Foreword to the book on Crass,
Love Songs, published by Pomona Books, 2004
A beautiful sunny day. T-shirt weather already and it's only March. Fallen
branches snap under foot. The light filters through the trees and is hazy
around us. A bloke passes by walking his dog...
"Good morning."
It's an understatement.
Christian (Pomona
design deity) and I are heading for Epping town centre. It's somewhere
over there - past the fields, trees, hedges, motorway bridge and, finally,
schools and housing estates. We've just spent a night with Penny and Gee at
the Crass house. We come to a pond in a clearing. It's teeming with life -
water lilies and pond mint, crane flies and cabbage whites. We both feel unusually
happy. It's not just the sunshine and the summer-to-come. We're talking about
Crass, the influence they've had on our lives, reminiscing about when we first
discovered them, gigs we went to, people we knew. It's taken 20 years, but
visiting the house, meeting them, feels like a circle closed; we'd traced
the source of a large part of ourselves.
When I was about 15, someone in my class drew a cartoon of me in their rough
book. The speech bubble coming from my lips read: 'Crass, Crass, Crass, Crass,
Crass.' I was a sensitive kid and the piss-take hurt. I hated that anyone
saw me as this tedious, one-dimensional character saying the same thing over
and over again, over and over again. I'm not so hard on myself now. In fact,
I like that I was obsessional, up to my eyeballs in it. And Crass had that
effect, there were no half-measures.
I'd lived a typical working class provincial life until Crass. There had
been few books around the house. The pictures on the wall were plastic-framed
prints of seascapes and sad clowns. Mum (not dad, as if!) fed us on
fish fingers and Arctic Rolls, never pasta, spaghetti or beans you didn't
buy in a tin. I had all the love in the world, but I didn't have discussions
about art, politics, literature, poetry or philosophy. A few of us - the quieter
ones, I suppose (and it's the quiet ones you need to watch out for, of course)
- had gravitated to each other at school. All from the same background, wondering
just how big and wide a life could be. Someone somehow discovered Crass and,
at last, we'd found our epiphany and our totem: the rest, our former lives
especially, was history.
Crass were the utmost. Loudest, fastest, hardest, most fundamental. The music
was an unrelenting stop-start cacophony. If you listened hard enough though,
the structure was actually quite conventional - intro, verse, chorus, verse
- and it soon made sense. The effect was the same with the lyric. They were
screaming bloody murder at meat-eaters, fascists, liberals, Jesus Christ,
do-gooders, bigots, capitalists, the media, communists and The Clash (who,
they claimed, had exposed their hypocrisy by signing to a major label). They
blow-torched the lot, headstrong and sloganeering but in the scrabble of lyric,
information and artwork, they were also cerebral and poetic.
They performed under pseudonyms (in sublimation of their egos); pressed their
own records and sold them cheaply; refused to speak to the music press; carried
their own musical equipment and amplifiers; drank tea instead of beer; had
people of all ages in the band; advertised a specific date when they would
split up (no undignified lingering); appeared at village halls and scout huts
- every rock 'n' roll stereotype was eschewed, which, paradoxically, made
them the most valid, thrilling definition of rock 'n' roll ever. They wore
black clothes and were like a salvation army moving through Britain, picking
up kids, lifting off the top of their heads, stirring up their brains and
leaving them walking their hometowns shell-shocked. Crass were irresistible
because they were an authentic revolution, challenging and confronting all
that had gone before.
They spawned hundreds of satellite groups, many of whom were showcased on
their Bullshit Detector compilation albums. I bought a guitar and within
two weeks the band I was in, Untermensch, had released an album on cassette.
Our manifesto was formed by Crass and one of their apostles, Andy T, who turned
out (bizarrely) to live less than half a mile away from us. His track, Jazz
on a Summer's Day, had a huge impact, both in its sentiment and the do-it-yourself
ethos it summarised. While he speeded up and slowed down a jazz record, Andy
spoke deadpan into a cassette recorder (in, would you believe, a Lancashire
accent):
I still play it every two or three years. Andy's voice is full of defiance
and self-belief and when I hear it again it reminds me to be strong and also
of those times, us all being friends and realising it was okay to write poetry
and stories and not have to hide our intelligence and sensitivity, as we had
during most of our childhood. Crass were avowed anarchists, and while this
was open to various interpretation, to me it transmuted to self-belief and
compassion for others, an absolute respect for freedom: 'Be exactly who you
want to be, do you what you want to do. I am he and she is she but you're
the only you.' (Big A, Little A).
Untermensch became a fanzine as well as a band. We devoted the centre spread
of our first issue to Crass. There were other groups of course, many of whom
were perhaps more frequent visitors to our turntables because their music
was less radical, but Crass' position as cultural and political elders was
unequivocal. The Sex Pistols, The Jam, The Clash, The Buzzcocks etc all had
energy and some great songs but they fell considerably short of Crass' integrity,
authenticity and intellect. Our heartfelt articles were typed on to strange
double-sheeted paper that was horrible to the touch - dry and smelling of
charcoal. The school had a community officer who organised tea dances for
pensioners and helped the mums and toddlers group with their leaflets. He
had a beard and wore sandals with socks underneath. He agreed that we could
use the school duplicator to print the fanzine but noticed the swear words.
"Look lads, I don't want to impinge on what you're doing or anything,
and it's great that you're doing something positive with your time, but could
you spread your fucks out a bit? If they're all in one place, we might get
a few complaints."
Reading through the lyrics once more, I'm struck by how acutely they summarise
a critical historical period. I'd forgotten (thankfully) the sheer bleakness
of the early 1980s. If Crass appear to be reduced to hysteria and neurosis
in places, it is with good reason. Death really did feel to be everywhere.
