Crass: Acts Of Love

Marco Pandin lets us discover Crass and their album “Acts Of Love”

Acts of Love

“…I believe that this compilation should finally bury the stupid myth that punk was a mindless discordant aberration on the face of pop music. What these tracks represent is a period when the music business lost their grip, a period when the people took back what was rightly theirs and celebrated their victory in music and sounds. The music business has learnt the lesson, and has tightened its control again (just look at the present “alternative” charts and you’ll see just how much ground we have lost). It might be a very long time before we are again able to create the chink in the armour that made it possible to make recordings of the nature that we present here. While you are enjoying what is on offer here, recall that none of it
was made for profit. This is the peoples’ music, made by people, for people…” (excerpts from Penny Rimbaud’s introduction to “A sides” compilation cd, april 1992)

How strange is the fate of those anarcho-punk hippies: more than forty years after their breakup, Crass have not become rusty scrap metal or museum dust like some of their “colleagues” from back then. On the contrary, I think they can still intrigue and inspire more than one young person today – or at least I hope so.

I am someone who has read thoroughly the lyrics of anarchist poets as Fabrizio de André and Alessio Lega much more often than the books of Errico Malatesta. I know that for some of my comrades I am blaspheming, but I confess that I arrived at my twisted and extravagant vision of anarchy largely thanks to the inspiration I drew not only from those singer-songwriters comrades, but also from the lyrics of songs by Crass, Poison Girls, Flux of Pink Indians, Franti, Kina, and a few others, as well as from hanging out with them and other bands, rather than through more traditional paths such as, er, reading and studying certain writings by Mikhail Bakunin.

I remember that when we used to talk about Crass at the editorial meetings of A/Rivista Anarchica in the early 1980s, in the presence of certain old anarchists (people who were undoubtedly worthy of respect, but who remained, so to speak, someway nineteenth-century in spirit) some raised their eyebrows and others even took offense. I think that people like me seemed to them to be just ignorant troublemakers without a future, but it turned out not to be true. Crass also seemed like just another shitty punk band, but that was not true either. It seemed like it would all end in 1984, but in some ways that year was when it all began.
I already wrote here in March 2022 about how I crashed into Crass. Today I’m going to focus on their next to last album, released in January 1985: there’s no trace of their name on the cover – just the title “Acts of love”. The band had broken up six months earlier. Maybe I will describe their last record, “Ten songs on a summer’s day,” in another future post here.

It’s you who makes the world around you
The silence is yours
In every line upon your face
and every fold that holds your eyes a story
That story is you
There is no cosmetic for our frustrations
If upon my tears you build the utopia of which you dream
Be warned
Your petty prejudice will push you again into maliciousness
Beyond our alienation
And its tiresome manifestations of violence and greed
There is balance and harmony
Isn’t the world already at peace?
I suggest togetherness, proclaiming my love and compassion
Will you make that into commodity, asset and possession?
It’s you who makes the world around you
You alone can answer for it.

In my first post on Radio Punk I told you about when, in the summer of 1979, a friend of mine who had just returned from a short trip to London gave me “Stations of the Crass.”
It was a recently released album, and he had bought it because he was attracted by the incredibly low price and intrigued by the cover, but once he got home, he listened to it and didn’t like it at all. For me, however, that record sparked a huge commotion in my head and heart. And it wasn’t a case of falling in love with the music: compared to other bands, Crass sounded really bad, and I didn’t feel much like listening to “Stations” compared to certain other records of that period – such as “Y” by the Pop Group, “Fear of music” by Talking Heads, or the Cure’s “Three imaginary boys.”

