CHAPTER ONE
Thereâs a strong argument for the two most influential punk bands of all time being the Sex Pistols and CRASS; the former encouraged bored teenagers everywhere to get off their arses and start their own bands, the latter encouraged them to think for themselves. Of the two bands, however, the shadow cast by Crass is certainly the one with the most substance; they gave the ephemeral rebellion hinted at by the Pistols specific shape and purpose, and a thousand anarcho-punk bands set sail in their wake. And these bands werenât thrashing against any imaginary opponent conjured by the paranoia of youth⌠no, they set themselves very real targets and clearly defined â if a little ambitious â objectives. They werenât interested in sensationalist, unworkable notions of anarchy and chaos, they wanted a gradual revolution from within; they wanted anarchy, peace and freedom. The shock tactics of punk had been usurped, given an articulate intellectual make-over, and were now being put to sound social use.
âWell, I donât think that we were leaders of any movement,â says drummer Penny Rimbaud (real name Jerry Ratter) modestly, âalthough we may have helped inspire one. And we ourselves were inspired by some of the earliest punk bands, but what we aspired to do was what they only pretended to do. Commercial punk was a complete sham, part of the whole rockânâroll circus, operating in the same way as someone like Marc Bolan â which is not to denigrate it as such⌠after all, music is an industry; it produces product and people enjoy product. But to imagine that the first wave of punk related in any real way to what followed is quite inaccurate, and it was basically finished by late â77.
âAnd that particular element of rockânâroll that was called âpunkâ would have died a natural death, and the next phase, be it goth or whatever, would have been invented by the music business. It wouldâve required its main characters, of course, but would have just continued along the same line that rockânâroll has always continued along for many, many years.
âWe sort of tail-ended that first wave,â he adds, of Crass themselves. âWe were playing through â77, playing a lot with bands like the [UK] Subs, for example, and being talked about in the same breath. We didnât see any great disconnection really, but we actually wanted to put into action what had never been the intention of those earliest punk bands. We picked up their pretensions and tried to make them real. We came in with their energy, but also a great deal of political sincerity, and it was the political sincerity that attracted and created a movement. You could never have created a âmovementâ out of something as banal as punk rock.
âI mean, they were playing a Clash record on the radio earlier on today, and it struck me that you couldnât really tell the difference between that now and the Rolling Stones. It was just rockânâroll at the end of the day, just music.
âIt was our sincerity, and our authenticity, that made us different. Of course, itâs only now that Iâm aware of the authenticity part, but I was certainly aware of the sincerity even then; we genuinely meant that anyone could get up and do it. Because we had gotten up ourselves and done it! Most of the bands before us had been pub bands, on some sort of circuit; theyâd already tried some form of rockânâroll, just commercial players looking for a break⌠but we were saying, âHave a go!â And we really meant it. And when we set up our own label, at least initially, anyone who said they wanted to get up and play could get up and play. And we ourselves were happy to play with anyone else; we couldnât see that what we were doing was any different to what the Subs were doing, but it soon became clear that we did mean it. And we were quite prepared to put what little money we made â actually it was quite a large amount of money â back into promoting those ideas.
Penny Rimbaud (AKA Jeremy Ratter), drummer and co-founder of Crass.
âIf what youâre saying is that we created the anarcho-punk movement, then we didnât create it as leaders. We were just as hard-working as anyone else, scrubbing floors, knocking out leaflets, carrying our own gear â and everyone elseâs too! We never separated ourselves; we were a part of it, at one with it. There were those that tried to force that sense of leadership onto us, but I think we were very successful in never, ever accepting that role.â
Crass were never your âtypical bandâ from the off. The truly unique chemistry that set up the claustrophobic tension so inherent in their sound was a result of many factors, including disparate musical tastes, but more importantly differences in age and class. Penny was a 35-year-old ex-art teacher, living a communal life at Dial House, on the edge of Epping Forest, whilst vocalist Steve (âIgnorantâ) Williams (whoâs actually anything but) was a fifteen-year-old yobbo from Dagenham.
âIt all came about through my older brother, who would turn up at peopleâs places, ask to stay the night and then end up staying three weeks,â laughs Steve, by way of explanation of how he and Penny hooked up. âHeâd stayed at Dial House for two nights or something, through some hippy types that he knew down in Ongar, and he came over to see me where I lived in Dagenham â this is pre-Crass, by the way, when I was only about thirteen â and he told me about this amazing place where you could go and draw if you wanted to, go and play piano if you wanted to, whatever⌠and he took me over there. I was totally intrigued by it; I was an ex-skinhead, and I turned up in all this gear, really loud âRupert The Bear trousersâ, checked jacket⌠and thereâs all these people walking around bare-foot, with no fucking television! Talking in these accents I couldnât understand, using all these words I couldnât comprehend, and sounding like they had fifteen plums in their mouths!
