly offered
it to their readers as
'a must for that
happy day'. When the hoax was exposed,
Fleet Street
rocked, while heads at Loving
rolled.
The release of Penis Envy
confirmed a suspicion that we had had for some time. After one week in
the shops it entered the national charts at number fifteen, next week it
wasn't to be found anywhere in the top one hundred. The same fate had
befallen
Nagasaki Nightmare,
we knew that it just wasn't possible to be that high in the charts one
week and nowhere to be found the next. It seemed obvious to us that if
the major labels paid to get their records 'in' the charts, they'd pay
to get ours 'out'. We knew that we were disliked by EMI, they'd sent out
a circular to their A&R departments forbidding all contact with 'Crass
personnel' and their HMV shops have not touched any of our material
since they took exception to the poster on
Bloody Revolutions.
For some time now we
had been touring far and wide throughout the UK, bravely treading where
no band had trod before. Village halls, scout huts, community centers,
anywhere that was neither the rip-off clubs or the pampered university
circuit. Hundreds of people would travel to join us in unlikely spots to
celebrate our mutual sense of freedom. We shared our music, films,
literature, conversation, food and tea. Wherever we went we were met by
smiling faces, ready and willing to create an alternative to the drab
greyness all around.
It was not always
easy, there were always those who wanted to destroy what we had created.
We tried to play the Stonehenge Festival but got beaten up by the
bikers; we had gigs smashed up by the National Front and the SWP; we
played host to the RUC in Belfast, sent the British Movement packing in
Reading and got thrashed by the Red Brigade in London. There was a lot
of trouble, but it never outweighed the joy.
Throughout 1981 we were recording
Christ-The Album,
which by the Summer of '82 was ready to release. This time, however, the
trouble did outweigh the joy. 'Great Britain' had gone to war.
Insignificant events
on an island called South Georgia, which no one had ever heard of, led
to significant events on an island called the Falklands which no one had
ever heard of. The first pin-prick had been placed in the anarcho-pacifist
bubble, a pin-prick that would in the space of a few months tear the
bubble to shreds. As young men died by the hundreds, our songs, protests
and marches, our leaflets, words and ideas suddenly seemed to be
worthless. In reality we knew that what we had to offer had value, that
what we believed in was worthwhile, but for the moment it all seemed
futile.
Thatcher wanted war
to boost her party's flagging pre-election image. If she wanted war,
she'd have it, along with anything else that took her fancy. Cruise,
Pershing, PWR's, Unions, Dennis.
At risk of being
seen as the 'traitors' that we are, through devious routes we rushed out
an anti-Falklands War flexi and were instantly labelled 'traitors' by
the music press. We also received a severe warning from the House of
Commons to 'watch our step'. Protest against the War seemed to be
virtually non-existent and criticism in the press was being suppressed.
When the issues had been abstract, the Peace Movement had been all too
happy to shout 'No more war', now there was a war to shout about, the
silence was painful.
However it wasn't until the war had ended
and we released
How Does It Feel To Be The Mother Of A Thousand
Dead? that
the shit really hit the fan. After Thatcher had been asked in the House
of Commons whether she had listened to the record, it was inevitable
that she and her party would want to punish us. Tory MP Tim Eggar had
the hapless task of fronting
prosecution
proceedings and right from the start couldn't
put a foot right. The case crumbled completely when Eggar was exposed by
us on live radio as a complete fool. The Tories backed down immediately
after his miserable performance and even went to the trouble of
circulating a note in which members of the Party were ordered to ignore
all provocation from our quarter. Suddenly we started receiving
letters of support
from members of the
'Opposition'. Maybe we weren't on our own. Fall guys or what!
We found ourselves
in a strange and frightening arena. We had wanted to make our views
public, had wanted to share them with like-minded people, but now those
views were being analysed by those dark shadows who inhabited the
corridors of power. Eggar had created a great deal of publicity for our
cause and the press had lapped it up, especially those who, literally at
gun point, had been prevented from gaining any real information on the
war. It was as if we'd hooked a whale while fishing for minnows. We
didn't know whether to let go of the rod, or keep pulling until we
exhausted ourselves, which we knew, inevitably, we would.
The speed with which
the Falklands War was played out and the devastation that Thatcher was
creating both at home and abroad, forced us to respond far faster than
we had ever needed to before.
Christ-The Album
had taken
so long to produce that some of the songs in it, songs that warned of
the imminence of riots and war, had become almost redundant. Toxteth,
Bristol, Brixton and the Falklands were ablaze by the time that we
released. We felt embarrassed by our slowness, humbled by our
inadequacy. At the end of '82, aware that the 'movement' needed a morale
booster, we organised the first squat gig for decades at the now defunct
Zig Zag Club in London. Along with free food and copious supplies of
ripped-off booze, we celebrated our independence once again, this time
joined by twenty other bands, the cream of what could truly be called
'real punk'. Together we supplied a twenty-four hour blast of energy
which inspired similar actions throughout the world. We'd learnt the
lesson. 'Do it yourself' has never seemed so real as it did that day at
the Zig Zag.
In many respects the
Zig Zag consolidated our thinking, the job was by no means over. So,
deciding that we should hang onto the rod and fight the whale, we
launched an all out attack on Thatcher and her allies. The run up to the
'83 Elections had started, the 'Opposition' had all but collapsed.
Labour had made the inevitable, revolting turnabout on its anti-nuclear
stance and the Peace Movement was in tatters, muted by its own fears.
The album
Yes Sir, I Will
was our first 'tactical response',
it was an impassioned scream directed towards the wielders of power and
those who passively accept them as an authority. The message in the
record was loud and clear, 'There is no authority but yourself'.