Two things about Crass and “Stations” struck me deeply. The first was their sound, so dirty and poor and shaky and rough, surrounded by a reverb that made it sound very similar to the noise echoing in the basement where I used to play with my band. I was convinced that my bandmates and I had developed a particular creativity and style all our own, but that our skills were poor and we were completely unsuited to the scene and new trends – yet there were people like Crass who had dared to document their technical inadequacy, made it public, and turned it into a point of pride. It was clear that they considered the packaging less important than the intrinsic value they attributed to each piece: this reasoning knocked me out. In half an hour, all my thinking about discipline, the value of practicing the instrument, and exercise had collapsed. All my beliefs about music, how to make it, and why to make it were shattered.
And here’s the other reason: I was really fascinated by the lyrics of the songs, they had enlightened me. I found them evocative and amazing: a shake-up, an adrenaline rush, a box of firecrackers, a string of slaps in the face and loud kicks in the ass. For me, those lyrics were nothing more and nothing less than an instruction manual for learning how to really live instead of just surviving: get moving Marco, you’re almost 22, fuck the idea that there’s no future and no dreams, if you really want to change your life you have to get off your ass and get busy. Don’t expect someone else to do it for you. That was my very first impact with anarcho-punk.

Along with the record, my friend had given me a handful of flyers printed by the band that he had collected at Housmans bookshop in King’s Cross – a legendary place that a young restless reader from the northeastern suburbs of the empire like me used to fantasize about. Crass’s anarcho-pacifism and their practices of self-management and direct action had really grabbed me, so after a while I made up my mind and wrote them a letter. It wasn’t a typical fan letter, but I told them who I was, about my home, my friends, the free radio station I worked with, the band I played in, my bad luck, my messes, my aspirations, my difficulties. To my great surprise, they replied after just a few weeks: and it was a real letter, handwritten, not a circular. In the envelope were a couple of flyers, a badge, and a warm invitation to keep in touch.

After further correspondence, in the summer of 1982 I managed to take the train to London and, once there, pop into Rough Trade, then a must-visit destination for all indie music fans. In the store, I met Scott Piering who was in charge of the label’s press office: I left him a few copies of our Venetian fanzine and he gave me his time and attention. He said he liked the fanzine even though he couldn’t read it, and was surprised to find translations of some Crass and Poison Girls lyrics inside. “I did them myself”, I told him. “Wait a minute”, he said. He picked up the phone, and arranged a meeting for me with John Loder. We met there in the store a couple of days later.
John was very kind and helpful: he liked our fanzines too, gave me some records as a gift, and wrote down the phone number of their commune in Epping on a piece of paper, inviting me to call – which I have done several times since then. The following year, I finally managed to visit Penny, Gee, Phil, Joy, and their mates at Dial House and a few months later I published a self-printed book with their lyrics translated into Italian. In May 1984 I attended one of their concerts in Nottingham, and when I asked if I could plug my tape recorder into the mixer, they had no objections. I first made some cassettes and then a CD, which I distributed in support of A/Rivista Anarchica monthly magazine.

Here is another excerpt from “Acts of Love”:

Those hours are distant shadows
Silent
the beating sea
throwing winds upon a distant shore
Beneath the silence that holds us apart is a name
The name seizes its own reality
Where were you then?
Hiding in prosperous groves of lemon and grape?
You push aside the ivy with your white fingers
I shall never forget you
The silence of those fingers blinds my eyes
my ears are blinded by the whiteness
Walk here, here and beyond
Wait for me by the naked sand
The waves roll contented to the sea
Hold me as a memory
I’m a huge whale that fights for oceans and air.

As you most probably know, if you follow these pages and hang out with certain people, Crass were a collective of English punks active between the late 1970s and 1984. A couple of them, the older ones, had been involved in certain creative fringes of the British hippy movement for a long time in the 1960s. Anarchists and pacifists, they did not have an easy life: from the outset, they had to fight hard not to succumb to silence.

I’ll make it as brief as possible. Their debut album was released by the tiny London indie label Small Wonder in October 1978 with a couple of minutes of silence instead of the first song on side A, “Reality asylum”, a feminist outburst against religious oppression – the workers of the vinyl pressing plant had deemed it offensive and refused to process it.
The following year, Crass founded an independent and self-managed record label of the same name, and managed to issue the banned song as a single and reissued their debut album in its entirety – only to find very soon Scotland Yard officials at their doorstep, alerted by reports of blasphemy. This was a quite unusual issue in their country, and the vice squad, more accustomed to dealing with prostitution and pornographic publications, probably did not know how to handle properly the matter. The band managed to avoid legal repercussions by candidly denying any involvement in the plan, and succeeded in this most probably because the various members, although already known to the authorities, still had clean records.

