Cool Media. Hello, and welcome to Cool People Who Did Cool Stuff, a podcast that is sometimes recorded. Well, Margaret's dog licks her hand and then Margaret has to move her hand away from the dog, and then Margaret thinks, rather than not have this be the introduction, it will be the introduction. I'm your host, Margaret Kiljoy, and this is Cool People Who Did Cool Stuff. And my guest is really Holland.
Hi. Hello, so deeply psyched to be here. Thanks for having me.
Yeah, I'm excited to have you here. And I'm like, oh, I'm talking faster, and that's probably because I ate a banana in between breaks. And one thing I like about Crass is that they don't really do drugs or drink, because I also don't. But then instead I eat sugar and then my pace of talking begins to go up.
And that's so benign that you're like, You're like, sugar rush is a banana. It wasn't like it wasn't like a little Debbie or something.
Yeah, well I ran out of the sweets in my house. Besides, fruit is what happened. And there's a snowstorm coming tomorrow as I record this, so I will just be forced to eat fruit, which is very good to deal with, Sugar. But I think everyone probably knows who you are and who I am by part four, and you might even,
dear listener, know who Crass is a little bit. But we're going to talk about them more because where we last left off, they had started a band and then an arcopunk had become a serious movement, only I hadn't told you what it was doing yet. So as the seventies closed, oh geez, what will I do without Sophie. Sophie's usually is our producer, but just isn't on the call, and I almost forgot to say that Sophie's our producer, and more importantly that everyone has to say hi to Rory, our audio.
Engineer, Hi, Rory, Rory Hello.
And our theme music was written forced by a woman who once got an entire steampunk convention kicked out of a bar. It was actually funny because then un woman was headlining the main stage of that particular convention, but as a solo act, not as a terrible Crass cover band.
Anyway, I want to hear like rehearsal tapes of that band.
The best you can do is that there is a version from that convention of all three of us playing Bellachow from the main stage, and so I suspect that if you look up Bellachow on Woman on YouTube, it might still be there and you can. Why did I just tell everyone that it was not my best but anyway whatever. I used to make my music playing accordion on the street, but I was never good at it. I just didn't. I had an accordion and was broke.
The accordion is such a beautiful prop and that's all you need. Do you see this, Hold a beautiful instrument and be a beacon of sound.
Yeah, it's a really good busking instrument because it is loud and slightly. In punk scenes, it's like cliche. But when you're out on the street, people are like, holy shit, and accordion. I haven't seen one since my granddad's accordion. And then they're like, here's a dollar, and I'm like, sweet, thank you. And that's a thing that happens.
But that's all you need, just need them to give you the money.
Yeah, exactly. As the seventies closed the idea of punk as a broad musical label that might include bands like The Cure and Bauhaus. Right next to the slits and the cockney rejects that ended specific subgenres started things started getting very more like particular and specific, which is it happens constantly to every genre, and it's both good and bad and equal measure, you know. And one of the main subgenres of punk, especially in the UK, was a
narco punk, which basically meant sounds like crass. There's also OI that came out at around that time, which started off pretty leftist but then has earned a right wing reputation and is more into catchy songs and working class anthems. And I really like OI. I have to admit it is more my style and taste, not politically. But anyway, there's some good oy bands. So this isn't a story about OI. It's a story about anarco punk Crass. They
really did walk the walk. Their albums started selling rather well, and they simply pooled all of their money and then gave themselves about five hundred pounds a year as an allowance, and then all lived in dial house together. And I think that's like minus the like food and whatever stuff they need, you know.
They gave themselves five hundred pounds a year to live on.
Well, I think they're living expenses is that they are in Crass and live at Dial House, so it's like five hundred pounds on top.
Of that it's a tip.
Yeah, totally, that's not enough.
You know.
In the end, I think they probably agreed. They didn't let mass me do interviews with them besides like once or twice if the if the interviewer like really proved them, because they didn't have a rule like we won't do mass media. They had a rule where like we have to trust the journalists or whatever, and it's just like they almost never did, and they gave fanzines interviews constantly, and so they said no to basically every mainstream journalist
and yes to basically every fanzine. So fanzine sales started rising dramatically and the number of fanzines started going through the roof. They would spend every Tuesday answering fan mail. They responded to about two hundred letters a week, and they would like refuse to answer with like form letters, so they'd just sit around and divvy up the letters and write the people.
Can we imagine any big band doing anything like this? Now?
No? And this is like they are out selling ACDC and they.
Are doing this, A that's amazing.
Yeah, it would be like I don't know whoever, I don't I clearly don't know what we call it new. I don't know who's currently the people who would be comparable to.
But can you imagine, Okay, so if they were bigger than ACDC at the time, can you imagine you're driving across Utah or whatever and you turn on the radio and it's crass and not ACDC.
Yeah, but it can never be because they cuss so much. But yeah, but that same level of like they are bigger despite being underground, so which is probably why they have kind of a like being underground is better because it's working for them, you know.
I imagine.
I'm trying to think about different ways that artists could draw lines with media, and yeah, one proposition is we just talk about music because I feel like so much music journalism is just all about.
Gossip and oh yeah, totally, and it.
Often gets incredibly misogynistic.
I wonder if you could just be like, I will only talk about my music or my political positions and just like not talk about like who you're dating or whatever.
You know.
Yeah, I mean I've seen so sort of worse.
Like you know, I had this one band where one of the bandmates admittedly had a fantastic beard, and literally this interviewer only wanted.
To talk to the guitarist about his beard.
Oh my god, uh huh, yeah, it.
Gets it gets stupider than even like your proposal seemed to suggest, or like late lately, I've seen and this makes me. This is so upsetting to me. I've seen press about bands like major press only talk about the supposed mental health of the lead singer who is a woman.
Totally.
Yeah, it's it's so depressing.
It's like, yeah, it's it's fantastically progressive.