We were led to believe that nuclear war was imminent. The countdown had begun
and we were seconds from midnight. There were marches and badges, films and
documentaries: mushroom clouds, bodies snagged in barbed wire fences, Hiroshima,
Nagasaki - coming to your town soon. A car door slamming on the next street
might be the aftershock of a fallen missile. We'd soon be stock-piling rings
drawn from the fingers of the dead and comforting shaking, wide-eyed women
on the streets like in the film, The War Game. Later, if we survived,
we'd have to bury stillborn, malformed babies. The war hadn't even started
but you already felt you were suffering from a kind of radiation sickness.
Three million people were unemployed. Factories were shutting down and you
never heard of anyone getting office jobs back then. This was relentless and
had the affect of suffusing you with hopelessness, like placing a polythene
bag over your life. Meanwhile, at school, if you aspired to anything half-decent,
they took it as arrogance or that you were kidding yourself, living on dreams.
There didn't seem to be anything worth growing up for: rainy days, sleeping
in, baked beans for dinner, television, a walk around the town centre in the
afternoon, home for tea, more television, back to bed, waiting for the bomb
to drop.
At least you now had Crass on your side, reporting back from all this misery
but also nurturing hope and individualism, a way out. Their anger is palpable
in the songs, an anger borne from suffering the consequences of other people's
greed and selfishness. All these years on, I am still angry too, that fear
of the bomb and fear of the future blighted my childhood and early adulthood.
Margaret Thatcher rises from her sepulchral majesty in these lyrics and I
am reminded of my hatred of her: her dogma; her condescension; the sense that
she was the embodiment of evil, unfeeling, uncaring, contaminated.
Love Songs is probably best read over a few sessions. It is intense
and relentless and assails the reader. I like this effect, thoughts provoked
from bombardment. The energy still crackles. Much of it is frighteningly prescient
- foretelling of the grip of conglomerates, the idolatry of wealth etc. Of
course, with a menu so rich, it is important to disseminate, think for yourself
beyond the holler. Back then, I remember some 'fans' becoming dogmatic about
Crass, revelling in the austerity and viewing every line as an irrefutable
truth. I thought the idea was to question, think for yourself, and if that
meant disagreeing with a Crass viewpoint, so be it. They covered a lot of
issues; a total accord would surely have been evidence of a feckless mind.
I was (and still am), for example, troubled by their stance on religion. In
most other places their anger is righteous but here they seem spiteful. They
gorge on Christ's status as a symbol of guilt, which is part of their function
as iconoclasts, but they choose to over-look the happiness and succour he
brings to millions. And all those great buildings and pieces of art!
The feminist text of Penis Envy probably had the most lasting impact
on me. It has informed my thinking on women and womanhood ever since. I imagined
it would have been a starting pistol to scores of albums and bands developing
the theme but sadly it sits pretty much in isolation in my record collection.
It had felt like we were getting to somewhere good, but sexism is now a thriving
adjunct of consumerism and it seems fair game to exploit, ridicule and objectify
both women and men. I resent that I have to explain to my young children why
a naked woman is leaning over the bonnet of a car ("She looks like a
dog!" one of them cried once) on a giant billboard poster. It also isn't
fair that I sense I am humourless or prudish for taking offence.
Back to the Crass house. The walls and floors are crooked. It feels like
you're all at sea. Gee is warm and chatty. Later she'll drive us into town
and tell us about a performance artist whose partner cuts him with a razor
blade on stage. She thinks it's 'strangely beautiful,' the blood patterns
across his skin, his bravery and honesty. She's very matter-of-fact, she could
be telling us that the local bakery has a new line in scones. In the house
she shows us a book she's working on, where she's stuck animal heads on to
people in old black and white photographs. Christian thinks its brilliant.
Profound even. I'm not very good with art. I imagine showing the book to my
dad and his response. I want to laugh. I wanted to laugh at the performance
artist too. Gee said it took a few days for him to heal. I imagine him on
a 30-date tour, all of them consecutive and with afternoon matinees in local
schools. What a bloody mess! I'm not very good with art.
Penny is variously tending his garden, prodding at the open fire or, well,
brooding. He seems tormented. He's halfway through a book, a poem, a life.
Perhaps he's spent too much time discussing art, politics, literature, poetry
and philosophy. His hair is tatty and he's wearing those trousers that stop
just past the knee, almost-shorts. The Face will want him for their
next instalment of peasant chic. He has this very serious, quite intimidating
face but when he smiles it's just about the best smile you'll ever see, eyes
dancing, happy lines all over the place. While he's jamming logs into the
fire I notice that the skin on his legs is that of a much younger man: all
this insurrection must be good for the flesh. He has extraordinary charisma,
strength of character and self-belief glows around him like a barbwire halo.
We chat on relatively deep levels but I sense that, as I talk, he is three
thoughts and six ideas removed, on to somewhere else. Or he's heard what I
have to say before, long ago.
I'm struck by how fantastic it is that these people, so palpably different
than us, have had such an influence on our lives, that from this wonky house
(all the members of Crass passed through it at some time) so much was galvanised.
I've read somewhere that they sold more than a million records, imagine that.
While I'm there, I don't think of this legacy and I'm not overawed (as I thought
I might be). I keep thinking how trusting they are, and kind, letting us into
their house, feeding us, and that although they're opinionated and sometimes
prickly, they're also - and there's only one word for this really - loveable.
They'll probably hate me for that.
Love
Songs, a collection of Crass' lyrics and poetry, is published by Pomona
Books.