The police warned them that by doing so they were only asking for trouble and suggested they stop provoking, but Crass decided to continue anyway: from then on, their records were systematically censored and boycotted. Shops that displayed Crass records in their windows received discreet visits from the police: at first, they asked the managers to remove them from the shelves and return them to the distributor, then they moved on to threats. Some rebellious shopkeepers were reported to the authorities, and one in Manchester and one in Norwich were even put before a judge and convicted for selling “obscene material” to minors. I’ll leave you to imagine the pressure exerted by MI5 on concert organizers and venue managers, and I’ll just mention the warm welcome given to the band at the few concerts they managed to organize themselves – they were hated by everyone, right and left, from the National Front to Class War and beyond.

Between 1978 and 1984, Crass released a dozen records, including singles, EPs, and albums, and even managed to sell several hundred thousand copies, but inexplicably never made it into the charts. The British music press hastily panned their debut and routinely described their work in derogatory terms, accusing them of being dangerous extremists, pathetic late-sixties hippies fighting outdated battles, the personification of hatred, a band only good for making pins, “a disaster for youth cultural policy” and “the worst thorn in the side of the movement” (the latter two quotes are taken from two Italian music magazines). There are dozens of people around the world who have become rich by marketing, without having asked for or obtained any authorization or license, T-shirts, pins, and other merchandise bearing their name and logo, as well as counterfeit copies of their records.

Shortly after the outbreak of the British conflict with Argentina over the Falkland Islands, Crass wrote fierce and desperate songs against the war, attracting the attention of the Tory government and Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher herself – whom they dared to mock in public and put in serious difficulty during a BBC radio debate, where they revealed confidential information live on air. The anarchists’ access to national radio was heavily contested. During the broadcast, the BBC switchboards were jammed with hundreds of protest calls: publicly disagreeing on a subject such as war was considered absolutely unacceptable at that time.

In the midst of the war, Crass managed to press a transparent and anonymous flexi-disc abroad with “Sheepfarming in the Falklands,” one of their bitterest pacifist songs, and smuggled it back into their homeland. With the help of some Rough Trade employees, they distributed it by inserting it into the covers of other records, but a large part of it was soon intercepted by the police and seized. The release of “Sheepfarming,” considered by many parliamentarians to be an “obscene” song, led to even greater police attention being focused on those who were now considered nothing more than “traitors to the country”.

As soon as the war ended, the so-called Thatchergate scandal broke out: a recording of a fake telephone conversation between Margaret Thatcher and US President Ronald Reagan was anonymously sent to the editorial offices of the world’s leading newspapers. Although the recording was clearly a fake, it caused a series of diplomatic incidents: the United States pointed the finger at the KGB and the Russians at the CIA, and an international intrigue was about to explode. Instead, it was their own doing…

The group disbanded in July 1984 after a tumultuous concert in Aberdare in support of the striking Welsh miners.

“…It should be remembered that the anarcho-punk movement was not a beginning as much as a continuation. Before that there’d been the hippies, the beats, the bohemians, right back to the beginnings of human consciousness. There’s nothing new about social dissent, but unless it is willing to adapt to the times and to offer something radical and new in itself, it can become as rigid as that which it claims to oppose (which is one good reason why today, in 2008, I so loathe the fad for retro-punk). We all know the System stinks. We all know we can stop it for a day, or even two. We all know that McDonalds and Coca-Cola are crap. We all know that wars kill… What we don’t yet seem to get a handle on is how once and for all we can change all that. Thirty years ago, anarcho-punk broke a lot of new ground, not least in learning that oppositional politics tend to do little more than strengthen the opposition…” (excerpts from Penny Rimbaud’s introduction to “The last of the hippies”, 2008)

In January 1985, just a few days after the release of “Acts of love,” Crass were dragged into court where a judge deemed them “an association operating on the fringes of legality” and described their records as “crude and vulgar, consisting largely of offensive garbage,” as well as “stuff that no one would want to keep in their home”. Their third album “Penis envy” was judged by the court to be “contrary to public decency” because of its lyrics and cover art. The judges told the press that they “wanted to set an example and make a real contribution to improving human values and restoring public morals in the interests of all young people”.

