Last of the Hippies

An Hysterical Romance

Penny Rimbaud

• Publisher: PM Press
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9781629631332
• Topic: Médias et arts de la scène
• Subtopic: Musique punk

First published in 1982 as part of the Crass record album Christ: The Album, Penny Rimbaud's The Last of the Hippies is a fiery anarchist polemic centered on the story of his friend, Phil Russell (aka Wally Hope), who was murdered by the State while incarcerated in a mental institution.

Wally Hope was a visionary and a freethinker, whose life had a profound influence on many in the culture of the UK underground and beyond. He was an important figure in what may loosely be described as the organization of the Windsor Free Festival from 1972 to 1974, as well providing the impetus for the embryonic Stonehenge Free Festival.

Wally was arrested and incarcerated in a mental institution after having been found in possession of a small amount of LSD. He was later released, and subsequently died. The official verdict was that Russell committed suicide, although Rimbaud uncovered strong evidence that he was murdered. Rimbaud's anger over unanswered questions surrounding his friend's death inspired him in 1977 to form the anarchist punk band Crass.

In the space of seven short years, from 1977 to their breakup in 1984, Crass almost single-handedly breathed life back into the then moribund peace and anarchist movements. The Last of the Hippies fast became the seminal text of what was then known as anarcho-punk and which later blossomed into the anti-globalization movement.

This revised edition comes complete with a new introduction in which Rimbaud questions some of the premises that he laid down in the original.

ON THE THIRD OF SEPTEMBER 1975, PHIL RUSSELL, alias Phil Hope, alias Wally Hope, alias Wally, choked to death on his own vomit. Blackberry, custard, bile, lodged finally and tragically in the windpipe. Blackberry, custard, bile, running from his gaping mouth onto the delicate patterns of the ornamental carpet.

‘No answer is in itself an answer.’

—Oriental proverb

Wally died a frightened, weak and tired man. Six months earlier he had been determined, happy and exceptionally healthy. It had taken only that short time for Her Majesty’s Government’s Health Department to reduce Wally Hope to a hopeless, puke-covered corpse.

‘The first dream that I remember is of myself holding the hand of an older man, looking over a beautiful and peaceful valley. Suddenly a fox broke cover followed by hounds and strong horses ridden by red-coated huntsmen. The man pointed into the valley and said, ‘that, my son, is where you’re heading.’ I soon found that out. I am the fox!’

—Wally Hope, 1974

For me, Wally’s death marked the end of an era. He died alongside the last grain of trust that I naively had had in the System: the last seeds of hope. Prior to that, I had felt that if I lived a life based on respect rather than abuse my example might be followed by those in authority. Of course it was a dream, but reality is based on a thousand dreams of the past. Was it so silly that I should want to add mine to the future?

‘It became necessary to destroy the town to save it.’

—Twentieth century military logic

World War Two was neither lost nor won, it simply created a horrific emptiness. Within that emptiness there grew a desperation amongst the peoples of the world, a fear that civilisation had learnt nothing from the tragic lessons of the Nazi death-camps or the cruel truths of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. It seemed that those in power were setting the planet on a course towards total destruction. The arms race was full-swing. The Cold War was running amuck. The Third World was starving, but the superpowers looked only to themselves.

In the horror of this new world, people turned to bizarre ways of calming their fears. To ignore is the greatest ignorance, but ignore became the keyword as individuals buried themselves in the banalities of mindless materialism. The Age of Consumerism had been born. If you couldn’t find peace of mind, perhaps a Cadillac would do. If life had lost its meaning, perhaps a super-deluxe washing machine might give it back. The ‘this is mine, mine, mine’ ownership and security boom was underway. Buy, buy, buy. Possess. Insure. Protect. The TV world was upon us. Which one’s real? This one? That one? Mind-numbing crap to numb crappy minds. Buy this, buy that. Who knows which is which or what is what? Who cares? Buy this. Buy that. Layers of disposable, plastic-wrapped garbage to hide the awful facts of life in a nuclear reality.

BUY THIS.

BUY THAT.

Meanwhile, governments turned to the business of developing nuclear arsenals, nuclear ‘deterrents’ we were told, and the vast majority of the population, blinded by consumer gewgaws and media junk, was happy to accept the lie. As long as everyone was having fun, no one would question the behaviour of those in power as they played with their nuclear time-bombs. But all the time the fuse burnt shorter.

