Fight War, Not Wars! British Peace-punk in retrospect: a review

Again, a piece I wrote for RE/fuse issue #6. This time a lengthy review of some of the records and books that have come out over the past couple of years documenting the rise of U.K. peace-punk in the late seventies and early eighties. This review is already somewhat older, but I'm currently in the middle of generating some brand new content for this blog, so keep your eyes open for future installments. Untill then: enjoy!


George Berger – The Story of Crass (Omnibus Press, 2006)

Ian Glasper – The Day the Country Died: A History of Anarcho Punk 1980-1984 (Cherry Red Books, 2006)

V/A - Anti-War: Anarcho-Punk Compilation Vol. 1 CD (Overground Records, 2005)
V/A - Anti-State: Anarcho-Punk Compilation Vol. 2 CD (Overground Records, 2005)
V/A - Anti-Society: Anarcho-Punk Compilation Vol. 3 CD (Overground Records, 2006)
V/A - Anti-Capitalism: Anarcho-Punk Compilation Vol. 4 CD (Overground Records, 2006)

When I first discovered Crass, I must say that right from the start they confused me more than they actually spoke to me. Their version of punk was unlike anything I had heard or was listening to at the time, and their lyrics, though obviously political, seemed weird and did not match any politics I had come across up until then. As a whole, the band and the music seemed rather uninviting and incomprehensible, yet somehow I stuck with it and over time grew to love them.

Maybe the fact that I didn’t ‘get them’ at first, was because I was listening to them in 1999, not in 1977. When Crass originated I wasn’t even born, and while the Cold War was shaping the world in the 1980s, I was at home playing with my Lego’s. By 1999, when I got my hands on my first Crass CD, Best before…1984 the world was arguably equally bleak as it had been in 1977 (or 1984 for that matter), but the deplorable state of the world was only just starting to seep through to me. The validity of the themes that Crass were addressing in their songs had not yet reached my high-school punk mind. Despite the encircled ‘A’-s I drew on my backpack, I only had a vague clue about what anarchism was, and that clue mostly came from my Propagandhi records. I could relate somewhat to the band’s anti-Americanism (as expressed in 1984’s Smash the Mac) or their anti-organized religion sentiments (Reality Asylum) but the underlying feminist critique was largely lost on me, nor did I really understand what the hell all their talk about the Falklands was all about or what they meant by their constant reference of Nagaski (hey, wasn’t bombing the Japanese the reason ‘we’ won WWII?).

On top of all this some of their songs were rather horrible. Though at this point I can see the artistic value of a song like Nagaski Nightmare, it is still hard for me to listen the whole tune from start to finish without skipping it and moving on to the next one. But no matter how ‘unlistenable’ some of their songs were, and might still be, what they did do was intrigue me. I instantly felt that whatever it was that Crass were about, at least it was something genuine and dangerous, thereby urging me to delve deeper into their music, their words and their beliefs. The fact that I knew almost nothing about the band, except for the short outline of the band’s history as included in the booklet accompanying their aforementioned Best before… CD only added to the enigma as did the fact that I had a hard time believing all the stuff in there was actually true. Especially the pranks the band pulled on Teen-magazine Loving by convincing them to include a single by Creative Recording And Sound Services (C.R.A.S.S.) with their magazine in 1980 and the fabricated tape of a fake conversation between Tatcher and Reagan the band send to the press in 1982 seemed surreal and made me question whether the band wasn’t grossly overstating their own importance.

Luckily for me, there is now George Berger’s The Story of Crass to shed some light on that enigmatic band. The book covers the history of Crass as experienced by some of the principal players involved, both in and outside of the band. Despite the fact that the voices of drummer Penny Rimbaud and vocalist Steve Ignorant are the dominant ones in the book, almost all former Crass members have been interviewed for this publication. Although my major critique of the book would be that the editors did a lousy job, leaving in way too many spelling errors and other little mistakes, I do think the book does a good job in describing the history of the band and putting the band’s development into context.

Crass was started in 1977 by thirty-something Dial House (the communal house were the band members ended up living) founder, former art-teacher and drummer Penny Rimbaud and a young punk by the name of Steve Ignorant, who came into contact with the house because his brother used to jam with Rimbaud in a band in the mid-seventies. The band soon expanded into a collective consisting of guitarplayers Andy Palmer and Phil Free, bassplayer Pete Wright, additional singers Eve Libertine and Joy de Vivre, filmmaker Mick Duffield and artist Gee Vaucher. If the book shows one thing, than it is that, even though the band remains relevant today, Crass needs to be understood in its time, through the history of its members and its development as a band. Crass in more ways than one, was a residue of the 1960s. Several of the band’s members had gone to art school during that decade and were influenced by pop-art and performance art, which would later shape the development of the band into incorporating movies into its shows. There was also a strong hippy-element present in the band which led to their political awareness and, for example, their connection to some of the early free festivals in Britain.