Absolutely, I love the like when I do interviews, when I with Feminoschool, when we would do interviews, I loved because it was almost always there was a couple mainstream pieces about us, but not much. And just like the fanzine journalists, especially like weird punk and metal fanzines from Europe would have amazing questions even if it had to be like translated in both directions or whatever, And so
Crass would spend Wednesdays Tuesdays answer letters. Wednesdays, fanzine journalists would come over and a lot of people I think only created fanzines literally as an excuse to meet and talk to Krass, and they just let people do it. They knew that was happening, they didn't care. That's great and their stencyl campaign spread to listeners because they would include stencils and the leaflets that they passed out and
teach people how to spray paint. And then in nineteen eighty they released a benefit split with the Poison Girls that was meant to benefit a bunch of anarchists who are on trial because of this sum. There was this case that was called the Person's Unknown Case, and I don't have the full sense of it. It gets into the Angry Brigade, it gets into Irish politics, it gets into lots of complicated stuff, and I read a few sources about it and they all kind of seemed to
disagree with each other about what it was about. But overall, there was this case that happened where a bunch of people were arrested as terrorists, including like some like like an IRA person or a person accused of mean part of the IRA was arrested and then accused of killing Northern Irish cops, but then started being supported by anarchist
Black Cross and became an anarchist in jail. And there was this whole thing where like it basically seems like the UK cops were terrified that the IRA was going to move more anarchists, and they started like rounding people up or whatever. And four people got put on trial or five I've read both by different sources, and having anarchist literature was considered proof of guilt in this case
that was happening. So Crass and Poison Girls released a benefit for the person's unknown case and the name comes from the persons were known, the four people who are on trial or the five people are on trial, but they were accused of conspiring with persons unknown. So literally it was a case where like, you are being accused of conspiring with we don't know who about, we don't know what.
Oh that sounds extremely illegal.
Yeah, and shockingly including in Thatcher's fucking UK. The defendants were all found not guilty, or four of them were on one of them, I keep keep again, I read a bunch of different things whatever, and so they were like, Okay, we don't need this ten thousand pounds we just raised, and so they they looked at Northern Ireland, which had an anarchist center, which I want to know more about. I want to know more about Northern Ireland as being kind of a center of UK anarchism for a while.
And they were like, London should have an anarchist center, and we have ten thousand pounds. So they opened a short lived place called the Autonomy Center. Only they spelled center wrong because they're British and they don't know a spell, and they I had to make at least one joke about this. It's just I'm constitutionally incapable of not making fun of the British.
Got to talk some shit.
Yeah, And it was a rented warehouse space that they shared with an anarchist print collective called Little A. Every Sunday they put on punk shows six bands for a pound, and like people would come over it, you know, and they made their money on that by beer sales, basically. Steve Ignorant complains later about how it was all just a bunch of people sitting around talking about Bakunin. So he didn't really like the Autonomy Center very much.
Boring.
Yeah, sorry, that the place that once a week you get to go see six bands for a pound and drink like whatever. Anyway, the Autonomy Center itself only lasted about six months, but this version of social centers spread also. In nineteen eighty, You've got this fun event that I really wish I could find more information about. And when I say fun, that gets quotes, But me wanting to
learn more about is true. Remember us talking about the Stonehenge festivals that their friend had started, like several episodes ago, where Wally was like, we're all gonna go squat Stonehenge.
That sounds so flaky.
They kept happening. The Stonehenge festivals lasted almost a decade, and in nineteen eighty Krass was like, all right, well, we're going to bring punk to it. And not just Krass, the Poison Girls and a bunch of other punk bands were like, We're going to go play the Stonehenge Festival, and the punks are going to come because it's a radical, free culture event. Why not. So in the crowd was a biker gang who took a fence to the punks and attacked them. And this is a very like story
as all this time. At first, the bikers stormed the stage during one of the other punk bands and said that they weren't going to tolerate punks at their festival, and then they just like beat up all the punks. They just like went around and like beat everyone up, and it was like a beating up massacre, where like punks were like running away into the woods and being chased by bikers and beating up. It's actually really bad
to quote Penny and Boa about it. Quote. Weeks later, a hippie news sheet defended the bikers, saying that they were an anarchist group who had misunderstood our motives. So maybe the bikers thought that the punks were all fascists. I don't know.
Yeah, indecipherable. There's gotta be okay, there's there's gotta be people obviously.
Who know who're at it. Yeah, yeah, so who.
Have some more informed perspectives. So let's hear from y'all.
Yeah, Because even when I found things about the history of the Stonehenge festival, they were just quoting Penny Rombau from the same source that I was able to find it. There's not a lot of people talking about this happening, and there's even people saying like this sounds like a huge big deal. When you read the book, the story of Krass about it, but then other people talking about the Stonehenge festivals are like, how come no one else
talks about that? And so like, maybe I think it happened, but I don't feel like I totally know the story.
I know I've met a couple of old punks from that from those days in England.
Yeah, if you find out, we'll go back and edit in a further explanation here.
Nice.
So, either way, both Crass and Poison Girls were unable to play. Penny clearly wasn't having a good time at the festival his friend started because the last time he was there it also went really badly. But Crass is growing still and they just get bigger and bigger because DIY advertising, unlike mainstream advertising. The way that mainstream advertising is that in the middle of your podcast, the host, regardless of how they feel about what's about to happen, just pivots to ads.
Masterfully, thank you, and we're back.
So nineteen eighty one, a reviewer said, quote, you come across Crass in every place you look. They rarely play and hardly ever advertise. They live outside the music business, and they're far more successful than most people inside it. They don't need to promote themselves because they're following does that for them? Their logos on one hundred thousand black leather jackets and their name is sprayed on town halls
and bus stops from Amsterdam to Aberdeen. Crass records regularly sell well in excess of the figures achieved by outfits whose faces adorn the megastore displays, yet next to nothing is known of them.
