by Alex; Ogg
Crass would, conversely, become synonymous with the ‘benefit’ show, raising funds, or awareness, for issues ranging from rape crisis centres to animal rights. ‘We actually helped to organise the Astrid Proll benefit [for the England-based former Baader-Meinhof member] because she was a friend,” recalls Richard Williams of The Passions. “We knew her as Anna and she worked as a mechanic teaching young people at a youth project in North London. I also remember Crass phoning up and desperately wanting to play at the gig (being anarchists I suppose they would), but there wasn’t space on the bill for them. They were very disappointed.” “Yes, we did have contact with Astrid Proll,” Rimbaud remembers, though it actually went further than that. “We were visited by a woman with a young kid, and she was actually doing bank jobs, with her kid, to finance what remained of the Red Army Faction.” He doesn’t mean clerical bank jobs, either. “No, with a shotgun! Or whatever she was using, in mainland Europe. We had a policy of never, ever allying ourselves to anyone, even if we believed in what they were doing. From extreme radical groups to less extreme, most of them, at one time or another, did get in touch.”
Escaping pigeonholes, they nevertheless became most closely associated, almost by default, with anarchism. The act of refusing demarcation seemed to force it upon them. “Just as the rock ‘n’ roll thing started exposing its lies, we felt we had to expose our truths,” says Rimbaud. “The anarchist thing wasn’t because we wanted to be seen as anarchists, it was because we were trying to say, to both right and left, fuck off, we don’t want to be identified with you. We’re not part of any Trotyskyite scheme or some capitalist heist. We’re individuals doing what we want to do. Actually, we then had to learn classical anarchism very quickly. We’d always lived as anarchist individuals, but we didn’t have any history – it was a crash course. We hoisted ourselves on our own petard in that sense.”
Crass had aligned themselves with Small Wonder Records in Walthamstow after a visitor overheard what they were doing and took a copy of a tape to Pete Stennet. He offered them the chance to release a single, but unable to decide on which tracks to select, Crass instead recorded everything they’d written to this point, releasing the results as the 12-inch mini-album, The Feeding Of The Five Thousand’. Or they would have done, had not staff at the pressing plant deemed opening track ‘Asylum’ (aka ‘Reality Asylum’) offensive (“I am no feeble Christ, not me” it began, “He hangs in glib delight upon his cross”). It should be pointed out, however, that in this case it was not a knee-jerk response from the authorities but shop floor workers in Ireland who objected to the lyrics. Their response to this censorship was to release the record with a blank space where the opening track should have been, entitled ‘The Sound Of The Speech’ (aka ‘Freedom Of Speech’), though subsequent reissues, in a rather more forgiving climate, have restored ‘Reality Asylum’. Charges of ‘criminal blasphemy’ were eventually dropped, though notification of this was accompanied by a grave warning not to release any further records. “That was like a red rag to a bull,” notes Rimbaud.
Stennet wearied of the police intimidation that engulfed the band (including a raid by the vice squad) and was increasingly involving him, so Crass set up their own label as an interim measure, establishing an ethos of cottage-industry independence that would set the mould for third wave ‘anarcho-punk’. ‘Reality Asylum’ was initially re-released as a 7-inch single in June 1979 backed by ‘Shaved Women’. “We started the label purely to release a single that we couldn’t release any other way,” Rimbaud recalls. “Partly because Small Wonder didn’t want to touch it, because of the legal problems. That was ‘Asylum’. We were able to find a pressing plant and a printer who were prepared to do the job, as long as they remained incognito. One was a printer in Essex, Basildon. He’d never done anything of that sort before. The pressing plant was related to Saga, who did the huge classical range [and had links both to Joe Meek and later, reggae independent Trojan].”
