Cool Zone Media. Hello, and welcome to Cool People Who Did Cool Stuff, your weekly podcast for things that I think are cool? And who am I to decide what's cool? I am a person, and every person gets to decide what they think is cool. And these are the things that I think is cool. But my name as a person who is the arbiter of cool like everyone else is Margaret Kiljoy. And my guest who's also officially the arbiter of cool is Julie Holland.
So awesome to be here, Thanks for having me.
Yeah, we were talking right before we hit record about how this isn't a new history podcast, this is an old history podcast, because we were talking about being incapable of remembering the word for news and calling it new history. That's unrelated to anything.
It's comforting. It's like, uh, we're all gonna die kind of comforting phrase.
Yeah, we're all literally writing history right now, including writing the fact that we don't have a producer again today. But we do have a producer, she's just not on Mike and her name is Sophie, and our audio engineer is Rory. Everyone has to say hi to Rory. Hi, Rory Hi, riy And our theme music was written for us by unwoman who's going to be in this week's episode. In an aside, Hell yeah, but no one's going to know what it's about, unless do you know me, in
which case do you already know the thing? But this is part three of a four parter about the band Crass, about a narco punk in general, and the fact that we took two episodes to not even get to the band Crass is because of the fact that punk and its broader impact has had a broad You can tell
I'm off script here. I am entirely making this up, so I should probably just start, well, wait, what if people don't know who Jolie Holland is and they somehow skipped to just now and didn't know, would they know that you're a wait? We decided to sing a songwriter sort of an annoying word.
Well, I mean singer songwriter. Yeah, I'm a musician. Yeah. I like that. Sometimes people don't know that being a singer is being a musician, which is really funny.
Yeah, that's weird because that's like, that's the part of musicianists that I'm worse at is singing.
I believe everybody can sing.
I know I technically can make singing. I don't actually hate my singing voice. I just have to I'm not as trained at it as I would like to be. But it wouldn't have affected me if I'd been an avant garde or punk singer. That's not true. Actually, punk singers are incredibly talented.
Absolutely, I know. It's so much power. Yeah, yeah, I had never consciously listened to Krass until we started this. So here we are starting episode three, and I just listened to a whole bunch of Crass and I think they're amazing musicians. I just really enjoyed. Yeah, it's it's really technically powerful.
Yeah, and it's it changed, well, it changed a lot musically and not just like I'm going to talk mostly about its cultural and political impact because of my own background and focuses. But like when you listen to a bunch of crafts, you're like, oh, that's where that weird part of punk that doesn't make any sense comes from.
You know, absolutely, Yeah, I really heard that. I heard the formativeness.
Yeah. Well, where we last left our unlikely heroes, they were doing a bunch of avant garde stuff and living in a rented cottage outside of London called Dial House. After their divorce because they got divorced even though they never got married. Gee moved to New York City to work as a commercial artist, doing work for the New York Times and I think the New Yorker, and she lived around the corner from seatgb's the Classic punk club, and just a bunch of stories about those days and
hanging out with CBGB's punks and stuff. Meanwhile, back in London, folks in the house were working as cover designers, and at least Penny, at least is the only person who's like jobs I knew. I was trying to figure out whether they're all just like living on the dole or whatever. Penny was doing book design, Penny was doing like some sort of coal delivery or carrying. I think people were heating their houses a coal and I think Penny was delivering it and house painting and just having a bunch
of weird jobs. This is also oddly placed his Long Dark Night of the Soul. Normally that would come near the climax of the story, but his relationship has fallen apart and everything seems to be ending, you know, this whole end of this era, and so he spends a while just kind of Usually this goes really badly, but it works this time. He spends a while just like
drinking and complaining about Christianity in the kitchen. Oh yeah, and that's like, that's like his thing for a while, as he just sits around the kitchen table at this communal house and screams about how Jesus should have run away from the people who were killing him. And he wrote a pamphlet called Reality Asylum, or I think it's called Christ's Reality Asylum. And in case anyone's wondering, I don't know how to spell the word asylum. Still. I
took me like eight times writing the script. But he wrote this thing, and he was mad that Jesus hadn't run away from his captors. He was mad that his friend Wally hadn't either. He was just bitter, like all
the hippie love stuff is kind of fallen apart. And so he decides to put out this piece, and he asks his housemate Dave King to make a piece of art for it, design a logo for it for the cover, and so Dave King sits down and he sketches something that we now know today as the crafts symbol, which is a sort of a circle slash made out of Ora Boris's against a cross. And this is one of
the better pieces of branding in history. Like Crass is an anti corporate band, but the fact that they all come from like graphic design backgrounds and they know about commercial art shows this logo is part of what makes them. I think it's somehow kind of esoteric and slightly disturbing. Anything with radial symmetry is going to occasionally be mistaken for a swastika, and the Crass logo is no different. Have you seen the Crass logo of course.
Yeah. And I just spoke with my friend Sarah Berlin Game, who just got out of the State House in Wyoming today, just while I was walking my dog, and she said that they a bit of new history here. They just allowed open Carrie in the schools. Maybe for the students, I don't know. It's really upsetting, Okay, in Wyoming. In Wyoming, she's a she's like a lgbt Q plus organizer with white Wyoming equality and so tough, so badass, and uh yeah,
it's just shocking. But she said her the first love of her life had a Crass tattoo, and he was always telling people that it was not a swastika.