It is so important to look outside of the parameters of the music industry because the way it's set up is like a cattle choote and the musicians are the livestock.
Yeah.
I mean, I know some musicians who've had a fair amount of success through the industry, But the creativity of artists can be applied as well to how we make a living. Yeah, And uh, there's just there's no one way. There is no one way to be an artist anything, totally, and the industry only knows the way that's going to make them the most money. So it's up to every single artist to be creative about how we survive.
Yeah. And like when you work with mainstream stuff, which you can do, you just have to be really aware of what's happening. You have to be really aware of that it's not your only thing. It's like not the only way to be a musician. You can be You can engage with different labels at different levels at different times and then back out of it, like you know, you can like well, I mean they try and stick you contractually, but like, there's lots of ways of doing.
It, and so you have to be extremely wary of things that are independent as well, and don't just trust that like because they're punk or because they have a certain aesthetic or background that they will have the same ethics as you.
I think totally your community totally. And another thing that Crass got to do is they pulled off a bunch of really funny pranks, which is of course they did one of their better ones. So they released this album called Penis Envy that was an intentionally like feminist piece. It was maybe their first like concept album or whatever. It centered the women of the band. Also the men in the band would do shit like write songs about rediscovering how to be a man in a more feminist way.
Like they were actually had really good nuanced gender politics as far as they can tell. And there's a song that they did on penis Envy called Our Wedding, and it is this over the top love song about getting married. It's like a satire of marriage. The lyrics include things like never look at anyone, anyone but me, never look at anyone. I must be all you see, set to like sweet organ music or whatever.
Right, it is so creepy it is, yeah, and you could play that at lots of Christian Nationalists' weddings.
And that's basically what they realized is they were like, I wonder if we can trick someone into releasing this earnestly, and so they wrote a teen girl magazine called Loving who loved this new song by Joida Viv, which is one of the Crass singers, and it was published by According to them, when Krass wrote, they were like, oh, is this new song by Joida Viv published by Creative Recording and Sound Services Crass.
A Oh so good, I know.
And it's like a that's like a seamless acronym like that that wouldn't raise any red flags if.
I saw that, you know, and warms my heart.
And so Loving Magazine agreed to release the single free to any of their readers who would send them a stamp, and then they told their readers that the single would quote make your wedding day just that extra bit special. Joy de Vive has captured all the happiness and romance of that all important big day, your wedding, So make sure you send off for your copy and time for that grand occasion. It's a must for all true romantics.
It's so eerie. I was listening to it as I was walking my dog this morning, and yeah, I feel like one of my bandmate's sisters is in a really intense church and he talked about her wedding and the vows reminded me of that song. So it's a yeah, I really appreciate Crass's take on the patriarchy and religion. Yeah, it's something that really really deserves to be roasted hard.
And I think that I really love how feminists they were at the gate, Like I love that, like because that's I mean, that's one of the things that you don't when I imagine old punk. I'm not immediately like, ah, good feminist politics, you know, but like many of them did, and certainly cross and when the magazine found out that they got pranked, they were really mad. And Penny just told them that their magazines and others like it were
quote absolutely obscene and despicable. They exploit people in aggressive and unpleasant manner.
That's true.
They hadn't broken any laws, and they did not.
And yeah, it sounds if you listen to the song, like it really could just be played on the radio as like a love song. Uh yeah, because that's how patriarchal so many love songs are. I mean, it's very like it's very phil Spectory in a way.
I don't know Phil Specter as I feel terrible about that he.
Was a he was a murderer.
Uh oh shit, okay?
Who who was like a really important producer?
Oh fuck okay?
And like he like he was part of I don't know fully, but because I I write off people who are total pieces of shit sometimes and it's hard to really remember everything about them. But like I think he created the wall of sound. If that rings a bell, it's.
Just like really like the concept of like what a lot of the like no wave bands and stuff were doing of Like it's kind of as loud as possible.
I love your misinterpretation of that. No, like no, it was it was like a sixties sound esthetic.
Okay, Okay, no, I don't know it, but what I do know about No, it's not time for an ad break. I'll just keep reading the thing. So yeah, they hadn't broken any laws, so they got away with it. In nineteen eighty one, things were getting really heated in the UK. Riots were breaking out across the country against police racism and violence, starting in Brixton. Under Thatcher, unemployment continued to rise. Punks responded with flyers that said things like national tragedy,
twenty three million people still employed in Northern Ireland. Irish rebels were dying during hunger strikes in prison, and more and more people were sympathetic to the cause of Irish unification, although there were also more terrorist attacks and such, and so people were getting polarized on it. In nineteen eighty two, Crass released what they sort of figured it would be their last record, Christ the Album, a big old double album,
but then the Falklands War kicked off. I actually only learned about the Falklands War because of I really like this band, New Model Army, that's like an old UK band, and so I was like listening to them since I was a teenager, and they talked about the Falklands were and I was like, I had no idea what it was. I was like seventeen or whatever.
But that's that's like a that's an Elvis Costello song. Right, New Model.
Army, Oh New Mottle Army gets its name from it was part of the English Civil War. There was the kind of group tied in with the Levelers and stuff that we're trying to create a more just England. But I actually hate the actual New Model Army from back then because they were who invaded Ireland and like kind of genocided them so and like you in like England, they have this like oh the people fighting for good,
but then Cromwell used them as like useful idiot's. Basically that was another revolution that was betrayed from my point of view. If you want to hear more about it, you can go back and listen to me talk to John Darnell from The Mountain Goats about the Levelers and the Diggers on an old episode. So I don't know if it wouldn't surprise me if Alvis Costello would also use that as a song, but I think the band gets it from the old group.
Yeah, but the.
