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Crass
by John Robb - More articles
| 01/09/10 02:00 | |
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Has been read
Last
week I was at the Rebellion punk
festival in Blackpool.It’s the biggest punk festival in the world and is
held in the UK’s largest seaside town- a working class resort that is
about as British as you can get- scowling landladies, cheap neons, fish
and chips and cheap amusements are the backdrop to thousands of punks
who turn up from all over the world.Not only was I
playing a set with my band Goldblade but I was also conducting onstage
interviews with punk rock legends like TV Smith and Charlie Harper as well as Penny Rimbaud and Steve Ignorant from Crass.It was the
first time the pair of them had been together on stage for decades and
for many in the packed room it was a relief to see that they were
friends again. There had been some recent fallout over Steve going out
and playing old Crass
songs in a set that revisited the band’s greatest moments-
it was a decision that was quite controversial with raging internet
debates over whether this was what Crass were about. Penny wrote a statement about
it on the internet voicing his displeasure and for a brief moment it
looked like the key partnership at the heart of Crass were falling out.
Onstage in Blackpool though penny apologised and his respect and
admiration for his cohort was powerful and touching.  Crass were that sort of band.
They were not even technically a band, they were an art anarchist movement
that explained just what anarchy was to a generation of young punk ears
in the UK in the late seventies and early eighties. They sold a massive
amount of records with no press and radio play. They existed beyond the
fringes and were perhaps the genuine heart of the punk
movement.Crass music was a mixture of the angriest
blasts of punk rock vitriol and avant garde tape collages,
they were genuinely original but they have been somewhat removed from
the history of music by a music press that seems keen to tell the story
of music on its own terms. The post punk
period which Crass
were a staple of has been rewritten. This was a time of
great groups like the Gang Of
Four etc but Crass were equally important. Just because they
were not on a major label or fitted into the comfortable lineage they
have been edited out. The post punk period was far more diverse and
fascinating than has been presented. And if Crass don’t fit as snugly into the student
takeover of the strands of punk it doesn’t mean that they should be
removed from the story.What they did was quite remarkable and they
were the closest that the UK came to a genuine anarchist movement.
Compared to Greece-
the country that invented the word anarchy and still has a strong
anarchistic tradition- all this may seem quite tame, the British don’t really do
anarchy, maybe it’s too damp and cold for such shenanigans,
who knows! Crass were huge in the UK and their albums were
signposts in the post punk
comedown. They influenced a massive array of musicians,
with unlikely names like the Charlatans and Suede as being key converts to their imagination
and musical power. Penny was the drummer who brought in such esoteric
influences as Edward
Elgar and free
jazz into his militaristic drumming, he also wrote a lot of
the lyrics- dense, highly intelligent questioning texts that were
intellectual and yet approachable. Penny is the last of the hippies, an unrepentant example
of the power of sixties hippie culture. He lived through the sixties-
there’s a great clip on youtube of him meeting the Beatles in 1964 on live TV
when he wins a prize for a typically clever piece of
artwork.Penny was an art school drop out who ran an open house near
London called Dial
House. It was here that loose collection of similar art
types coalesced including Gee
Vaucher whose stunning artworks for the album covers
complete the Crass
equation. It was into this house that the younger Steve Ignorant arrived
in the mid seventies, Steve was initially fired by Bowie then punk and
it was this combination of Steve’s street punk attitude and Penny's wily
old hippie intelligence that gave Crass their power. They straddled the two most
fiercely anti revolutionary musical movements in the UK and took the
positives from both and forged something highly unique. They turned a
generation onto pacifism and vegetarianism and were tracked by the police and
had questions asked about them in Parliament and rattled the powers at
be with their high IQ questioning of the system.
Next Wednesday, we will talk about the revolution of punk and iPad.
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