Yeah that Yeah, that's gonna end up sometimes a problem for them. And it's funny to me because I even like often think things look like swastikas that aren't. I have never looked at the cross logo and thought it's a swastika, but I do know an awful lot of people with the tattoo.
It's it's a lot like the the Bad Religion image kind of is a iteration of the cross image in a way.
Right, Yeah, isn't a circle circle slash through a cross is bad religion?
Yeah, it's like almost the same.
Yeah, totally. Oh that's a that's a good point. Bad Religions is much simpler. But you know, so they have this logo and they don't know that it's going to be the logo of Crass yet it's just the logo for Christ's Reality Asylum, and they make pamphlets of it and stuff and start distributing it. Well, I guess Penny does. Punk is doing this thing, And in nineteen seventy seven
the whole house went to go see the clash. I really like the idea that they had, Like House field trips and they left and they were like, hey, this is fucking cool. And then they saw the Slits and they were like, oh, this is even more earnest, this is even better. And also they were like the Clashes was more technically competent than the Slits, let's say, and so they were like, you know what, and they can do it. Anyone can do it, we can do it.
It also helped that Joe Strummer from the Clash used to challenge the audience to form their own bands at the end of shows, which is fucking cool. That is a cool thing to do, especially when you're like the rock star band is to be like, no, we're not better you. We could just everyone can do it, you know.
Yeah. I think I think they somebody gave them that advice before they started too. They're like, we really have we want to start a band, but we feel like we're not good enough, and I forget some big band was like, no, you should just start.
Hell, yeah, that's cool. I really like the Clash. About half of Crass is like, uh, Clash is bad and sellouts, and the other half of Crass is like, Clash is cool.
Yeah. I saw I saw the track where it seemed like they was trying to start beef with them.
Yeah. They they do a lot of beef tracks. They are uh dis tracks, that's the word, not not beef tracks. I'm good at knowing new history.
On new history. Yeah. They they seem very fighty.
Yeah, and it's interesting because like the whole time that they're a band, they're incredibly fighty with their like lyrics and they're the stuff they do. But then like their house is open and they're all peaceful and you can just like come hang out, and like it was kind
of interesting. So they get home, they've seen the clash, they've seen the slits, and there's this young punk who had been hanging around the house because they're in their thirties and they're not punks, right, And this guy named Steve Ignorant was coming around, which is a good punk name. He would come around because his older brother, who was a hippie, used to take him there. And then young
Steve he was originally a skinhead. This is before skinhead had racist connotations, and then after that he was glam but then he was punk and he liked this house. He's like in high school or whatever they call high school over there, maybe they called high school, I don't know. And he starts hanging out there more and more. He's like skipping school to hang out at dial House, even though the weird hippies wouldn't let him eat meat and there was like no TV to watch or whatever, you know.
And so one day he shows up at dial House and he's like, well, I want to start a band, and Penny's like, yeah, sure, fuck it, all right, I'll be your drummer. Let's start a band. And it was a two piece at first. Steve would shout and Penny
would smash on the RUMs. And Penny wanted to call it les font Terrible, the fucking surrealist fucking it's a uh in font Terrible means the terrible children, and it's a reference to some weird old artsy shit, a novel by John Jean Cocteau, Whereas Steve wanted to call it Stormtrooper,
which is also not a very good name. But it's interesting because Stormtrooper is a better name in terms of, like it sounds like a punk band, but it's also a terrible name because it's a literally a Nazi thing, you know.
Yeah, So then they ended.
Up picking the name crass, which comes from a David Bowie song Ziggy Stardust, in which there's a line that says the kids were just crass. And soon enough there's
a bunch of them in this band. And this isn't a music history podcast, and I'm not going to give you the names of And I feel kind of almost like a jerk about this, but I'm not going to give you the names of like everyone in the band, and like when they joined them, when they left, and what instruments they played and all that stuff, because that is extensively covered. So that's not what I'm gonna do.
Everyone in this band was important, and they really were a collective, but there were a bunch of them, and I would have a hard time crafting a narrative around all seven or eight of them. At first they were all men, and soon enough there's three women in the band as well. They played their first show and they pissed off the neighbors so much that the neighbors pulled the plug on their show. And I think that that
is a good way to start a band. The reason that I think that is that I once was in an acoustic crass cover band, which you're making obviously that would be amazing face but and it was called best before eighteen eighty six, so is somehow a reference to Haymarket and crass. And it was with my friend on woman who did the theme music for this podcast, as well as another friend who doesn't like when they're named on air, so will not be And we got booked
to play. This is really gonna I'm gonna really impress everyone. We got booked to play a steampunk convention in San Antonio, Texas, and we were so bad that not only were we kicked out of the bar where we played, the entire convention was kicked out of the bar, even though they'd booked it for a private event.
That's incredible. And this is wait, this is an acoustic band.
Yeah it was one one was playing cello, I was playing accordion, and my friend was playing acoustic guitar.
So wait, you were wait you were amplified right.
No, no shit, no, we were just shouting loud as hell.
Yeah, So that that is I'm deeply impressed. That's thank you, that's that's that's another level. You got the convention kicked out.
I know, I know, I was really impressed by that. Uh No, one else was impressed by that. Everyone else is upset by that.
But you know, that's success, that's really success.
Yeah. That was the only time we ever played. We did not continue. We got booked to play that convention. That was it.
Wait was the name of the band again.