Falklands War kicks off. There're these off the coast of Argentina called the Falklands Islands, and they are part of the UK. For whatever dumb colonial reason, they're still part of the UK. In nineteen eighty two, Argentina was like, we want our shit back, and so they invaded and the UK was like, are you kidding me? We're the fucking UK. The war lasted seventy four days and ended
in argentina surrender. The UK stomped them. About one thousand people died, mostly Argentinians, but two hundred and fifty five Brits were killed in the fighting too. At the start of the conflict, Krass was like, all right, well, we're going to make fun of patriotism and we're going to make fun of the British soldiers. And they put out a single called Sheep Farming in the Falklands, which is about British soldiers who just want to go there to fuck sheep.
Yeah, that's fired.
But as the war got all like, you know, killie, they put out a song that just actually really shook up British politics. Like I didn't go into this knowing to what degree Crass impacted world politics. They wrote a song called how does it feel. I've ever seen it both as how does it feel? And how does it feel? To be the mother of a thousand dead? Which is fucking good title. Yeah, and that song is written directly
to Margaret Thatcher. Imagine writing a song aimed at a politician and then the most important politician, and then having the politician like listen to it, not like listen to reason and change what they're doing, but have the song like actually impact the country's politics.
Yeah, And whether or not she listens to it, it's just important to say it and that everyone hears you say it.
Yeah.
And as the podcast idiot, I truly was an idiot. I was just you know, in a scene where some people obviously talked about Crass and yeah, big Crass fans, but I had never consciously listened to Crass, And so I have had my Crass immersion in the last few days.
And one of the things that I immediately really have savored about Crass is how because they're part of the inventors of punk rock, they sidestepped one of the biggest pitfalls of punk rock in my opinion, which is that it's it's this anger aimed outward and it doesn't state the self lyrically, and I just loved, like, I'm a fucking I'm truly the podcast idiot. What's what's the big song that we were talking about earlier?
Do they always a living?
Do they always a living? It's it's so cool, and that it like it states yourself. It's like it's it's all about what we think and what we deserve as opposed to like so I remember, it's not as you are bad.
It's like we're gonna we're gonna fight for what's ours.
Yeah, And it's not like ranting at somebody that you hate who's not even there.
Yeah, because Margaret Thatcher's there in this conversation when they write this song, you know.
Yeah, and they have the power and they take aim and they are they're so conscious of who they're able to communicate with, and it's.
It's astounding.
It's really beautiful.
Yeah. No, And when they write this song, the Tories actually her Thatcher's party actually circulated a memo internally that was like, we really can't afford to respond to this kind of provocation and we should not arrest them. But the cops started showing up at record stores threatening anyone who was like selling their record and about half of their shows were shut down by cops before they even got started. And with the Falkland War, Cress became one
of the main voices of the opposition. Instead of them writing labor politicians, labor politicians were writing them. And then they started getting leaked information by soldiers. What happened was a soldier had written them an angry letter being like, how dare you not you unpatriotic? Blah blah blah blah blah. Right and Krass had responded, and I think they'd even been like, oh, fuck you or whatever. But it had gone.
It had opened up a channel of communication, and eventually this soldier who started off hating them, started telling them all of the horrible things from the war that weren't getting talked about in the press, including the fact that there was almost a mutiny among British soldiers. So then they pulled their most dangerous prank. This is the kind of prank that I think could have gotten them killed.
They spoofed a conversation between Thatcher and Reagan about the Falklands War and American imperial interests in Europe with nuclear arms.
I didn't I didn't get a chance to listen to that one did.
They like do their voices?
Like how like they no, they they they found old recordings of them and like cut them up and then like did enough like audio magic to like it's like a lot of people can tell it's faked, right, but
not everyone, And it's like fairly well done. And this thing that they put out and they they leak it ahead of the nineteen eighty two UK general election and it claims that Thatcher allowed a British ship to be attacked so that the UK could counterattack, and Krass figured the whole thing was like cheap and hacky and no one would get fooled and it was just like not going to go anywhere.
But people are dumb.
Yeah, they tried super hard to make sure it wouldn't be traced back to them. The CIA and MI six couldn't figure out the source of the fake. They suspected it was KGB, but a journalist at The Observer was like, Nah, this is crass, and like basically like got them to fess up. Uh yeah, I love that. Like the journalist was just like, no, I've heard this audio production style before, you know, incredible, and it's called Thatcher Gate, and it
did not cost Thatcher the election. The Falklands War made her popular again. War is good for popularity. I sure hope the current administration doesn't figure that out, but my money is that they will.
Did I just say people are stupid?
Yeah?
Yeah, still upsetting.
Around this time, Krass opened up a squat. I suspect this more than just Crass. I expect this other the narco punk movement, but with Crass involved, opened up a squat, an empty venue called the Zigzag that had gone under a year earlier or whatever, and they opened it up to have a twelve band show, which a thousand people came to. And this was a new tactic, and it's
one that's spread across Europe. The implication in what I read is that this is the first like open a squat to throw a show in that era, in the modern era in Europe or whatever. People who've listened to the show know that I'm very skeptical anytime it's like the first time anything whatever, you know. But it seems like this is kind of how the tactic started spreading around Europe, because they distributed a pamphlet about how and
why to do this kind of thing. When they did it, and they gave it to everyone who came, and it included the lines quote what happened at the Zigzag, we hope was one step towards reclaiming what is ours. Freedom, free food, free shelter, free information, free music, free ideas, freedom to do whatever does not impinge on the freedom of others. The idea of squat rock, I'm continuing to quote, the idea of squat rock is not purely another way
of doing gigs, as we hope this handout explains. Hopefully it will have been and is an inspiration to other people to open up more places, whether it be for gigs to live in whatever. As for what they hope to accomplish, I want to quote Penny Rimbau from his book The Last of the Hippies quote, we can open up squats and from them start information services for those
who want to do the same. Or we can form housing co ops and communes to share the responsibility of renting or even buying a property in places we already live. We can open the doors to others, form tenant associations with neighbors and demand and create better conditions and facilities
in the area. We can form gardening groups that squat and farm disused land or rent allotments where we can to produce food for ourselves and others, that are free from dangerous chemicals and grow medicinal herbs to cure each other's headaches, and like, yeah, it's not limited to like, oh we can have punk shows. They're like we can have a better life.