But besides being influenced by the sixties, the band was also a product of the seventies and the economic and political climate of those days. Their angst ridden music and lyrics denounced capitalism, war and oppression. In disagreement with both sides in the Cold War, Crass chose another road, that of anarchism, thereby denouncing both the capitalist power structures as their supposed adversaries, the established socialist and communist parties. While Johnny Rotten had proclaimed to be ‘an anarchi-e-st’ (and that he ‘really meant it, maaaaaaaaaan’), Crass actually seemed serious about their non-partisan politics, thereby appealing to hundreds, if not thousands, of young people growing up with the threat of nuclear war hanging over their heads.

As with any good example, other bands taking Crass’s cue were soon to follow. Fed up and disillusioned with the stars of the first wave of punk bands, or a few years to young or living too far from a city to have been there at the start of the punk scene, youth all over England had nevertheless been inspired by punk’s energy and were looking for ways to transform that energy into something of their own. As Sean McGhee, ex-Psycho Faction vocalist and compiler of a 4-CD retrospective on Overground Records of the Anarcho-Punk (or Peace-punk) scene that Crass helped spark in the UK in the early 80ies writes: “Let’s face it, by 1979 Punk was dead on its feet, the inspiration, excitement and passion absorbed by both the music business and an increasingly insipid New Wave. Out in the suburbs and those rural placed that no-one ever visits, there was a whole generation of kids too young to be part of the ‘art school’ elite of those early punk days, but certainly old enough to have felt the initial gut reaction and life-changing ability of the punk beast.”

Crass were the catalyst that changed punk for McGhee and for many other young people in the U.K. and again infused it with relevance and excitement. The band traveled all over the U.K. to play gigs and wherever they went, new bands would spring up in their wake. As said, the scene the band helped jump-start would be referred to as the anarcho- or peace-punk scene. The history of this part of the Britisch punk scene has been documented by punk-historian Ian Glasper in his recently published second book on British punk, The Day the Country Died: A History of Anarcho Punk 1980-1984 . The book is an overview of the peace-punk scene of the early eighties and covers about 90 (!) bands from the era. The bands are categorized by region (London, Wales, Scotland, etc.), following the model that Glasper used in his previous book on punk in England Burning Britain: The History of UK Punk 1980-1984, in which he described the second wave of British punk by focusing on the likes of Abrasive Wheels, Varukers, Discharge, the Exploited and GBH, to name a few. Numerous people interviewed by Glasper in The Day the Country Died cite seeing Crass play live as an eye-opener and an incentive to form new bands or to revive and drastically change their old ones.

A portion of the bands that came into being during the era were outright Crass-copycats. While listening to the four-CD retrospective of the early 80ies anarcho-punk scene on Overground records, you’ll notice how some bands in the scene followed Crass’s musical blueprint of Rimbaud’s almost militaristic drums-style, the band’s staccato guitars and its political lyrics, belched out with venom and spite by singers Steve Ignorant, Eve Libertine, Joy de Vivre and, occasionally bass-player Pete Wright.

Something else that was adopted from Crass by a large part of the scene, and which shaped the look and image of punk for the decades to come, was the band’s decision to solely wear black on stage, giving them a dark image that flirted with fascism, even though that wasn’t the band’s intention per se. According to Steve Ignorant in George Berger’s book The Story of Crass, wearing black clothes was simply a result of the entire band living together in a house and sharing a washingmachine. “The true story is that we used to have this really old washing machine. Someone fucked up the washing so that all the clothes – including my white socks – came out this grey mushy colour. It was a pain – doing eight people’s washing – so we just thought let’s dye it all black – it’ll look smart and won’t be such a hassle on wash day.” Though maybe come up with as a practical solution for wash day, the image of the Crass-members all dressed in black, with black amps and instruments, added to the mystique around the band and intrigued many fans of the band to adopt a similar style, doing away with the more colorfoul punk-fashion of bands like the Pistols.