Best before eighteen eighty six? Yeah, so soon enough Krass, the actual Crass, not the brilliant derivative band Best before eighteen eighty six. Soon enough, Krass developed their whole deal, which was to wear all black like a uniform and play in front of a bunch of political banners. Eventually they start using projection from various like artsy films and all kinds of imagery, and they use the big old Crass logo banner and this is all really effective branding.
But for a long time, even though they were eventually like the a narco punk band, a lot of people saw them and were like, are these Nazis? And it didn't help that they all wore red armbands.
Oh lord, yeah, because everybody knew what Nazis were, and people did not know what anarcho punks were.
Well, because a narco punks weren't a thing yet, and what's and what's fascinating about it is that they like and they weren't like wearing like patches and stuff, right, they were like wearing solid all black. And to this day,
like there's kind of a slight division in punk. It's not named, but there's like a slight division where the more Anarco you are, the more clean black, and the more punk you are, the more color and like patched up black, you know, but like punks wear a lot of black, but like the like slightly cleaner Anarco look like.
I think this is the idea that punks just wear all black comes from crass And what's fascinating is I think they were doing it kind of to look a little bit like fascists because and this is a thing that like, Okay, the playing around with fascist imagery is a thing that is hard to look at in retrospect. But a lot of early punks were using this for three different reasons, as best as I can tell, a lot of people like Susie Sue, who has a kind of racist named or band. Anyway, Susi Sue used swastikas
and stuff, and I believe is basically shock value. I'm not an expert on Suzi Sue and then some people were using swastikas and stuff because they were actually right wing, and Krass never used swastikas, but they used this kind of imagery, I believe, in a similar way to what they were doing with their visual art, whereas like Crass's like art is like close up photos of children on fire and the horrors of war and mutilation and all of this like edge Lord imagery, right, they were doing
it to be like, look, these are the horrors of war that they're trying to hide from you. We're going to put it in your face that war is bad.
Yeah, this is the expression of empire that and we're all living on the slightly cleaner side of it, but this is the reality.
Yeah, Like we're going to show you the shit that is being done in the rest of the empire here in the colonial center, you know. And so I think that they are sort of playing around with like edgy uniforms and like being like kind of fashy in some of their fashion comes from that, like that desire, whereas like these days, most of the time when people dress up fascy, it's just bad, you know, Yeah, I.
Mean it's also it also seems like it could be read as just an expression of militancy totally.
Yeah, And then it's like kind of fun and interesting because they are like pacifists from the go, but they are like loud and angry pacifists in a way that like you don't see a lot of these days. You know, Yeah, there's a oh I haven't read it, but there's a book that someone I know wrote called a pacifismin What it Used to be. Oh no, non violent ain't what it used to be anyway. So Crass is starting to play, and they didn't have advertisers cutting into the middle of
their shows. They just didn't. They were really that is a thing that they were against. But that's fifty years ago and things are different. Sometimes advertisers come right now and we're back. So Crass is starting to play and they're not like a tight professional band for a very long time. They actually start getting more and more like technically competent or whatever, but they've never prioritized like clean
production or technical mastery of their instruments. There's a lot of like some of the people from Krass talking about how they had sometimes had trouble at other shows because afterwards all the other musicians would like want a jam or something, and they're like, I know how to play the three chords that are in my song.
Yeah, I know how to play the songs that I wrote and not not anything else. Yeah, which I love that. I really appreciate those kind of musicians.
I appreciate it because I am literally that kind of person. I cannot I love playing piano. I play piano. It was like my main happy place. I cannot play a piano song and write. I barely know how to read music, and I like write music, and I feel like a jerk because then people are like, oh, let's Jim, and I'm like, I no, No, I kind of can if someone tells me what key we're in, I can do it.
But anyway, there's a part of why I like Crassis. Yeah, they prioritize their overall aesthetic and they prioritize political messaging. But they did write some fucking bangers right out of the gate. Their main issues included feminism and the peace movement. One of their first songs is one of their classics. I think it's like the second song they wrote. It's called do They Owe Us a Living? And the chorus is do they owe us a living. Of course they do.
Of course they fucking do. And it's just this like angry, like no society needs to take care of people.
Yeah. I just went and went by my friend Jessica Kinney's house and she comes walking down her hill and she's she's a old punk and I had told her that we were doing this and uh huh, she comes walking down our hill. She's screaming that song at me.
Hell yeah, the song is fucking good. And there's a punk club in London at this time called the Roxy. And I think this part's actually important. It grew out of a gay club and Crass played there twice, the second and last time they ever played there. Is it still in their very early stages, they were too drunk to play, possibly too high to play, but I've like
read one thing that's too high to play. But overall I read that they kind of didn't do drugs, so at the very least they were too drunk to play, and they made such a shit show of it that they got banned from the Roxy, which is why they wrote a song called Band from the Roxy.
When I read the lyrics, it seemed to imply that, like they were too cool, for the roxy, but they just couldn't they couldn't make it happen on stage. It sounds like.
Yeah, basically like I've read a couple of different takes of it, but it was like they went up and they were too drunk, and so the club was like, get the fuck off stage, and they were like no. And then eventually the band was like, fine, you can finish your set, but your fucking band. And then afterwards they decided even though they were like, oh, we were unjustly banned or whatever, and you know, they were like, hey, maybe we shouldn't get so drunk before we play anymore.
Like you can have like a beer or two before you play. That's the that's the new rules in Crass is we don't want to be too drunk to play, which is important. It's like a funny I see the like as a musician, you're like, okay, like, especially when you're first starting or something, you're like, you know, a drink might help loosen you up to be a little bit less nervous on stage, but it gets real, real bad, real quickly.