âBut also, for the first time in my life, I was actually being included in the conversation⌠even though I didnât understand what they were going on about; they treated me like an equal, yâknow? If I said something, they would consider it⌠it was the first time that I thought, âWell, yeah, I have got something to say.â
âSo, I kept playing truant, and going back there to stay, but then I left school and moved to Bristol for about a year, and then punk came along. I went to see The Clash at the Colston Hall, which totally did it for me, and Joe Strummer said, âIf you think you can do better, start your own bandâŚâ, which became my battle cry. I came back to Dagenham â the week of the Queenâs Silver Jubilee, I think it was â with the idea of finding my old drinking buddies and starting a punk rock band of my own. But of course, none of them were having any of it, âcos they all had wives and jobs and all that bollocks, so I came out to Dial House, to find that Pen was living there on his own, writing âChrist, Reality Asylumâ. Gee [Vaucher, who would become the bandâs graphic designer] had gone to America, doing illustration work, and so he said, âWhat you up to?â And I said, âIâm gonna start a bandâŚâ to which he replied, âIâll play drums for ya!â And thatâs how it all started really. His previous band, Exit, had stopped performing properly in â74, but people would still come over at weekends and jam⌠and what a fucking racket that was!
âAnyway, I turned up wanting to be Johnny Rotten or Paul Simonon⌠âcos he was a good looking bloke, always looked a bit tasty⌠and with my David Bowie background, sort of thing, a part of me always wanted to be famous. And then you had Penâs background, which was much more intellectual, and it just came together. I couldnât even understand what âChrist, Reality Asylumâ was all about, but I knew I liked it because it was having a pop at religion, and it had âfuckâ in it, which was well punk rock, wasnât it? I dunno, we just got on really.
âDial House was this place where everyone could go; there was this idea that if you were a poet and you turned up, you could earn your nightâs board by reciting your poetry, for example, and there was going to be all these Dial Houses all around the country. So you had all these people turning up who werenât working class â they tended to be middle class and into photography or film-making â and Pen used to like them turning up and being confronted by me, this spiky-haired, spotty little oik, âcos punk rockers were still âfrighteningâ back then. And I used to enjoy seeing that happen as well, my so-called âelders and bettersâ being a bit scared of me, so that worked for us as well; it was a little bit of a stage act, a performance. The funny thing was, as soon as Crass started, a lot of the people who used to visit Dial House stopped coming anyway â âcos the whole place would be full of Italian punks or whatever!
âSo yeah, there was a class difference â I remember I always felt really nervous in front of Penâs mum and dad â but it worked for us; it was a good mixture, and I donât really know of any other bands that had thatâŚâ
That early poem of Pennyâs, âChrist, Reality Asylumâ, remains a tenet of the Crass canon, an outrageously focused cornerstone from whence the band developed and refined its gleefully confrontational style and approach. With its condemnation of Christâs martyrdom as a âchurlish suicideâ, exclaiming that Jesus hung âin crucified delight, nailed to the extent of his visionâ, it was deliciously, shockingly blasphemous, and was always destined to land the band in trouble with those kind-hearted censors that safeguard our precious morality. When the bandâs first 12â came out, the song was left off by the outraged pressing plant that manufactured it, forcing the band to name the silence left in its place âThe Sound Of Free Speechâ.
âBut there were no âtacticsâ as such,â claims Penny. âI had this friend staying with me, the guy who actually designed the Crass symbol, a bloke called Dave King who now lives in San Francisco [and was later a part of the Sleeping Dogs, who released their 1982 âBewareâŚâ single through Crass]. And we were both from upper-middle-class backgrounds, and we were talking about religion, and I went off on this rant, and I ended up rolling around on the floor, doing all these theatrics. And he said, âFuckinâ hell, you ought to write that down!â
âI was so in the moment, tearing up all this stupid religious tradition, and I realized that I was 35 years old but still bound up with this superstitious rubbish, and it all started falling away when I started getting into the rant. So I got up off the floor and wrote it down, carried on ranting but onto paper, and that became the âReality Asylumâ book, and the âCrass logoâ was actually a symbol that Dave designed for the frontispiece of the book. But no, there was no intent there; it was just what I was feeling at the timeâŚâ
With Penny on drums and Steve providing vocals, the duo began writing their own material, Steveâs searingly blunt approach providing the perfect foil for Pennyâs more considered, cerebral musings. The contrast between their very differing approaches can best be gauged when comparing âReality Asylumâ to Steveâs first composition, âSo Whatâ.