The critique of an entire scene of Crass-copyists is far from valid however. The sounds on the four CD’s are extremely diverse. Even though all the bands on the ‘Anti-…’ CD’s share a certain connection to the only-vaguely defined ‘anarcho-punk’ or ‘peace-punk’ scene, that was hugely influenced by Crass. And many were (stylistically and musically) influenced and inspired by Crass or somehow connected to them and their labels Crass records and Corpus Christi in one way or another (for example through the famous Bullshit Detector compilation Lp’s). As said, there are those bands that diligently followed Crass’s cue, yet there were also many bands that incorporate other influences into their music. For example, there’s the folk-influenced music of bands like Astronauts, Blyth Power and Danbert Nobacon (a one-man acoustic project band of a member of Chumbawamba who themselves also incorporated a significant folk-influence in their music), the political Oi-anthems of Scotland’s Oi Polloi and the female-fronted, almost poppy punk of Icon A.D. From the dark, heavy onslaught of bands such as Amebix or Antisect, to the stripped-down two man band D&V spitting out lyrics over nothing but drums (in a time before two-man bands were the hip thing). From the melodic and soulful, yet angst-ridden, songs of the Mob and Zounds, to the overtly political fast-driven compositions about Animal Rights and other issues of Conflict. From the Subhumans to Flux of Pink Indians, from New Wave-like melodies, to dark, angry hardcore-punk, the Anarcho-Punk scene encompassed it all and the amount of diversity on these four CD’s is one of their prime assets and I can recommend all the CD’s to anyone interested in this era of punk. They certainly inspired me to start digging deeper into the history of this part of the punk scene and to rediscover some old bands that I hadn’t listened to in a while.

The CD’s and the songs on them, as well as both the books, in words and pictures, echo well the bleakness of what the early eighties must have been like. The Cold War was still in full-swing, with the arm’s race being given a new boost by a certain mr. Reagan residing in the White House and a certain mrs. Thatcher at Downingstreet 10. Unemployment was rampant, creating a lot of dissatisfaction among youngsters, while also giving them enough time to transform that discomfort into music, zines and political action. The stories told in words, songs and pictures show a generation of kids growing up in a world that warranted little hope for the future, yet instead of accepting it, these kids, even through limited actions and with limited means, decided to fight back. By writing songs, venting their frustrations at callously wasted lives of people and animals all over this planet and the destruction of the earth around them, they transformed music into something more. Hopefully these publications will spark a renewed interest in these bands and their ideas.

Undoubtedly the anarcho-punk scene also had its flaws. Stories of holier-than-thou attitudes in the scene (more vegan than you, more anarchist than you, etc.), drug use and other problems regularly come up in the interviews Glasper conducted for his The Day the Country Died and even Steve Ignorant in Berger’s book talks about how he was getting fed up with having to discuss anarchism with the fans of the band after every gig. However, the scene inspired many who would often go on to channel their energy into worthwhile projects and causes. Some of the punkclubs that still exist in the U.K. until this day are residues of the energy that these punks invested into their scene.

What I would have like to have seen however, in both Berger’s as well as Glasper’s books, is a more thorough analysis of the politics of the Anarcho-punk scene and what the contribution of those ideas and politics in the larger scheme of things was. The primary focus is on the bands, which is understandable in many ways, but one of the things that makes the Anarcho-punk scene of the early eighties so inspirational, is that these were bands often had very radical points of view. It would have been interesting in my opinion, if more time had been spent on analyzing those ideals and what became of them in the long-run, in a context beyond just the punk scene, but of British society as a whole. It would have been interesting for example to discus the connections between the anarcho-punk scene of the late 1970s and early 1980s and the autonomous movement that was emerging in Europe at the same time. Glasper for example uses pictures of the Stop the City demonstration in 1983 on the cover of his book, but never really goes into the effects of those demonstrations on the larger scheme of things or into the Anarcho-punk scene as a movement for change. He doesn’t really cover or analyze CND (Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament) or Stop the City as separate entities, but only discusses them in relation to some of the bands and band-members who were active in such initiatives. This also happens with Glasper’s coverage of the rise of the ideas of vegetarianism and animal liberation (like the ALF) within the anarcho scene, which he discusses in his paragraph on Conflict, but which he does not really analyze beyond that. This is a minor point of criticism though, as I understand why Glasper has chosen to focus primarily on the bands and to provide an overview of the scene. In this he succeeds, and his book is a must-read for anyone interested in British punk, anarcho-punk or any of the bands from that era.

In closing, Berger’s The Story of Crass, Glaspers’ The Day the Country Died and the four CD’s on Overground Records were longtime overdue. With all the attention given to American hardcore and first wave British bands like The Sex Pistols and The Clash over the past few years, Crass (though arguably one of the most important punk bands of all time) and the scene they helped spawn have been grossly overlooked. I urge everyone to check out these books and records and the bands they focus on. Highly recommended.