Yeah, it doesn't doesn't do anything for me.
Yeah, but.
Yeah, so it's nice to having The writer is nice to share with friends, if if people whatever that you want to.
Say, like to give drink tickets and drinks or whatever to your friends.
And yourself to hang out in the hang out in the dressing room and then drink some tequila.
Yeah, fair enough. I think by the end of Crass, I think only Steve Ignorant was drinking at all. And at Dial House there was almost no drinking and almost no drug use. And part of that was strategic cops like came by to raid and search and knock and talk to them like all the time. And you don't want a bunch of drugs at your anarchy house. That's a general.
Rule, absolutely not. It's yeah, especially yeah, if you look really cool, other people are gonna notice.
Yeah, And they eventually become like too serious for drinking and drugs or whatever. And they are they're such good kill joys. They are like the archtypical like yeah.
They really are.
Yeah, and kind of negative way as well, Like a lot of the stuff you read retrospectively about Krass is like, oh, basically they kind of created a puritanical scene, and they they built kind of this politically pure scene. This is their weakness and their strength for example, there was this Rock against Racism movement that I brought up last time. It's all these big concerts happening in London, pretty much in a response to Eric Clapton's wild unhinged racist rant.
And Krass played Rock Against Racism once and then they decided not to again because they were so offended that they were offered money to play for it. Come on, they are like, you know, they we stand on the shoulders of giants. You know, they like offered a really important critique of the music industry, but like people need to eat food on a regular basis.
Yeah, for real, I'm gonna take this moment to Okay, Well two thoughts. Okay, Number one, they're commercial artists. Why how what's going on? Like they already they're already, but I guess they're like that's somebody else's job, you know that they're working on. So like like if they're creating the artistic parameters of the vision of their band, part of that is like this anti whatever. I don't know
what their deal is. And then the second, the second thing that I wanted to say is that I was offered a lot of money for to do music for a de Beer's ad early in my career, before it was obvious what a shit talker I am or whatever, And that was at least a down payment on a house, Like my life could have been a lot better. So I'll at least I get to talk about it on your podcast.
Yeah, did you end up doing it?
Hell no?
Fuck yeah cool.
Buck No Yeah, oh no, I didn't get the house. All I got to do is tell you that I didn't do it.
Hell yeah. Because that's like, that's like a good example of, like, you know, there's a kind of a way of going a little bit too far in both directions. You know, you're like, yeah, if you can get away with it, don't work for de beers, you know. But then like I don't know, if you sell records and then use the money to eat, I don't know, this would be a great place to pivot to ads. But we don't
have to pivot to ads. But like, I mean, I guess this whole thing about Crass is kind of a reflection on the commercialism of art, and so one of the things that they do is that they're basically always playing benefits. Basically every show they play is a benefit show, which is cool, and they like make amazing things happen during their career. And at one point they're playing with this band, the UK Subs, and then the UK Subs played a song called All I Want to Know is
does She Suck? And so Kras was like, that song is sexist, and so they storm the stage, pull the singer off the stage in the middle of the show. But then later they all sit down after the show, they all sit down and talk about it, and the person who wrote that song is like, this is the context of why I wrote it, And they discussed the lyrics at great length, and in the end they all become friends.
That makes me very happy. I'm trying to have room for that kind of energy in my life right now.
Yeah, because like, if you're going to kind of create a vaguely puritanical scene, you need to not be complete assholes about it. You need to be like, Okay, I hear where you're coming from. But this is why we think it isn't presenting a good you know, it's like causing it. You know, it's a sexist thing to go up and sing and like, you know, this is why we have a problem with it. But I also think it's cute that they ripped them off stage.
Oh me too, makes me very happy that they pulled them off the stage.
Yeah, And so they didn't become a giant success over, but they started building a fan base though in the early years an awful lot of people headed for the doors when they started playing. Although I get the impression
that that's kind of like a mystique that they're building up. Also, I suspect it's true, but I suspect they're like playing into that when they talk about it, especially since their previous band was called Exit, because they were like, ha ha haa, we're going to drive away all of our listeners or whatever.
You know. They're good at that.
Yeah, I mean it clearly by sticking to what they were doing. Yeah, they drove away a lot of listeners, and then they brought in even more, you know. And then geev ousher who's living in New York at this time, she books them some shows in America, so they go over and they loved New York, at least Steve did.
Steve talked about how he loved that there was cross dressers everywhere, and there's vegetarian food everywhere, and the food actually tasted good, which makes sense because I've eaten British food, so I think that going to New York would be a culinary revelation. And then they headed back to England
and Gee moved back to England with them. Basically, Ge was getting more and more politically radical, and she was getting tired of the feel good liberal vibe of the New York Times and the New Yorker and her employers in general, for example. And this was actually the final straw.
I believe there had been this homophobic attack in Central Park, and so she did art for an article about it, and it included two men kissing in her art, and her boss got mad at her for including two men kissing in this article about people being attacked, no homophobic attack, and so she was like, you know what, fuck this and quit, you know, commercial art, and moved to back to London, into back into dial house and started a plane and cross And at this point, around this point
when they get back from New York, they're like, are we doing this? Like is this? Are we going to take this seriously? And they all committed, and there's this whole thing where like basically and there's people saying that this didn't didn't happen there's a version of the story where Penny was like, Hey, if we don't take this seriously, I'm quitting and everyone was like, fine, then quit and so he quit, and then a day later everyone was like, no,
let's take it seriously. You can come back, like and at this point, this is when when women started the band, including Eva Libertine, who's a mom and who's we were talking about before as an amazing vocal style and just like does really cool shit. And they Once women joined the band, more women started coming to the show. But as best as I can tell, the audience of punk music overall was drifting further and further towards angry young men instead of where it started as this like larger,
more inclusive, youth led subculture. And I feel like punk has always had this like multiple sides to it, and one of them is this like beautiful feminists, liberating movement, and then there's this other part of it that's always been at least since the you know, late seventies, early eighties, like a angry young men are angry m hm. Around this point, they actually banned the word kunt from their lyrics.