As our political position became
increasingly polarised, we felt it necessary to define our motives in a
clearer fashion than perhaps we had done before. The what, where and why
of our anger needed explaining, as did our idea of 'self'. We had often
been accused of sloganeering, now was the time to come out into the
open. Several members of the band produced
Acts Of Love,
fifty poems in lyrical settings, in an attempt to demonstrate that the
source of our anger was love rather than hate and that our idea of self
was nor that of an egocentric social bigot, but of an internal sense of
one's own being. The ambiguity of our attitudes was beginning to disturb
us. Was it really possible to have a bloodless revolution? Were we being
truly realistic? Were we being destroyed by our own paradoxes?
It was at this time that we sent the now
infamous
'Thatchergate Tapes'
to the world's press. The highly edited
tape, which took the form of a telephone conversation between Reagan and
Thatcher, had her admitting responsibility for the sinking of the
Belgrano, an issue which at that time she had not been confronted with,
and implying knowledge of the Invincible's decision to 'guinea-pig' the
Sheffield, a fact that still has not come to light. So as to leave no
stone unturned. we caused Reagan to threaten to 'nuke' Europe in defence
of American heritage, a hypothesis which is probably not as wild as it
seems.
The tape lay dormant
for almost a year before surfacing in the State Department in Washington
DC. The categorical denials that were issued in relationship to the tape
and its contents acted as a clear indication that the methods that we
had employed to discredit Thatcher and Reagan were in no way dissimilar
to those of The State Department. Why else would they have taken our
somewhat amateurish efforts at tape forgery so seriously? Inevitably,
they waved the accusatory finger in the direction of the Kremlin.
Shortly after that, several papers in America, and The Sunday Times
in Britain, ran the story as proof of KGB 'foul-play'. It was the
first time that the press had run any story that, albeit in a roundabout
fashion, questioned Thatcher's integrity concerning the Belgrano. We
were overcome with a mixture of fear and elation, should we or should we
not expose the hoax?
Our indecision was
resolved when a journalist from The Observer contacted us in
relation to 'a certain tape'. At first we denied knowledge, but
eventually decided to admit responsibility. We had been meticulously
careful in the production and distribution of the tape to ensure that no
one knew about our involvement. How The Observer got hold of
information that led to us is a complete mystery. It acted as a
substantial warning, if walls did indeed have ears, how much more was
known of our activities?
Since the
graffiti days of '77
we had been involved in various forms of
action, from spraying to wire cutting, sabotage and subterfuge. We had
been concerned that if we went public on the tape all manner of other
'offences' might bubble to the surface. Now we had exposed ourselves to
that risk and the telephone started to ring.
The world's media
pounced on the story, thrilled that a 'bunch of punks' had made such
idiots of The State Department, and 'by the way, what else had we done/'
Throughout the years as a band we had never attracted such attention,
the telephone rang incessantly, we travelled here and there to do
interviews, all of a sudden we were 'media stars'. We were interviewed
by the Russian press as American TV cameras recorded the event, we were
live on American breakfast TV, we talked to radio stations from Essex to
Tokyo, always giving the anarchist angle on every question. We had
gained a form of political power, found a voice, were being treated with
a slightly awed respect, but was that really what we wanted? Was that
what we had set out to achieve all those years ago?
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. Where once we had been generous and outgoing, we had now
become cynical and inward. Our activities had always been coloured with
a lightness and humour, now we saw that we had been increasingly drawn
towards darkness and an often ill-conceived militancy. We had become
bitter where once we had been joyful, pessimistic where once optimism
had been our cause. 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. 'Accidental' death from Thatcher's private army
of boys in blue had become an acceptable norm. The balance of a whole
society was hanging on the apron strings of a vicious and uncaring
despot. Far less important by far was our own fate. 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. From the stage we vowed to continue working for the
cause of freedom, yet, as we drove home, we all knew that the particular
path that we had been taking had been exhausted. We needed new ways in
which to approach our objectives and, a few weeks after the gig, Hari
Nana left the band to seek his. 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.
'There is no
authority but yourself', we said that, but we'd lost ourselves and
become CRASS. We are still involved in the often painful process of
refinding that self, of seeing each other again, of healing ourselves
from the self-inflicted wounds of 'public life'. The 'movement', from
Class War to Christians For Peace, needs to regain the dignity that it
has lost in the process of attempting to confront problems that appear
to be created by others. We have all been guilty of defining the enemy,
and indeed there are those who would obstruct the course of liberty, yet
ultimately the enemy is to be found within. There is no them and us,
there is only you and me. We need to consolidate, reassess, reject what
patently does not work and be prepared to adopt ideas and attitudes that
might. We need to find the 'self' that can truly be the authority that
it is. We need to look beyond the barbed-wire and the ranks of police
for a vision of life which is of our choosing, not that which is
dictated by cynics and despots. The exponent of Karate does not aim at
the brick when wishing to break it, but at the space beyond. We would do
well to learn from that example.
We have spent too
much of our time, energy and spirit attempting to dispel the shadow of
evil cast over us by the violence and terror of the nuclear age. That
shadow has become a stain on our hearts. It is time to wash away that
stain and to step out of the shadow into the light. We have become
trapped in fear outside metaphorical Greenham Gates. 'Knock and ye shalt
enter. . .the kingdom of heaven is within you.'
We know enough of
the sickness of the world, we should be careful not to add to it through
our own physical and mental exhaustion and ill health. If we are ever to
achieve our shared objectives we must each of us be strong enough to do
so. We have all failed and we have all succeeded. This is no tail
between the leg ending, but a proud, albeit painful and confused,
beginning."
Love, peace and freedom,
what was CRASS, but now knows better.
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