Retailing at just 45p, and funded by an inheritance left to rhythm guitarist Andy Palmer by his grandmother, it lost them money on every copy sold (they’d forgotten about VAT). The ‘pay no more than’ drill they maintained across the label evolved thereafter; records would be individually priced on assumptions about what they would sell to reach a break-even point, and therefore fund subsequent releases. Despite the Director of Public Prosecutions having dropped the Criminal Blasphemy case, intimidation continued. “We just put out the one single as Crass Records,” says Rimbaud, “but were still with Small Wonder. It was solely because we didn’t want to put Small Wonder under threat after we’d been warned by the DPP that they’d ‘have us’. But that didn’t stop the authorities’ interest in Small Wonder or in us. We thought it was a bit unfair on Pete to do this. At that time, we were doing our second album for Small Wonder. We said, ‘Look, Pete, why don’t we pull out? You go on distributing it, but we’ll take responsibility for it.’ There was no pressure from him to say let’s call it a day, he was a really good guy. That was completely amicable, but I’m sure he was quite relieved.”
The group’s second album, the double LP Stations Of The Crass (September 1979), therefore transferred to Crass’s own imprint. “We didn’t have any money to pay for that album, so we borrowed it from Poison Girls. We did a pressing of 5,000. That sold out in the first few days and we re-ordered 20,000. And they sold, too. We were suddenly making lots of money, even though it was marketed at a very low price. We’d budgeted it on selling 5,000, so after it went on selling and selling, we very quickly had a load of problems. At that point, we said to John Loder at Southern, we can’t really cope with what’s happening.” Loder first met Penny Rimbaud in 1968, bonding over a shared affection for Hendrix, Zappa and Stockhausen. By 1970 they had formed their own experimental, avant-garde band, EXIT, using Loder’s love of DIY electronics (he studied electrical engineering at City University). He would eventually assemble enough equipment to build a studio in the garage of his north London home, principally financed by mini-cab driving.
“We asked him, will you take over as our financial manager?” continues Rimbaud. “Which he did, but not in the traditional sense, he actually became a member of the band. That’s where Southern started – prior to that, John was doing advertising jingles. When we got the money, we weren’t really happy about that – we hadn’t set out to make any money. We were a bit bemused at what to do with it. So the immediate idea was, we’ll put it back into trying to expand our ideas through allowing other people access to our studio and financing. Never with an idea of making more money, really just to expand the ideas. We then adopted this policy of doing one single, and generally speaking, a band would come in on the Saturday, record it, and on Sunday we’d mix it, and that was that. We started using Rough Trade for distribution. Our ears were to the ground, we’d hear of a band, we’d get in touch with them. They’d come in. Everyone wanted to be on the label, because they knew it would be good marketing for them.”
Crass Records thereafter offered a home to left field punk activists and misfits, almost as an extension of the ‘open house’ ethos that prevailed at Dial House, starting with Honey Bane, whom they knew through The Poison Girls’ connection, then Poison Girls themselves. Both, of course, had also worked with Small Wonder (Bane as part of Fatal Microbes). Though they shared some stylistic similarities and political reference points with the likes of Crass, Conflict and Flux Of Pink Indians, there were a number of important differences between Poison Girls and their peers. Not least the fact that they were led by a former NME secretary and middle-aged mother of two – the wonderful Vi Subversa. And she had a lot of pent up anger to disperse. “On occasions the message has come from the audience to us that we’re too old,” she would tell Phil Sutcliffe. “Well, it took me 40 years to find my voice and I’m not going to let a bunch of narrow-minded 15-year-old bigots take it away from me now!”
Originally formed in Brighton in 1976, as an extension of a cabaret project, Poison Girls relocated to
Burleigh House in Essex to become near neighbours of Dial House. They would play many gigs together and later collaborated on the ‘Persons Unknown’/’Bloody Revolutions’ split single in aid of the short-lived Wapping Autonomy Centre. Songs like ‘Bully Boys’, whose specific target was ambivalent beyond mocking machismo attitudes, managed to unite both the Socialist Workers Party and the National Front in condemning them. Significantly, they were among the first of the Crass roster to open their own spin-off label, Xntrix, with the release of the live Total Exposure album in 1981 (although Flux’s Spiderleg offshoot issued a retrospective Epileptics single that same month). The label would also house releases by Conflict and Rubella Ballet, two of the latter (Gem Stone and Pete Fender) being Subversa’s children.