However, if the majority is always happy to be blown along by the prevailing wind, there are also those who will stand against it. If the fifties saw the birth of consumerism, it also gave rise to two powerful oppositional forces: the Peace Movement and rock’n’roll. Both were in reaction to a world increasingly dominated by the grey men of war and their grey thoughts. Both, at least initially, rejected the empty glitter of consumerism. Both represented a revolution against the abnormal values of ‘normal’ society.

The Peace Movement in Britain was founded on the platform of the newly formed Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament, CND, who by the end of the fifties was able to call thousands of protesters onto the streets to make their voice heard. But a louder voice still could be listened to at that time on the portable-radios and wind-up gramophones of millions of homes: the harsh new voice of rock’n’roll.

Whereas the Peace Movement was predominantly middle-class, rock’n’roll knew no class barriers, and although it probably took The Beatles to finally bring together the various disillusioned parties, rock’n’roll, revolution, a desire for change and the Peace Movement have from the very start been as good as inseparable.

Regrettably, by the beginning of the sixties, CND had become an accepted and therefore contained part of the British way of life. Its shout of protest had been dulled by the voice of moderation. The aims of CND had become increasingly obscured by political opportunism. Leftist vultures heavily disguised as doves had moved in and it became clear that the Labour Party saw CND as little more than a rung in the ladder to power. In 1964, as the opposition party, they promised to do away with Polaris, the nuclear submarine force. A few months later, after election to power, they ordered four new submarines. The disguise wore thin. Michael Foot, at that time a CND committee member (but now leader of the Labour Party), when asked if he would vote for an anti-bomb Tory Party rather than a pro-bomb Socialist one, replied ‘certainly not’. It acted as a bewildering testament to his desire for peace.

The present rebirth of interest in CND runs the risk of once again going up the well-worn political arsehole. Socialist power-seekers have already moved in on the hard-fought-for peace platform. Speeches at the two most recent Trafalgar Square rallies were directed more towards vote catching than peace making. When the issues weren’t so fashionable, the leftist ‘doves’ were happy enough to be sharing peanuts with the rest of the pigeons in the square. Now they are promising to refuse to allow America to install cruise missiles in Britain. Is this just another vote catcher that they will back off from if they are elected into power? If it is allowed to do so, the Labour Party will sail CND right down the river and sink it without trace.

Nuclear disarmament and the wider issues of peace must not be allowed to become political soap-operas in which the power-hungry can play out their cynicism. Further to this, and quite apart from the obvious threat of political exploitation, a very real danger to the long-term existence of CND and its allies is the current interest being shown in it by the music business. All of a sudden, peace has become a saleable commodity, a trendy product, and established record labels, the music press and bands alike, who four years ago dismissed those who opposed war as ‘boring old hippies’, are now bending over backwards to be seen to be supporting the cause. The only cause that they’re supporting is their own. It’s good promotion, good sales, good business, and they’ll bleed it dry as long as it’s this year’s thing. When it isn’t, they’ll drop it, as they did Rock Against Racism, like a ton of hot bricks.

If by the mid-sixties the power of protest had dwindled, the power of rock was showing no such faint heart. Rock’n’roll ruled, and no party conference was going to bring it down. Youth had found its voice and increasingly was demanding that it should be heard. Loud within that voice was one that screamed promises of a new world: new colours, new dimensions, new time, new space. Instant karma, and all at the drop of an acid tab.

‘My advice to people today is as follows. If you take the game of life seriously, if you take your nervous system seriously, if you take your sense organs seriously, if you take the energy process seriously, you must turn on, tune in, and drop out.’

—Acid prophet Timothy Leary

Respectable society was shocked. Desperate parents backed off as their little darlings tripped over the ornamental carpets. Hysterical reports that LSD caused everything from heartburn to mass suicide appeared almost daily in the press. Sociologists invented the generation gap, and when the long-haired weirdo flashed a V-sign at them they got that all wrong as well, it was really a peace sign, but either way round it meant ‘fuck off’. In the grey corner we had what was normal’n’nice, and in the rainbow corner we had sex’n’drugs’n’rock’n’roll, at least that’s how the media wanted us to see it. It was at this time that the CND symbol was adopted as an emblem by the ever-growing legions of rock fans whose message of love and peace spread like a prairie-fire, worldwide. In its desperate need to label and thus contain anything that threatens to outdo its control, the media named this phenomenon ‘Hippie’, and the System, to which the media is number one tool in the fight against change, set about in its transparent but nonetheless effective way to discredit the new vision. Rock’n’roll was achieving something that had never been achieved before, it was proving the falsity of the socially created divisions of colour, class and creed. The barriers were coming down. It didn’t matter who you were, where you were from, or what you did. If you dug it, you were cool.