Yeah. I love that. Uh, that tactic of community gardens.
Yeah too, Which is why this podcast I should just start doing little ads for things that I think should be the advertiser. This podcast is brought to you by community Gardens, although it was all so even more explicitly brought to you by that when we did a whole episode about community gardens. But community gardens are great. So garden and then give food to people, and that's good. And that's the only ad.
And we're back.
If you heard other ads, it was a mistake, and you should write to our complaints department, which is just look for someone named Robert Evans is the complaints department. So just tag Robert Evans and whatever social media and we'll get right on that. So at this point KRASS is just wildly important on the world stage in a way that I didn't realize, and so folks are kind
of trying to sort them out politically. Folks from the Red Army faction, which is like a German communist urban guerrilla group, started hanging out a dial house to like suss them out, be like, oh, are these people are going to help us on a bombing campaign and then realize that Crafts are pacifists and anarchists and not likely to support them. The KG came around and tried talking to them, trying to sort out how they knew what
they knew about the Falklands War. But my favorite interaction of THEIRS with traditional rebel groups was in nineteen eighty two they played an anarchist center in Belfast and the first night there was trouble when some like loyalist skinheads, like people who were not pro Irish unification but pro the UK. They attacked people at the show. But the second night, on a Sunday, there were no problems. There was no violence at the show, and so Penny was like, oh,
I bet even these people take Sundays off. Was his first guests or whatever. But then they got like a letter that was like invited them to an IRA pub and they were basically told like, no, the IRA has your back. We kept the loyalists away. The reason that was peaceful is we did security for you without you even noticing it.
Uh, just seamless.
Yeah, and all of this political stuff that started happening kept them involved in the band. They kind of thought the band was gonna wind down. They thought that was gonna be their last release or whatever. There's like people argue, like they claim sometimes they claim that they were going to disband the band in nineteen eighty four because of George or well, like everyone everyone in the UK thought nineteen eighty four was gonna be like a big deal.
When it happened, you know, it's kind of like a year two thousand kind of thing. But some people were like, oh, we were always going to disband in nineteen eighty four, and other people were like, no, that was just some bullshit we used to say. But all of this political stuff kept them involved. That makes sense to me. Suddenly being important in world political events is a bunch of
weirdo punks. That has got to be a trip like that has got to feel at least interesting, you know, how do you walk away from that?
Yeah?
And also it's like you realize you're performing a service, and totally, once you realize that the world needs you you, you need to respond to.
That no totally and it's got to be weird pressure too, and maybe even in response to that pressure, I don't know, they were like, we're going back to our roots really hard. In nineteen eighty three, they released their most experimental album, which is called yes, Sir, I Will, which comes from
a like one of the generals or whatever. There's like a wounded soldier and he was like, get better soon, and the soldier was like, yes, sir, I will, like you know, and so that's what they called their album. It didn't have so much as songs as like a one noise spoken word track on both sides of the record.
It theoretically holds the record for the longest punk song because there's no divisions between the different pieces of it on the record, like where the little lines of you know, you look at a record and you can see where the song's end or whatever. And this album wasn't like really enjoyable to a lot of people's very avant garde.
They started playing shows that a lot of people weren't into, where they would just play the entire album start to finish, instead of playing the hits and things like that, going.
Going back to their Rootsa's exit.
Yeah. Basically, Steve Ignorant in particular didn't love standing around with a written script because it was so long that they just literally had the script in front of them. He was struggling at this point with the non rock and roll nature of the band. He's the young you know, the young punk who kind of started the whole thing.
What's their age difference.
I think he's about ten to fifteen years younger than everyone. Okay, he said quote from Crass, like from his time in Crass, I don't have any of those anecdotes. Oh there was the night where we got the fire extinguishers, etc. Which is the stuff people love to hear. We didn't have none of that, Just cups of tea and staying around people's houses and being polite to their mum and dad.
Ah.
I have read a ridiculous amount about Crass in the past couple weeks, but I've only scratched the surface. I did read this critique of them, though I read it on my phone and I didn't tract the name of it, so it's not my source. List. I'm sorry about that, but I also don't agree with it, and so whatever.
And I read this thing that argues that the failure of Crass in an arco punk was that it had no involvement in actual social movements, and I was like nodding along reading it when I first read it, because I read it pretty early on, I was like, I'm gonna look up some stuff about Krass. But after reading more about Crass, I think that this is entirely untrue. I wasn't surprised to realize that the article had been written by an authoritarian socialist magazine that was basically like MAD.
That Krass wasn't specifically part of some specific named leftist mass movement, right.
Yeah, and they were. They wanted them to be their lapdogs.
