Story of Crass , livre ebook

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206 pages

English

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Crass was the anarcho-punk face of a revolutionary movement founded by radical thinkers and artists Penny Rimbaud, Gee Vaucher, and Steve Ignorant. When punk ruled the waves, Crass waived the rules and took it further, putting out their own records, films, and magazines and setting up a series of situationist pranks that were dutifully covered by the world’s press. Not just another iconoclastic band, Crass was a musical, social, and political phenomenon.

Commune dwellers who were rarely photographed and remained contemptuous of conventional pop stardom; their members explored and finally exhausted the possibilities of punk-led anarchy. They have at last collaborated on telling the whole Crass story, giving access to many never-before-seen photos and interviews.

Sujets

Penny Rimbaud

Subculture

Thatcher

Politics

Gee Vaucher

Margaret Thatcher

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Publié par	PM Press
Date de parution	01 septembre 2009
Nombre de lectures	0
EAN13	9781604862331
Langue	English

Informations légales : prix de location à la page 0,0025€. Cette information est donnée uniquement à titre indicatif conformément à la législation en vigueur.

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Cover
Title Page
Copyright
Table of Contents
Cover
Title Page
Copyright
ANOK4U2?
THE BAND & SUPPORTING CAST
BOHEMIAN RHAPSODY – THE SIXTIES
EXIT-STANCE
HIPPY HIPPY SHAKE
CH-CH-CH-CH-CHANGES
721984
NIGHT OF THE LONG KNIVES
621984
521984
421984
321984
221984
121984
1984
TO INFINITY AND BEYOND
AFTER THE FACT
EPILOGUE
DISCOGRAPHY OF RECORDS MADE AND PRODUCED BY CRASS, & OTHER OUTPUT
BIBLIOGRAPHY
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
Dedicated to Joanna Markunas
ANOK4U2?
“This time it’s for real!” jeered Ronnie Biggs, guest-recording with the remnants of The Sex Pistols on the Great Rock’N’Roll Swindle soundtrack, and the paradox was complete. What had seemed like a life-line to a generation who increasingly felt like the rubbish left out on England’s streets was being presented by Malcolm McLaren and his cohorts as nothing more than an elaborate illusion – a rabbit pulled out of the hat, a simple act of misdirection.
The Swindle may have sought to confuse, and certainly succeeded in entertaining, but the lost tribes of England wanted more than that. For people who’d bought into punk as a way of life, ‘this time it’s for real’ was a phrase that could have, should have, meant something.
‘Helen! Never trust a hippy!’ cried McLaren in the Swindle. We giggled at the cheek, unsure as to whether there was a tongue in it. Ironic perhaps, that it was to be a group of people emanating from the hippy era that would put the trust back into our lives.
On a more positive, and perhaps relevant note, there was a benign revolution in Nicaragua, when the Sandanistas stormed parliament and seized power. So, in amongst all the despair, always seeds of hope and a sense of possibility. Elsewhere, Astrid Proll is arrested in London and Sid Vicious pogoes off this mortal coil.
“This time it’s for real.” The irony is complete. London 1978. Punk is dead.
Which leaves a whole generation of punk rockers without a soundtrack. Because by now, punk is far more than a bunch of alternative music fans. Indeed, it always has been. It starts as a fashion statement screamed out of a shop called Sex (latterly Seditionaries) in the Kings Road and evolves into a lifestyle screaming danger gear and rebellion.
Nature abhors a vacuum. As does capitalism, naming it the ‘gap in the market’.
Enter Crass. The rest is, or should be, history. But it is a history so far shamefully under-recorded. Here, then, is the history of Crass. As an early Crass poster cried, hanging tattered and torn outside the corpse of the Roxy Club in Covent Garden: ‘Germany got Baader-Meinhoff, England got punk. But they can’t kill it.’
They say the past is a different country, but the UK in the mid-seventies was a different continent. Or should that be incontinent – England was a mess when punk exploded into its avenues and alleyways.
In 1974, the miners had gone on strike and brought down the Conservative government. But subsequently the economy, under a Labour Government, had fallen to pieces. They were forced to go cap in hand to the International Monetary Fund to request an emergency loan. By 1976, inflation was running at over 23%, and unemployment had doubled in just three years from just over 2% to almost 6%, the worst since the recession of the thirties. The temporary blip of post war economic boom that peaked in the sixties seemed been replaced by a wider post colonial-exploitation bust that saw Great Britain being put back in her economic post-Empire place by colonies sick of being sucked dry to feed their mother country.
Factor in the long oppressively hot summer of 1976 and you’re getting a recipe for anger. A minister for drought – Denis Howell – was appointed and announced everyone had to reduce their water consumption by half or face water rationing. As the heat wave roared on, increasing numbers were admitted to hospital suffering from sunstroke and heart attacks. Motorways had problems with tarmac melting. The drought hardly helped the economy either, as thousands threw ‘sickies’ from work in order to enjoy the sunshine.