Despite what followers of Oi or Marx might say, rock’n’roll cannot be pigeon-holed to fit into any specific political ideology. It is the collective voice of the people, all the people, not just a platform for working class mythology, left, right or centre. Rock’n’roll is about freedom, not slavery. It’s about revolution of the heart and soul, not convolution of the mind. To say that punk is or should be ‘working class’ is to falsely remove it from the classless roots of the ‘rock revolution’ from which it grew. Punk is a voice of dissent, an all out attack on the whole System. It as much despises working class stereotypes as it does middle class ones.

‘Punk attacked the barriers of colour, class and creed, but look at how it is right now, do you really think you’re freed?’

—Penny Rimbaud/Crass

Oi has been promoted in the pages of the music press as the ‘real punk’, but whereas punk aims to destroy class barriers, Oi is blind enough to be conned into reinforcing them. Oi’s spokesman, Garry Bushell, who in all probability has never done a day’s manual work in his life, claims that ‘only the working class can change society’. Presumably he realises that his privileged professional status as a journalist prevents him from being in a position to contribute to his own pet theory. His myopic idea of what ‘working class’ means is little more than a middle class fantasy about a type of person who, except in the form of Alf Garnett and Andy Capp, just doesn’t exist. His unrealistic view of workers as cloth-capped, beer-swilling, fist-waving jokers is a complete insult to genuine working people.

Oi would have been harmless enough if its comic-book caricatures of the workers hadn’t appealed so strongly to the elements which were inevitably drawn to its reactionary views—the so-called ‘right-wing’. Rather than rejecting its new and possibly unwanted following, Oi appeared to revel in its image of being ‘nasty Nazi muzac for the real men’. Defending the trail of blood and bruises that it left behind itself wherever it went, the ‘new breed’ claimed that ‘they weren’t advocating violence, they were just reflecting the way things are’. Despite repeated evidence of Oi-inspired violence, it became increasingly obvious that Oi the Bushell and Oi the Bands were either perfectly happy with the way things were, or totally incapable of controlling the monster that they’d created.

At a time when something could have been done to change the image, the Strength Through Oi album was released, but rather than making an effort to shift the right-wing emphasis, it deliberately promoted it. The less than attractive cover sported your average skinhead about to land his cherry-reds up someone’s khyber. But that week the cherries also left their mark on an old age pensioner’s face. No matter, you can’t win ’em all. Inside the sleeve, Oi the Bushell wrote about ‘the sea of crop-heads running riot, knife-blades flashing in the moonlight’. Well, it’s poetry, ain’t it? But that week the knife-blades also flashed into an Asian youth’s stomach. No matter, accidents will happen, won’t they? The greatest ‘accident’ of them all, Southall, finally exposed Oi for the dangerous farce that it was. An Oi gig in a predominantly Asian community was inevitably going to cause problems. It would be unfair to suggest that the violence was deliberately planned by either the bands or the organisers of the gig, but given the reputation of Oi’s following it should have been more than obvious that there would be trouble. Nonetheless, Oi the panto blindly marched in and, as the shit hit the fan, Southall burned and our jolly jokers, shaken and bruised, retreated to the pages of the press to protest their innocence. ‘Well, the Asians weren’t there for the concert, they only live there, don’t they?’ This time round, no one as much as giggled.

LEFT WING? RIGHT WING?

YOU CAN STUFF THE LOT.

By the late sixties, straight society was beginning to feel threatened by what its youth was up to. It didn’t want its grey towns painted rainbow. The psychedelic revolution was looking a little bit too real. It had to be stopped.

Books were banned and bookshops were closed down. Offices and social centres were broken into and their files were removed to be fed into police computers. Underground papers and magazines collapsed under the weight of official pressure. Galleries and cinemas had whole shows confiscated. Artists, writers, musicians and countless unidentified hippies were dragged through the courts to answer trumped-up charges of corruption, obscenity, drug abuse, or anything else that might silence their voice. But nothing could. It all mattered too much. As oppression became increasingly heavy, public servant ‘bobby’ became known as public enemy ‘piggy’. War had been declared on the Peace Generation, but love wasn’t going to give in without a fight.

And Charles said ‘let there be death’, and there was death, and the media and its faithful followers recoiled in horror at the thought that it might have been their child ordering the slaughter.

‘Anything you see in me is in you. If you want to see a vicious killer, that’s who you’ll see. If you want to see me as your brother, that’s who I’ll be. It all depends on how much love you have. I am you, and when you can admit that, you will be free.’

—Charles Manson

Charles Manson, weaver of words, psychedelic warlord, witch-doctor of rel...