Yeah, totally, totally. Crass and an arcopunk in general were absolutely directly involved with all sorts of mass movements, especially the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament the CND. From what I can tell, they revitalized it like it was kind of a dying movement. But then Krass would use its logo with a piece symbol like everywhere. You can also say that the modern anarchist movement stems at least as much
from a narco punk as traditional anarchism. But fortunately it's like left behind being only one subculture, because subculture is fine when it's not. When people think like, oh, in order to be a leftist or an anarchist or whatever, I have to be a punk, that is nonsense, you know. But it's cool when subcultures have radical politics within them. I just want a million subcultures, as you said, like
diversity is our strength, you know. And modern protest tactics and styles, like our styles of protesting owe an awful lot to the UK in the eighties, specifically around the
turn of the millennia. Later, the US, Mexico and Europe at least have these huge anti globalization protests which kicked off twenty first century protest culture in the West, and of course I have an affinity for it because that's how I got involved, and we owe an awful lot about those tactics and how those protests went to this time period, there was this anarchist group called London Green Peace, which threw me through a loop because I would just oh,
the articles would be like, oh, London green Peace did this thing, and I was like, oh, okay, Green Peace the organization, but in London, that was what I was thinking, right, right, there's no relation to the organization we currently know today's green Peace. It turns out both get their names honestly. They both grew out of the same grassroots environmental movement that called itself green Peace, but then a huge chunk of it became green Peace International, the thing that grandma's
donate money to do to save whales or whatever. Yeah, London green Peace was still grassroots, and in nineteen eighty three they called for some protests. At least I've read it was them. Other places say Crass called them for the protests, and other places say it came about completely organically and no one called for it. Whatever. The anarcho punks and the pacifists called for some protests. Crass says it was Greenpeace, so we'll go with that. There have
been these huge peace camps and such like. Basically tens of thousands of people were showing up to block military bases. But some people were like, why are we going all the way out to the countryside to do this. The halls of power are right here in London, So they
called for a stop the city demonstration. They wanted to shut down London was the idea, specifically the Financial district, and this was to bring together the pacifice and the anarchists into this big mobilization, and this was an uneasy alliance. Sometimes the pacifists were worried that anyone who defended themselves against the police or damaged property would make the movement look bad, and the cops themselves were super worried.
I was just thinking, this is some Hampton shit, you know Fred Hampton. Oh yeah, yeah, yeah, totally, this is like, yeah, this is like like getting.
Getting these different people. Yeah.
Big coalitions really make you a target fast.
Yeah, that's true. And it's interesting because this one it it forms a coalition and it is this loose one and yeah, like it absolutely worried the shit out of the state because the cops were like for decades in UK, well not nine Northern Ireland, but like in England, protest organizers had been willing to like meet with cops to coordinate the whole thing, you know, like, oh, we're gonna do our march from here to there and get permits and do everything the right way or whatever right And
for some weird reason, the anarchists in the past of us. It didn't, and so cops showed up at an anarchist meeting to be like, can we can we please talk this over? Can you like we know you're doing a thing, can we just can we be part of planning? And they like, no one would work with them, and they all had to leave.
Some it's some Hampton shit, and it's also some Judy Barry shit. So yeah, it's like when you get really effective, you get really it's it's really hot water.
Yeah, totally. And so before the protests, they squatted an empty office building to create an anarchist social center called the Peace Center. Cops raided it the night before the protests, looking for weapons. There weren't any weapons, but the raid didn't stop the protest. To quote George Berger from the book The Story of Crass quote, normal demonstrations had leaders, stewards organization and an overload of Socialist Workers' Party placards.
Stop the city had kids in colorful rags, breaking off from the main group on their own initiative to affect their own actions. Graffiti, street theater, free food bank, locks, glued patriot flags, burned leaf litting anti apartheid actions against Barkley's Bank, many arrests. By the virtue of about fifteen hundred leaderless young punks and a few older ones, the anarcho punk movement had arrived. It was no longer simply
a bunch of kids who bought the same records. It was and is a people's culture, and so I like that. The thing that makes them real is like when they start doing stuff outside of just subcultural spheres. You know, a ton of people were arrested. Two hundred people caught charges at the first one. Between the first one and the second one, a thousand people were arrested, and the financial district was like all chewed up. They did a ton of financial damage, like by stopping the ability for
business as usual to continue. And so they did it again the next year. But something even bigger happened the next year. And these are the like, this is the real coalition shit, this is the like I'm going to eventually be doing a lot of episodes about this shit. Have you heard about the miners strikes in the UK in nineteen eighty four. It's okay if you haven't, but I'm just curious.
No I have, I'm not fully informed, but yeah, yeah, no, it. It was gigantic.
Yeah, in nineteen eighty four, Thatcher had decided in March nineteen eighty four, Thatcher had decided to break the working class and unions for good. About twenty thousand miners were going to be laid off and so all of the miners went on strike. And this became a battle for the whole of the English working class because it was fairly heavily socialist and Thatcher wanted to shatter that wanted to just destroy class unity, you know, among the working class.
And this was a massive showdown kind of beyond what's easy to imagine for an American. I think it was almost a civil war between the right, Thatcher and the left, which was working class miners and their supporters. And the reason is so hard is that like the US has had a strong ever since the Red Scare has had a pretty strong hold, the right wing has had a pretty stronghold on like rural culture, you know.
Totally but not complete. But you know, you.
Read your Robin DG.
Kelly, and there was so much socialism coming from the ground up all throughout this rural South.
Yeah, no, absolutely, like, and we have this idea that somehow rural poor people have always been right winging that this is a completely untrue, including in America, Like it just socialism, leftism and anarchism and communism were just so completely memory hold in the US, like starting in the nineteen forties and fifties, and when this minor strike happened, punks came out in droves to support the miners despite this massive cultural divide between the urban weirdo queer punks
and the like normy you know, the miners who are much more culturally conservative. And one day I'm going to cover the strike in more detail because i want to talk about this group called lesbians and gay support the miners. But if you ever want to cry, watch the movie Pride. It was about this.
Yeah cool, it's English movie.
Yeah, it's an English movie about lesbians and gay support
the miners. And it's about learning to find solidarity between these like urban gay punks and like weirdos showing up in these like you know, small towns of culturally conservative people and being like, well, we're here to support you and people you know, like reminds me a lot of like I've done a it's been a while, but I used to do a lot of like role organizing with like environmental campaign stuff, you know, and like queer punks and trans people would be like showing up and hanging
out with people and like watching people like be like, well, all right, what's this pronoun thing? You know? And like and then like vice versa, like there's all kinds of shit that we have to learn too, and like it's just like, literally, this is what makes my heart move forward on a day to day basis is like solidarity.