Factor in the mass acceptance of racial bigotry to all this and you’re running a serious risk of the anger exploding in a dangerous direction. This was a time when it was still acceptable for TV to run a comedy (Love Thy Neighbour) based on the racial bigotry of a white man towards his black neighbours; a time when Eric Clapton – a musician who had made a fortune from playing the blues – said live onstage that England had “become overcrowded”, advising the crowd to vote for Enoch Powell to stop Britain becoming “a black colony”. (Rock Against Racism would be set up in late ’76 as a direct response to these remarks.) In May 1976, the National Front received almost one in five of the votes at a UK by-election, while summer saw race riots during the annual Notting Hill Carnival as largely black youth declared temporary war on the police.
A time before ‘political correctness’ had ‘gone mad’, as the Daily Mail might see it.
“I think that the general feeling in society from the mid-seventies onwards was that both main parties had nothing to offer. Till then people thought society would automatically get better.” – Dave Morris (London Greenpeace, McLibel Two)
Anarchy In The UK at the time was publicly represented by the Angry Brigade – a loose group of anarchists whose bombing campaign targeted a wide range of fascist and capitalist targets without any loss of life. The targets were usually connected with the state, though interestingly they also targeted hippie boutique Biba, and accompanied by communiqués that sought to explain their actions and encourage the workers to join in. Which, of course, they didn’t.
Look backwards and England looks backward. The only spaghetti we had came in a tin (or a junction); our three television channels started at lunchtime and finished before midnight; videos were yet to come into the public arena and foreign holidays were just taking off as Spain became a popular destination. No matter that it was still a fascist dictatorship – Franco may have died in 1975, but democracy wouldn’t happen until 1978. Anna Ford caused a stir by breaking the sexual apartheid to become the first woman newsreader.
England looks backward but was desperately scraping around for something that may point forward. The emphasis on ‘new’ had percolated through the seventies: slums were pulled down en masse in cities to be replaced by shiny utopian tower blocks. Just twenty years after the end of rationing, the consumer society was rife. People consumed for the sake of consuming: trendy new electrical items, coffee percolators, soda siphons; if it was new you had to buy it, regardless of whether you needed it or would ever use it, and if it was a ‘status symbol’, all the better. Credit cards and cash machines were introduced to encourage more spending, even if you didn’t have the money. The never never. Still you kept buying. New new new. But where was the new music?
In December 1976, The Sex Pistols swore on the teatime family viewing Today programme and punk went overground. Anger and anarchy. Outrageous clothes that were statements in themselves. A generation of parents recoiled in horror and a nation of straights were suitably disgusted. Punk jumped from being almost a secret confined largely to London and Manchester, to being tabloid headline news. Depending on who you ask, it was the end of the beginning or the beginning of the end for punk. 1
Fast forward to 1978 and the initial punk explosion had blown over, particularly in the eyes of the media. The cathartic scream had been screamed and in some ways the dust was settling. Of the initial heroes (in an age of none), The Sex Pistols had been sent to America to die a needless death and The Clash were busy deciding they weren’t so bored with the USA after all, and metamorphosing into a successful middle of the road rock band. The music industry was promoting a roster of bands under labels like ‘new wave’ and ‘power pop’, doing what it had always done best: taking a movement, watering down its essence and repackaging it for public consumption in a way that kept the accoutrements and readily identifiable ephemera whilst surgically removing the spirit. Bands like The Boomtown Rats leapt up the charts whilst The Jam self-censored the lyrics of This Is The Modern World, adding to doubts that they had ever been a punk band in the first place.
But the punk spirit wasn’t so easy to brush under the carpet. To a legion of British youth, punk meant more than that. Because, like the great post-war youth movements before it – beatniks, teds, mods, hippies etc – punk gave the individual a route to personal liberation and self-discovery; a place for outsiders, romantics, lovers of outrage, people who sought a life less ordinary. And once discovered, it felt way beyond a simple fashion to be discarded when the forces of attempted control declared that it was time to move on to a soulless mod revival or water down to a soulless power pop tune.
Punk had, to varying extents, preached a dogma of DIY – the idea that anyone could do it. Helped by the supposed rudimentary nature of the music, punks across the land took this onboard to form bands and write fan-magazines. Strangled fanzine (not Sniffin’ Glue as is often credited) emerged with a