And this is kind of interesting to me because every British person I've ever met has tried really hard to convince me. I think they're right that the word kant has very different connotations in the UK than it does in the US.
I love the word kunt.
I know, it's such a yeah.
I just think like I love it as as an anti imperialist word in a way, because the other the other terms, the like medical terms that we use for for the genitalia are fucking Roman okay, huh. And then the the English word gets turned into a swear word, and I would say, I.
Was is kunt The English word kant.
Is an English word interesting and it's and it's a venerable fucking word. It's it has the same root as kundalini, Okay. So it is like you know, classic, like Indo European ancient ass word, and it signifies the entire organ, unlike the you know, the medical words which are you know they are? They come from uh, from Rome, from Rome, from the colonizing force. And that always happens, like colonized people, their language gets turned into curse words.
Yeah, even like when Finland is not well. Actually Finland was a colonized space for a very long time, but one of the Finnish course words Badcula is the name of like and it's like meant to be sort of like a word for satan, but it's just an old pagan deity. Like it's not a bad word at all, you know.
Yeah, My a friend of mine is his mom is Filipino, and he was saying like his mother's language was very crass, and I was like, is it crass or is this just like a colonized perspective.
Yeah, no, that's that's interesting, and like I think it's like such a good indicative of crass, the band being like we're not gonna use the word cunt and songs because we're doing feminism in the nineteen seventies and eighties. And it's interesting because like again, like Kant has much stronger negative like if you call someone a count in the US, it's a very like strong thing to say, and it it isn't as much that way in the UK.
And so I think that the best comparison is like if they stopped using the word bitch in their.
Lyrics exactly, yeah, I was gonna I was gonna.
Call that yeah, yeah.
But like in I think in Scotland or something where somewhere over there they have a They're just like, there's a cunt of lake.
Oh hell yeah.
So it's it's like you can see that, like it did not have this kind of like very negative characterization in the past. And also I've seen some etymology that suggests that the word queen comes from the word cunt.
That would rule, well, do you know who? I won't call a bunch of cunts, because then I wouldn't have a job anymore. It's our advertisers.
It depends on whether or not you mean it as an honorific.
That's true. Why in that case that I wouldn't as an honor You know what, sometimes some of our advertisers are right. You know, sometimes we get the like go walk in the woods more ads, and you know what, here's a free one for go walk in the woods more. It's nice, go walk in the woods more, especially right now when they're all being destroyed by the current administrator. Anyway, here's advertisers who have something to tell you.
And we're back.
And that was probably the most I've ever towed the line wait towd the line is like it has like two opposite meetings. The most I've ever been like, uh, can I get away with this anyway?
Sorry, we'll find out.
So if there was a if there was an episode where I should do that. And so the band Crass has a whole mystique around them. No one individual was under the spotlight. They were actually fairly anonymous, Like now we kind of talk about all the individuals in the band, but I'm under the impression that they didn't do that as much. And I think they would usually sign things as the band, like this is what Krass said, rather than this is what G said or Penny said or whatever.
No one knew their names as far as I can tell, for a long time, and they lived in some mysterious house in the country, but the house was open and people started camping there, going and hanging out. And then they started a graffiti campaign, which political graffiti is as old as politics and walls as far as I can tell. But I think that they kicked off a lot of
the idea of stencil graffiti in the UK. And it started with G and Penny going out every Saturday to stencil basic slogans like fight war not wars.
I was like, I love that one. It's really good.
Yeah, yeah, it captures that militancy so well, right, because you're like, no, we're going to fight something, but what we're fighting is the concept of war, you know.
And it's like all of this, the like going out and like with their gorilla ad campaign, it really and like the ability to like create this like beautiful slogan, it's all. It all feeds back into thinking about them as coming from commercial art.
Oh my god, you're completely right. This is an advertising campaign, but it's not, and it does promote the band, but they are set up to not cash in on it. They're set up to then use it to promote the ideas. And so for eighteen months, every Saturday they would go out and stencil until touring basically took up kind of
all of their time. But that point more people have been doing it anyway, including as soon as they started doing stenciling campaigns, a conservative Christian group started counter stenciling to them, and they had this whole graffiti war, and soon enough all kinds of groups were getting into stenciling. And they put out their first album. They called it a single, but I think this was like literally around
how they wanted to price it really cheap. It was twelve songs, long, so a little bit long for a single, and it was a twelve inch record called The Feeding of the five Thousand. I love how they play with all this sort of anti Christian imagery and lyrics constantly. But the Feeding of the five Thousand is a reference to when Jesus fed as many poor people as he could.
I one thing I was trying to do in the minutes between these episodes is come to an understanding of Crass's theology.
It is hard, have you come to conclusions because I haven't read everything yet.
But you were raised, you were raised Catholic? Is that right?
Yeah?
