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. “Lucid in recounting their dealings with freaks, coppers, and punks the band’s voices predominate, and that’s for the best.” —The Guardian UK “Thoroughly researched...chockful of fascinating revelations...it is, surprisingly, the first real history of the pioneers of anarcho-punk.” —Classic Rock “They (Crass) sowed the ground for the return of serious anarchism in the early eighties.” — Jon Savage, England’s Dreaming George Berger has written for Sounds , Melody Maker and Amnesty International amongst others. His previous book was a biography of the Levellers: State Education/No University . The Story of Crass By George Berger PM Press Copyright © 2008 Omnibus Press All rights reserved. ISBN: 978-1-60486-037-5 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, CHAPTER 1 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 suck