Later Crass releases featured Zounds, Flux Of Pink Indians, Conflict, Rudimentary Peni, The Mob et al. Each got one shot – the abiding logic being that Crass weren’t a record company out to exploit the careers of their ‘roster’. And they sold in their tens of thousands, though the pricing policy ensured that everyone was happy if the break-even point was reached. Each beneficiary would, seemingly, form their own label on similar principles: Spiderleg (Flux), Mortarhate (Conflict), Outer Himalayan (Rudimentary Peni), All The Madmen (The Mob) etc, though Zounds switched to Rough Trade and, to some consternation, Honey Bane would sign a contract with EMI. It was in exactly this viral manner that anarcho-punk unfolded like one of Crass’s famous nine-panel wraparound sleeves. “We hope we’re the last of the big punk bands,” Crass told Mike Stand of The Face in 1981.” The very fact that we are big is a sign of the failure of what punk was all about. But we do feel it’s building up behind us now, hundreds of bands and fanzines.”
The pricing policy came about “because we were living very cheaply,” says Rimbaud. “We grow our own vegetables and didn’t have any costs, so why should we get involved in profit? We didn’t need profit to live. I remember when we printed all the ‘Asylum’ stuff ourselves, probably the first 10,000 covers we printed here, on grey paper. I was at school with a guy who married the daughter of a wealthy mill owner in Edinburgh. They had this warehouse full of paper they wanted to get rid of, so we brought tons of it down here. It gave us years and years and years of paper. Some of it we’ve still got! It’s going a bit yellow now. So stuff was just there. People gave us things. I still live that way. If you don’t have anything, stuff turns up. The way of preventing things turning up is having stuff in the first place. Nature abhors a vacuum, space fills. That’s always been my philosophy, McCawberism, something will always turn up. Sometimes it doesn’t, money notably. But then I don’t care about that particularly. The whole operation was run on that level.”
Even so, not everyone was in a position, either in terms of having the discipline or financial wherewithal, to cut the apron strings. “Eventually people would say, ‘what do we do next?’ recalls Rimbaud. “But the idea was really to show people how to do it. I got involved in production, but it wasn’t until way towards the end that I got involved in production for other bands in a real sense. I was initially there to provide access, to show people how to do things, what was possible, and to help them get what I thought, or what they thought, they wanted. That worked very well. It was done on a 50-50 deal, generally. With the Poison Girls we did much more generous deals – on Chappaquidick Bridge [their 1980 album] they got 100%. We made absolutely nothing. Most of the records hardly ever paid for themselves, so there was very little money in it for anyone, including ourselves. It was making use of the money we were creating [through Crass the recording artists, whose releases typically averaged between 50,000 and 75,000 sales].” Although income generated by each release was recycled for the next one, they were fortunate in not having to wait until costs were covered. “We were always financing it from our takings, which were massive, because we were selling so many thousands of records, we had the capital to do that. We financed the label, basically, and put out lots of stuff that cost us a lot of money, in real terms. But that didn’t really matter. What interested us, quite simply, was to get stuff that we thought was making a valid point out into the market.”
The criteria were aesthetic and political, never commercial. “That was how the decisions were made. There had to be some sort of broad agreement, ranging from the somewhat aggressive anarchism of someone like Conflict, to the completely surreal nature of [Icelandic group fronted by a young Björk] K.U.K.L.; two extremes of anarchistic behaviour or thought. But broadly there had to be common agreement – people weren’t ‘run through it’, it [selection] was done on listening to the bands and the things they wanted to say. And you’d have funny things like when Captain Sensible wanted to ‘say something’, he got in touch with us. ‘Can we do a single? I want to say something.’ We agreed. We wouldn’t have done ‘Happy Talk’. Probably! He’s a lovely man, Captain. And a fine artist.”