âWell, actually, the first song I ever wrote was probably something like âSong For Tony Blackburnâ, which only ever appeared on a tape or whatever,â corrects Steve, âAnd the first proper song I wrote was âDo They Owe Us A Living?â The second one was âSo Whatâ, I think, and by then Iâd sat down and read âReality Asylumâ. To be honest, it really annoyed me in a way; it was all âIâ, âIâ, âIâ, âyouâ, âyouâ, âyouâ, âmeâ, âmeâ, âmeââŚ
âThen again, when I look at how we laid the lyrics out on [that first 12â] âThe Feeding Of The 5000â, with all the obliques and no punctuation, I find that annoying as well, but at the time, I agreed with the others that if we made it difficult for people to read, theyâd have to concentrate a lot harder.
âAnyway, little did I know that the first song I ever wrote, âOwe Us A Livingâ, which I sang under my breath, marching back from the shops going, you know, âFuck the politically mindedâŚâ, would be the main song that Iâm remembered for. And all the other songs Iâve written that I consider far better than that â âcos Iâve written some great songs since Crass â no one knows, or cares, what they fucking are! And if I formed another band tomorrow, you know full well that thereâd still be people shouting for âOwe Us A Livingâ even nowâŚ
âTo be honest with you, we never thought it would get any further than the music room at Dial anyway; it would just be our little hobby⌠we never dreamt weâd ever get a gig. We didnât take ourselves that seriously, to start with. Then this guy turned up called Steve Herman â he was a bald, beardy bloke with glasses and sandals⌠didnât look anything like a punk, but he could play guitar, and we thought, âFuck it, itâs punk, anything goes!â
âAnd then Andy Palmer turned up; he couldnât play and he didnât have a guitar, but he nicked one from somewhere and tuned it so he could play a chord by putting his finger straight across. And then [bassist] Pete Wright became involved⌠but even then, it was like a weekend thing â it was only once weâd done a couple of gigs, that we thought we were maybe onto something. And we were still going on blind drunk at that point, just having a laugh really.â
âYes, it was Steve and myself at first,â clarifies Penny, âAnd Eve [Libertine, real name Bronwen Jones, one of their vocalists] used to live just up the road, a mile or so away. She used to come down, and although she didnât join in with the band for the first year, she was quite instrumental in the nature of how we grew â especially the feminist aspect of it all. It was Eve that disallowed our use of the word âcuntâ in the lyrics.
âAnd because weâve always been this cultural centre [at Dial House], weâve always had people coming and going; thereâs always been an itinerant body of people moving in and out â some of them stuck and some of them didnât. We never ever thought to ourselves, âOh, we need to get a bassistâ, or anything. People just turned up.
âI remember Andy turning up; he was at a local art school, and heâd never played an instrument in his life, but he nicked one from the International Times offices, and came round and said he wanted to be in the band, so he was. Thatâs how it worked; we were just mucking about. Me and Steve originally called ourselves âStormtrooperâ⌠Eve thoroughly objected to that, and thankfully persuaded us otherwise!
âBut really it all just happened, it wasnât by design. Although there did come a point after the first year, when we realised that we were basically fucking ourselves up, drinking quite a lot and using other substances. We couldnât have kept going like that, so we had to say, âAre we going to take this seriously, or are we just going to carry on pointlessly like this?â So we had this big conference for a whole day, which was very self-conscious, and we made these decisions about what we were going to do, and those things stuck. And by then, all the different people who were going to be in the band were already in the band, and from then on we only incorporated extra people if they could actually add something to it. So we had filmmakers and poets turn up and get involved, and I suppose if a saxophonist had turned up, we might have got them in as well, but they didnât!â
Prior to them sobering up though, the very first Crass gig was during the summer of 1977, somewhere on the Tottenham Court Road⌠although the band didnât actually get to perform their full set.
Andy of Crass debating with police outside the Zig Zag, picture by Tony Mottram.
âThere was a big squat there back then, with a big yard out back,â recalls Penny, âand we did three-and-a-half songs, before we got switched off by this retired colonel, who thoroughly objected to what we were saying! It was a very nice squat, very regula...