Yeah, I love that scene in mate Wan where where they're all playing music together, all the different all the different factions of that the I'm.
Getting teary eyed, I know.
Yeah, like all the the bosses are trying to you know, divide everybody and.
Yeah, white versus Italian versus black, Yeah, I think.
Was that one and then they just all like end up playing music together.
Yeah.
I got to see Will Oldham play the other night here in Los Angeles. My partner used to be in his band, and uh he he plays the child's preacher in mate Wan.
Oh shit, Oh cool.
Oh you didn't know that.
Yeah, that's that's a baby Will Oldham. Fuck.
Yeah.
Yeah.
So during this strike in the UK, everything became very serious, like it was just a really dire time spoiler alert them. Well, no, I'll get to it. The miners are gonna lose. But meanwhile, Crass started like, in order to get through police checkpoints and play benefit shows, they would dress not as cops but like cops and then drive the same kind of car that cops drove. But like not, it wasn't like they were like, hello, officer, I am officer. You know,
they were like they did it like legally. They just wore the same outfits and shit, I think it's really clever. And they hung a huge banner over the Thames, which is the river that goes through England that if you ever see something in writing and you're like the Fames, well it's the Thames. And they hung this banner where Parliament could see it. And this is probably my favorite slogan I've ever seen from Krass. It read you picked the scabs, Now the wounds will fester.
Oh yeah, that's come on. There are such gorgeous lyricists. I'm so moved by their writing.
Yeah, and I think a lot of them because it wasn't just like oh, it wasn't like Penny wrote it or Steve wrote it, or Eve wrote it. You know, it was like they all I don't know if I think they each wrote different songs, but like they clearly were challenging each other to write poetically and well, you know.
Yeah, I love I love that. Just yeah, seeing people that all keep each other on their toes.
Yeah. Crass played their final show in nineteen eighty four, in July nineteen eighty four, and it was a benefit for Welsh miners. And then basically it was nineteen eighty four and they sort of promised to break up in nineteen eighty four and then they started to Andy Palmer went first. They were all just kind of burned out.
In nineteen eighty five, the miners called off the strike Thatcher one she was fighting the enemy within and soon she attacked the Stonehenge Festival and other like leftist and free culture and whatever stuff. After the band broke up, a song on their old album Penis Envy was banned for obscenity, and slowly folks started drifting away from the
band and from the well from Dialhouse. After Crass, Steve Ignorant said, quote, the bands that came after Crass outcrassed Crass by being even more scruffy and dirty and being even more square and even more miserable than we were meant to be. They became even more politically correct, which is to say Steve Ignorant was not a fan of the or a copunk culture that Krass created. He didn't
like that people called him comrade. Oh yeah, and to be fair, a lot of people don't like when you call him comrade.
No, it's cosplaying a bit.
Yeah yeah. Also, politically correct started out as a leftist joke, and then the right, oh yeah, and then the right used it against the left. I'll just I'll take this moment to say one of the I learned this phrase from Eduardo Galiano's he was quoting Argentinian organizers at the time. Power they say is like a violin. You grab it with the left and you play it with the right.
Fuck. Fuck that is I mean that's what Mussolini did right, like, but I.
Mean that's what Biden did, like recently, with like just taking all the like George Floyd energy and then turning it into whatever the hell he was doing.
Yeah. The By the end of nineteen eighty nine, everyone from Krass who was still at Dial House had a big blow up fight if you listen to more critical takes about Crass. Basically all the puritanical arguing about what was the right political line like came to a head without the band to keep them focused. I think their like last fight that they had was about whether or not like smoking was politically correct or whatever, you know, And you know, they would argue about like can you
have milk in your tea? Like everyone in Crass's vegetarian is to my understanding, but like people used to use the word vegetarian where we might use were vegan now and they were like a little bit more interchangeable and you know whatever, people'd argu about that shit. After the band broke up, Steve Ignorant started playing with the narco punk band Conflict, who was one of the main bands in the scene, and they were a little bit less than the passifist tip and more on the animal rights tip.
Steve also became a puppeteer, doing punch and judy shows for kids, and Penny and Eve and g started doing free jazz and poetry as we all knew they would do without Crass.
I love I love seeing the end of bands, like where everyone goes off and does their own thing and everyone shows their colors, like like the one guy from the Velvet Underground who like became a steamboat operator and oh shit really yeah, and like I think like got some kind of amazing degree and something very obscure, like.
It's just it's it's it's sweet.
People are yeah, yeah, okay, all right, I love this part of the story.
Yeah, like and then it actually as a happy ending on some ways too. The land Dial houses on was sold to basically become a golf course, but Dial House sued and won, and so the landlords were like, fine, when we're selling the house then, and they sold it at auction. So all the friends of Dial House showed up at the auction and bought it.
Is it?
Is it like one of the Is it like cob or something like When I think of an old old English house, I think like that ancient construction, you know.
So I've looked at pictures of it. It's it was first built in like the fourteen hundreds or the oldest houses from the fourteen hundreds, and it's been added on to room after room over time, and so I but I couldn't tell you exactly the types of construction. Whenever I leave the US I'm always like, wow, everything's built different with like plaster and stuff, you know. But I but I couldn't tell you it's cute. You can, there's plenty of pictures of it, and so dial House, as
far as I can tell, still there. And I think, well, I don't want to docks. I think that the people still just live there, you know, and are still doing their thing. Like fifty years later and along the way, Krass sold about two million records in the seven years that they were around, the population of the UK was only fifty six million people at the time, and I know it wasn't like one record for every you know,
couple being whatever. I can't do math in my head, but like, selling two million records at any time is a big deal, but selling it in a smallish country.
