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.
The power of Crass was their vitriolic anger, their high intelligence and their questioning lyrics and music. Each album was a major event, encased in Vaucher's artwork they were almost concept albums of anarchist politics that documented the turbulent times they existed in better than anyone else and to see the key members of the band reconciled on stage was powerful, emotional and inspiring.
Crass’s message still stands strong to this day and is worth investigation. This autumn Steve will play those powerful songs again on a short tour and they will be celebrated for making a difference.
Next Wednesday, we will talk about the revolution of punk and iPad.
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.
The power of Crass was their vitriolic anger, their high intelligence and their questioning lyrics and music. Each album was a major event, encased in Vaucher's artwork they were almost concept albums of anarchist politics that documented the turbulent times they existed in better than anyone else and to see the key members of the band reconciled on stage was powerful, emotional and inspiring.
Crass’s message still stands strong to this day and is worth investigation. This autumn Steve will play those powerful songs again on a short tour and they will be celebrated for making a difference.
Next Wednesday, we will talk about the revolution of punk and iPad.
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