I was raised in uh. I was raised Jehovah's Witness, okay, And like I never got baptized, I never drank the kool aid and it's blood, yes, So I had to That's so funny. I had to really grapple with theology from a very young age, you know, because I was I was just like presented with like this giant pile of bullshit as a child. So and it was like this language that I had to grapple with. So it's it was really fun looking at their theology because it's their stuff is so religious.
Oh yeah, absolutely, yeah. I like that about it. I like how they are playing with this. And when they put out The Feeding of the five thousand, every other album at the time was three ninety nine, and so they made theirs one ninety nine, and to make sure that shops wouldn't mark it up, they printed pay no more than one ninety nine right on the sleeve.
They must have lost money, right, so they didn't.
On this first one. They actually occasionally do lose money on their releases, but they basically like, we'll get into it. And so they had a song on there called Reality Asylum, and it was based on that pamphlet that Penny had written. But this was the most blasphemous track on the album, and the pressing plant refused to press the record because
it was so blasphemous. So they cut out Reality Asylum and then replaced it with two minutes of silence shout out John Cage, and they called that song the sound of free Speech. Yeah, And they were able to sell their records so cheap because they lived collectively. They grew most of their own food, they didn't do a bunch of drugs, they didn't stay at hotels while they were touring. And then they like from their point of view, they passed the savings onto the customer.
And they knew how to cook beans.
Yeah, you watch the young ones.
Yeah.
And when I think whenever I think of the UK people eating slop, I think of the guy, the hippie guy with his lentils that he's always trying to feed everyone.
That's too real. My lentils are really good.
Though I believe it. I've probably even said this on the air before, but my favorite name for punk cooking is that when I stayed at a squad in Germany, they called it rice mitchie rice with shit, and it was just a stir fry of whatever shit you whatever you've dumpstered or grown or stolen, and then rice.
Rice mit chice.
Yeah, hell yeah. I think they ate a lot of rice mitche And I think that refusing to stay at hotels and they also refused to have roadies. They carried all of their own gear and stuff. It kind of fucked them up a little bit and burned them out.
I think, yeah, it's it's it's brutal. I have sometimes I'll get a taxi to carry my gear sometimes between you know whatever, between from place to place on tour, and sometimes it's hard for me to justify it to myself, but I just by myself, this is cheaper than the body work, like if I if I rip a muscle or whatever, or like, yeah, it's it's brutal. Carrying that gear is brutal. I have friends who've broken toes from dropping things on their feet. It's it's awful.
Yeah, no, it it makes sense to me as someone who's like I've before I ever toured on my own. I like tour it as like a roadie and like a merch girl or whatever.
What is your tour with? Can you say? Are you at liberty to say?
Oh, yeah, a goth bank called Ego likeness, Okay, yeah, I don't know them. Yeah, no, that's that's fair. Yeah. And eventually I toured as their drummer, which was funny because they called me to be like, hey, we you know, our our guitarist left the band and we're about to go on tour. And I was like, I'd love to play guitar, and they were like, do you want to play drums? And I was like, I'd love to play key tar and they were like no, come be a drummer.
And so but it was a very dead simple drum set. It was electronic drum, was just a kick and a snare on pads, and I was basically a glorified stage dncer. It was very fun.
That sounds so fun. You're a stage dancer.
Yeah, more or less. Yeah, I especially new because no, I don't want to reveal their secrets. Okay, Anyway, so they refuse to have roadies and they refuse to stay at hotels and this fucked them up a little bit and kind of burned them out. And they because they they never got a good night's sleep and they were all tired all the time while touring.
Yeah, you need to stay in a goddamn hotel. I mean, yeah, nah fucking Airbnb, but.
You need a private space with beds.
Yeah, you need to shut the door, you need to like have some mental health.
Yeah yeah.
And I like, I've arrived at Airbnb's in the middle of the night and there's like no toilet paper. So that's one of the reasons why I'm like, no, I want a real hotel that like knows what they're doing.
Yeah. No, especially because like if your goal is just to go there and sleep, a hotel is what works. And like on this last book tour I went on. I was I usually would go on tour and to stay with people who book the shows and stuff like that, or go camping and you know, my truck or whatever. And then while I was on this tour, I was just like, I am in my forties, and I am so exhausted and I am so oversocialized that I don't
want to talk to anyone anymore. I would like to go to a space where me and my dog, because also had my dog with me, who's like kind of reactive, and so I was like, I just need a controlled environment. Now I'm done. I did my uncontrolled environment. But anyway, your dog.
Wants to sleep too. Your dog needs to sleep as well.
Yeah, exactly, because he was protecting the car from all the other cars all day. So and so, no matter how big Crass got, they always would just stay at people's houses. And since punks are super young, this meant that they were often crashing at their fans' parents' houses. And I love it because, like, hey, mom, can this multimillion records selling anarchist punk fans stay on our living room floor? They're all about your age, you know, Like I love it.
That's adorable.
Yeah, and so they put out this record and it was like the spiciest punk album yet to people. It was full of cussing and blasphemy. It was also almost specifically designed to be unable to be played on radio because it was so full of curse words. And they got an awful lot of negative reviews in the music press, so they would print the negative reviews in their liner notes or whatever their.
Next thing was, that's lovely, and some of the.
Negative reviews this kind of caught me by surprise. Some of them were basically leftist political infighting because the UK didn't have the same kind of red scare that the US did, and so a huge chunk of the working class and the intellectual class in the UK were leftists, especially Trotskyists, people who like Lenin but not Stalin, and you know, they don't like the worst excesses of state communism.