As for what they accomplished, At one point, an interviewer was talking to Steve Ignorant about how he and others had basically destroyed the legacy of Margaret Thatcher that when she died in twenty thirteen, it couldn't be said that like people had a harder time whitewashing Margaret Thatcher, right, because history also remembers that people fucking hated her too, and Steve said, in response to the interviewer, that's my proudest thing that a spotty little oike from Dagenham actually
stood up knees trembling as he avoided the ash trays being thrown at him and still fucking did it. And like, yeah, here's the standing up knees trembling, dodging ash trays and fucking doing it.
You're making me cry again.
Yeah.
Yeah, I love their immediacy.
I love their you know, talking shit to power at every turn.
Yeah. It's interesting because the main critique that comes up over and over again is about like PC culture, uh, kind of creating a puritanical space where like we figure out more and more things that are bad without figuring out more and more like ways of being good.
You know. Well, yeah, but people are we're such intelligent animals and uh, you know, people are just complicated and we were we're so dogged to grab another animal metaphor and we just we just go for stuff. And it's like that was part of their you know, their artistic vision is that they were being critical and that they were empowering people to be critical. So yeah, they yeah, sure, of course they overdid it. They're they're people.
Yeah, no, totally, and it it was necessary to to break a lot of things by saying like, no, we're just gonna do this shit. And I fucking love that. It came from the combination of avant garden punk, which are like actually go together me if you listen Acrass, they go together very well, right, But like you wouldn't know it thinking about it. You know, you wouldn't when you're like thinking about, like, oh, would this work really
well to create this thing? And but they both like were just like, oh no, fuck the rules, you know.
Right, if you don't know any avant garde people, you might you might be able to kind of fool yourself into seeing those things as separate worlds. But in my experience, they are all the same people.
Yeah, totally, especially the ones who like take music seriously, you know, yeah, like the people making the music.
Yeah.
I was like trying to explain at some point when I was like, you know, ten fifteen years ago or something, I was like talking to someone, I was like, oh no, like when I say punk now, like you know, I was like walking somewhere with like my friend who like wears clean clothes, and color, and I'm like, oh yeah, no, like us punk's right, and it was just like it was a much broader word and concept and like and when I think about like not just like folk punk
as a genre, but literally like the fact that punk culture also makes pop music, makes noise music, makes country music, makes folk music, like you know, it's like it's all gotten beautifully complicated instead of getting more and more obsessive about I mean, sometimes people get more and more obsessive about niche subgenres and that's actually fine, but like instead just this like big mess of I don't know, just because sometimes people are like, oh my, my ethos is
punk and it's not. It's not SLC punk, you know, it's not the like cartoonish punk. I don't know where I'm going with this.
Well, genre genre is I'm I don't have a strong relationship with genre and.
Personally the singer songwriter, right.
Because I you know, when I put up my last record, Haunted Mountain, there's a dance song on it. Because I don't know, I would assume partly because of the misogyny inherent in the culture, but you know, maybe that has to do with like pigeonholing me. I'm just like it was so funny se all these reviewers look at this dance track and the whole record and try to say that it was folk. I really don't know what they're talking about.
I mean, especially listening to.
Do They Owe Us a Living for the first time a few days ago, was like this is oh yeah, this is definitively punk. This is like this is classic punk. And I remember like coming up in scenes where all these Americans, all these Houstonians had British accents, like like they needed all of it, you know, they took they took the entire palette of of that that expression of the genre of punk.
Yeah, I like punk. I is that My closing thought is I like punk. I was even like a punk as a teenager is a weird goth kid, but like once it became a squadron traveler and really kind of fell in with the punks and the more political punks and just it just felt it felt like home in a way that like nothing ever had even if it, you know, I would listen to Crass sometimes, but it wasn't like it's not the thing I put on. I would actually actually the same scene listen to a lot of Julie Holland.
So that makes me feel so good.
That's lovely.
Thank you.
Yeah. Well, if you're listening to this, if you want to know more about an archo punk. Almost a sequel to this is an episode about the the anarchist punk band Trumba Wamba with that I did with the guy from Eve six is the main way that you might know him. Also, you can start a band, you can make music, you can do whatever. You can start a podcast. You can do these things and you should because why not you only live once? Or whatever makes me want to start a band, You just start a band. Yeah,
like another band, like two other bands. Oh, I'd have to get better at electric guitar if I wanted to play in a punk.
Band, or learn as you go.
That's true, that is the more classic way to do it. Well, that's the end of this, And thank you Jolie for coming on. And people should check out your music everywhere that music is music.
And yeah, Margaret, thank you so very much for having me. Everyone should check out your podcast wherever podcasts are podcasted, and read your books and listen to your audio books and just enjoy your music.
Oh thanks, Oh I guess I should say I probably do talk about a fair amount. My music is. I have a bunch of bands on band camp. If you want to hear a black metal band that actually is kind of avant garde, it's called Femino's School and that's I also have a dark, gothy pop music project called the medic War Machine that used to be more noisy. And I have a one woman do metal EP but I put it out but I never did follow up
called Vulgarite. But if you're like, I want to listen to a one woman do metal band that is themed after the works of William Blake, you can listen to Vulgarite. And my newest album is years old and it's called The Lathe and it is post punk and is with one of my friends is an amazing songwriter, and that's also on band camp. There that's my weird music shout outs before podcasting consume my life.
Is Yeah, well it's you know, it's good to figure out how to get paid.
Yeah.
I you know when I was when I just started listening to Krass a few days ago, I felt that they were Blakian.
Yeah, I could totally see that.
Yeah, it's like they're so English, and they're like, hey, what if this was a better place?
And they even like come from graphic design, like William Blake was a did etchings for a living.
That's incredible exactly. And then they and also like they have their own idiosyncratic theology theology exactly.
Yeah, Well we had ended there and I'll talk to you soon and all you listeners, I'll talk to you next week.
Adios.
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