The first Bullshit Detector volume was released in 1980. As Last Hours magazine would note, compilations “actually defined the anarcho-punk movement both culturally and politically”. The reasons for this were multi-fold, but essentially related primarily to economics. A ‘comp’ could offer a snapshot of a musical scene and community, with costs divided by the contributors. However, the logic behind the first and most famous anarcho-punk compilation series was slightly different. Borrowing a phrase employed by The Clash (again) on their song ‘Garageland’, the series title was loaded with significance. ‘Garageland’ had been written in direct response to Charles Shaar Murray’s barbed comments about the Clash’s ‘coming out’ gig at the Screen On The Green in 1976, in which he suggested they were the sort of garage band who should return there with the engine left running.
The fragmentation of punk occurring at the time of the record’s release was stark. A street youth movement – Oi! – almost single-handedly punted by Sounds journalist Garry Bushell, was one faction, fast, aggressive hardcore punk from the likes of GBH and the Exploited another. There were also the first sightings of the Ants/Banshee-inspired positive punk/early Goth scene. To these could now be added a fourth front, the anarcho or peace punks, who had grown up around Crass, whose entire raison d’être seemed to be principled and sustained opposition to the state.
Though Crass had existed as a force since 1977, the real impact on that demographic of bands was most visibly felt with the arrival of the Bullshit Detector series, arguably pushing the logic of Crass beyond anything else they did. Despite the rhetoric, not everyone had the whys, wiles or wherefores to make records happen, but the Bullshit Detector series lowered the barrier to entry further than even the Desperate Bicycles could have imagined. A tape recorder, cassette and a postage stamp was now sufficient. A biscuit tin could serve purpose as well as a guitar. And everyone can sing. Well, perhaps not. “But,” notes Rimbaud, “the biscuit tin and the bedroom have produced some very profound art.”
There was a downside to this – many of the bands on the Bullshit Detector volumes were awful. To the casual listener, quality control was seemingly non-existent. At least in a conventional sense. But quality control there indeed was, albeit with more complex parameters. “We had hundreds and hundreds of tapes,” Rimbaud remembers, “and out of that we made three Bullshit Detectors. And we could probably have done another two or three. We were very selective – we listened to absolutely everything that arrived, and most of it was dross. But other things stood out. Why? Because someone had something to say, something had a quality. How do you judge art? And we’d have quite a team of us listening. But I believe then and now, that if punk had an ethos, then it was represented in its purest sense more by Bullshit Detector than anything we did. And that’s why we did it. That said more about what punk was really about than any known band could do, because you become removed from it. However hard you tried, and we tried harder than any other band to maintain that ethos, never to buy into the rock ‘n’ roll pantomime bit. But however much we tried, we inevitably were perceived within that. You couldn’t do that with Bullshi
t Detector. Bullshit Detector was where we started – which is why we’re on the first one, Steve and myself doing ‘Do They Owe Us A Living’ on the first one, because that’s what we were.”
Some notable acts did emerge from each of the volumes; The Sinyx, Amebix and Alternative from Volume 1; Omega Tribe, Anthrax, Toxic Ephex and Chumbawamba from Volume 2; and Napalm Death from Volume 3. To find those relative treasures though, there was an enormous amount of gristle and bone to sift through. The tone, equally, was somewhat hectoring and a little reductive (especially the ad nauseum anti-war diatribes). But the effect was unarguably astonishing, coming closest to delivering on punk’s democratising rhetoric than anything comparable – and truly offering a route from the bedroom to the top of the (indie) charts in double time. Toxic Ephex’s ‘Police Brutality’ appeared on the 40-track second volume, and, as they noted, “it climbed the dizzy heights to top the punk indie charts on October 8 1982, and to fourth place in the national indie charts, selling around 15,000 copies. The band got £135 in royalties… [they were] major recording artists of inter-galactic mega-status (well, their ma’s and da’s were faintly pleased, and the wifey down the chipper asked ‘Kin ye get me Rod Stewart’s autograph?’)”