So these leftist journalists were trotsky Ice and what did they want to fight about?
So they didn't like the fact that Crass didn't do the traditional left stuff, and they weren't like trying to build the right kind of like mass movement, and also specifically Krass like wasn't fucking around with the traditional left. They were anarchists and the traditional left didn't like them either,
and so the feeling was mutual. So the most influential music journalist in the country at the time was a Trotskyist named Gary Bushnell, and he was obsessed with how much he hated Krass, which is part of what made them so big. He constantly talked shit on them, and that really helped Crass grow like the ultimate Yeah.
That's glorious, Thank you for your service, Gary.
Yeah. But as anarchists, Crass were kind of outsider anarchists, although I'm going to complicate that in a moment when I talk about one of their best friends, the band Poison Girls. But eventually Crass is going to integrate, with various degrees to the with the mainstream anarchist movement. But they are coming from the outside. They are coming from having kind of hit upon their own ideas of anarchism,
not from like bacun and reading groups. Steve Ignorant later said quote, if you ask me I'm an anarchist, I suppose it's the closest to what I believe. But I'm not going to loads of bloody rallies or meetings or to sit in a semicircle and chunder on about the minor strike in Poland in nineteen eighteen or whatever, which I both appreciate, but I also basically, if there was a minor strike and Poland in nineteen eighteen, I'll probably covered eventually on this show.
So you're, yeah, the old history, the real history.
Yeah, but I like, you know, he basically he was like, I don't like the traditional anarchist culture that was around.
Yeah he's and he's probably not like constitutionally suited for it. And that's you know, and that should that should always be fine. Like you know, diversity, diversity is strength.
No, totally, absolutely, and their their biggest break with the traditional anarchist culture was that they were pacifists. In a weird way, you could say that Crass kind of developed or popularized the modern idea of the lifestyle anarchist in
contrast to the revolutionary anarchist. But I hate this dichotomy and I think it's bullshit, and I think the way that you expressed it is what we should actually do, which is diversity as our strength, and different people want to do different types of organizing and living, and that is great. Crass's main selling point was just their sincerity.
I mean also their songs were really fucking good. But sincerity became basically the cultural currency of the anarcho punk scene and the movement, honestly to kind of a problematic degree, right, you could prove like I'm the most earnest, you know, Krass for example, you called this earlier. Krass for example, once put out a single that said pay no more than forty five ps. So they lost money on every record that they sold.
Yeah, you got to look out for that.
And so what they did is that after that they hired a financial manager, which is where we started this conversation.
Maybe it was smiled business manager, although those they were a great firm that used to work for me. But like basically all they did was they weren't super intimate in the work. They were just kind of like making sure I was ready to you know, pay taxes or something like that.
Yeah, no, I mean that makes sense. Crass also passed up a lot of money because they wouldn't sell merch. They would like, if you wrote them a letter, they'd send you back like a one inch button or whatever you had a beg for, But they didn't make shirts.
I knew this guy who would talk about his new record and he would say like, have you heard my new T shirt?
And so so Crass wouldn't sell T shirts even though that's like where most of the money is at least currently that and you know, ticket sales. So all the T shirts were bootlegs. And after the nonsense with the first album being censored, they started to start their own label, Crass Records. They released the censored song as a single.
Talked for a while about arresting them for this very blasphemous single, and Krass was investigated for a while, but in the end the government was like, fuck, if we arrest them for this, they'll just get more famous, and so they dropped it. True, there was another super earnest anarchist band worth mentioning here who was close friends with Krass. It was called Poison Girls. Have you heard the Poison Girls?
Have not?
They were fronted by a middle aged housewife named Visa Versa who started I think she was in her early forties when she started this band, and that fucking rules.
Yeah that's so wait, So how old was everybody else in the band?
So Kras were like mostly in their thirties and I think Steve was like probably in his late teens early twenties, and so they were like they were like half a generation older. And then but V was like had kids, and I mean so did Eve, but but yeah, Va was a little bit older.
So the front woman for Poison Girls was she started in her forties, and then how old was the rest of the band?
I actually don't know that. I think they were a little bit younger than her, because I know that some of the Dial House people ended up playing in Poison Girls. I actually did this thing where I kind of got sad, where I was like, I almost wish I'd done this entire thing about poisoned Girls instead. So I almost like I did some research on Poison Girls, and then I was like, oh, this is too much.
You can do another thing on boys and girls sometime.
It's true. And so V started Poison Girls independently actually before Crass and I think seventy six, but then moved it to a cottage near Dial House, and eventually Poison Girls and Crass would play one hundred shows together, and they were basically like they would really splits together. They were like the two things, and it's just Crass is.
More famous, but they're like twin bands.
Yeah, totally. And what's interesting is there's all this stuff about Crass being kind of outsider anarchists or whatever. Visa versa is not visa versa from the Poison Girls comes from the traditional anarchist movement. She had come up selling anarchist newspapers on the street, a newspaper called Freedom, and her partner in Baby Daddy was another anarchist activist guy.
So this is like, she does come from this. Krass and the Poison Girls fit oddly into London punk In some ways they were kind of the biggest and most influential acts, but in other ways they were seen as old and out of touch. Visubverse in particular, have kept have to prove that she belonged there, because you will be shocked to know that there was misogyny and agism in the punk scene. I know this is gonna blow you away with surprise, but oh, it's.
Just it's perennially disgusting.
Yeah, but yeah, so these are like old hippies living in the countryside. What do they know about the like London squatter punk scene, right? Is kind of the presentation that, you know, is what people say when they're mad at Crass and Poison Girls. And there's this huge squatter punk scene by nineteen seventy nine, and Crass aren't in it, but they were influential on it, and they constantly played benefits for it. They actually stopped playing outside the UK
pretty early on. They played a show in Germany and the German punks overturned a cop car and set it on fire, and cops shut down the event, or rather cops tried to shut down the show, but Kras was like, look, if you shut down this show, all of the punks who just set a cop car on fire are gonna be like extra mad. And the cops were like, yeah, you're right, and so they let them keep playing. It's the kind of thing that doesn't happen in America as
far as they can tell. One time, years ago, I was at a squad bar in Amsterdam and the old barkeep was telling a story about a punk night where cops had parked in front of the squat and then gone somewhere else, and so then the drunk punks came out and set the cop car on fire, and so then all these cops came and my friend, the bartender went out to negotiate with the cops, and the cops were like, we're so sorry about that. It was a rookie, he didn't know not to park in front of your bar.
It'll never happen again.
That's adorable, I know, I know.
And it also made me feel like I was a never never Land because I was like, yeah, people go to prison for a long time for that stuff in the US, you know, there's currently a lot of people in prison from twenty twenty for that. But in Germany, when this thing happened, with this like sort of almost riot happened, Krass like thought about this really hard, and they were like, look, we're kind of role models. We show up, we sing about anarchy, we sing about fighting
the police, and you know all this stuff. If we play shows in people riot in the UK, we know what to tell people, Like they would make pamphlets about know your rights and how to make it through court hearings and shit right, they would see it as their responsibility on some level if their fans did something like that, But what the fuck do we know about German law. We don't know how to support people. So they decided that if they couldn't help people handle the government repression.
They shouldn't be inspiring people to fight that government as directly, and they stopped playing overseas, and this is I don't know, that's interesting. That is admirable, is it? I don't know if it's what, I don't know, it's just interesting.
I like it.
Yeah, these were some of the early days of punk versus Nazi skinhead fights, and Krass actually didn't do the Mostly the anarchist punks and stuff would just be like,
all right, we're going to fight all the Nazis. Crass are like pacifists, and occasionally they would get into fist fights to protect themselves or each other, but largely they actually didn't try to kick skin heads out of their shows and instead were like, oh, we should expose them to anarchism, and we should expose them to pacifism and
we'll help change their ways. And the middling success they succeeded sometimes, but I will say, from my point of view, the biggest l of their career that I've been made aware of is that there's this big Trotskyist versus Nazi bral At a benefit show that they played, and Krass later were like, the leftists are the red fascists basically like both sides are bad or whatever. Look, I don't like stay communism either, but when they are fighting the Nazis, I'm on their side, you know.
But whenever I was trying to understand some of the things that Krass had said publicly, and some of it was just pretty confusing or like badly reported on and like including stuff about the Rock against Racism, I was just like, it seemed very reverse world.
And I don't know, no, I understand. That's how I feel reading some of their stuff. I'm like, huh, everything is different at different times in history, and people have really different opinions despite this having the same labels as each other. Yeah, And so they were seen as out
of touch for a while. And it's interesting because as the world starts getting worse, Crass actually starts struggling with their pacifism and starts taking on a more militant and more traditionally anarchist line with certain things, because things are about to get a lot worse. Specifically, in nineteen seventy nine, a far right politician who was known to history as quote the only bad Margaret came to power. I think that's what people called her. I think people called her
the only bad Margaret. Her name was Margaret Thatcher, and Thatcher wasn't the UK's Ronald Reagan. Reagan was the US's Thatcher. Thatcher came into power and was like, I am going to declare war on the leftist working class of the United Kingdom. She hated unions, she would give raises to cops that killed protesters. She agreed to host US nuclear weapons in the UK, and, in a move that will be quite familiar to modern listeners, she cozied up to the middle class to get their votes by pretending to
support their interests. But in the end she only supported the rich, and so punk starts becoming more of an actual social movement in the Thatcher era. All of this a couple years after punk had been declared quote dead by the music press because it was no longer like the hot new thing. Like basically like the music press is, like, oh, punk was from seventy six to seventy eight, and then it was done, and then like this supposedly dead thing
becomes an incredibly powerful social movement and aesthetic culture. But as for what it did once it became a movement, we're going to talk about that on Wednesday. Yeah, anything you want to plug.
I have a show coming up March sixth at the Oddfellows in Bellingham and then Constellation in Chicago. Hell yeah on March fifteenth.
Hell yeam On March third, my book The Immortal Choir Holds Every Voice goes to Kickstarter and I'm really excited about it. And you're all probably tired of hearing me say that, but you're going to have to hear it. Actually you don't have to hear it. You can actually hit stop now and then just start the next episode and be fine. But instead you could hear me also talk about how I work with an anarchist collective publisher called Strangers in a Tangled Wilderness and you should check
us out at Tangled Wilderness dot org. If you give us ten bucks a month, we'll send you a zine every month anywhere in the world. We also put out a bunch of podcasts and do a bunch of stuff, and so you could check that out if you're like, wow, I've this is the first time I've heard of an arco. What does the collective make? Well, we make some stuff. We'll see you on Wednesday. Cool people who did Cool
Stuff is a production of cool Zone Media. For more podcasts on cool Zone Media, visit our website foolzonemedia dot com, or check us out on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.