“…It would take more than VAT to make us stop. The reason the band stopped was several reasons. One, we always said we’d stop in 1984. That’s why we had the countdown on the numbering [of the LPs]. Secondly, when we got to 1984, Andy wanted to go back to art school, he went to the Royal College. And none of us could see any point in continuing without Andy. The band kind of operated like that. We certainly couldn’t get a stand-in, because that wasn’t what the band was about. We were all very committed to each other, and that was the band. And if somebody left, then the band stopped. We decided on a more positive note, in the sense, a lot of young punks here were immersed in death and disaster. And they were forgetting why they were angry. I thought that was very negative. So we did “Acts of love”… I thought it was very important to do that…” (Gee Vaucher interviewed by Richie Unterberger on Perfect Sound Forever, 1998)

We have seen it clearly all before: the system proved capable of absorbing and recycling opposition, including radical opposition, and making even punk manure palatable and tasty – all it took was sprinkling some sugar on top in the form of reissued vinyl with a few bonus tracks scraped from old rehearsal tapes. However, this does not seem to have worked very well in the case of Crass.
As I said at the beginning, the group has not been active as such for over forty years, even though some of the former members have continued to be artistically active in their own way and their old records have continued to be in constant demand. Thanks to One Little Independent, which acquired the Crass Records catalog when Southern closed after John Loder’s death, their old stuff continues to be reissued, and Steve Ignorant occasionally sings the usual old songs in front of an audience of nostalgic old punks who share heartbeats and choruses with many curious young punks.
Edited by Gee Vaucher for Exitstencil Press and entirely self-produced, last year was released a beautifully packaged, three-inch-thick book about the Crass years containing photos, written material and graphics, bringing together contributions from fans and supporters around the world. Unfortunately, after Brexit, with the addition of customs duties and extra-EU shipping costs, both the book and the records reissued by One Little Independent cost us Italians an exorbitant amount.

And here I am at “Acts of love.” At first, I had many scruples in writing about this record here. There isn’t a single guitar lick, shouted verse, or loud drum beat in here, not even a minimum of distorted sounds that you would accept as punk, and probably because of all this it might be hard for me to justify its presence here. But I sincerely believe that this is the right place for it: it represents a different path, an uphill climb by all means, to recount certain roots. I think it’s an important piece in helping to better understand the succession and stratification of events and reasoning that led to the formation of Crass – motives that were anything but musical, economic, or fashionable – and above all, it can explain the reasons for such a strong unity among the group’s members.

At the end of the gigs organized in the spring and summer of 1984 to promote their fifth album “Yes sir, I will”, and shortly before the band broke up, Penny Rimbaud threw himself headlong into a musical project radically different from that he had pursued with Crass. He had found and collected fifty short poems he had written between 1968 and 1973, and imagined reading them with some background music. Instead of punk, inspiration came from a Yamaha DX7 synthesizer, the first fully digital keyboard, which had just been placed on the market and which John Loder had immediately purchased for Southern Studios.
Penny began experimenting alongside Paul Ellis, keyboardist for the Poison Girls at the time, who also added his Prophet 5 and Prophet 8 analog polyphonic synthesizers to the equipment. The two worked poignantly in the studio in the spare time, and the project soon began to take shape, being completed after a few months. Eve Libertine provided vocals to 49 tracks, Steve Ignorant to the last track on the album.

Here is one more excerpt from “Acts of love”:

When you woke this morning you looked so rocky -eyed
Blue and white normally
But strange ringed like that in black
It doesn’t get much better
Your voice can get just ripped up shouting in vain
You’ve got to make such a noise to understand the silence
Screaming like a jackass, ringing ears so you can’t hear the silence
Seeing it but not being touched by it.

“Acts of love” was released in January 1985 by the band’s label Crass Records. The vinyl package included a large-format booklet with one or two poems by Penny on each page, accompanied by fine illustrations by Gee Vaucher. Neither poetry nor songs, but acts of love: this is how the fragments that compose it were called. Forty minutes without time, space, or dimensions.
No advertising campaign was organized for promoting the record, only a short press release that was also included in a flyer accompanying the group’s correspondence at the time: “…Fifty songs written in memory of Wally Hope”, Penny wrote, “Songs dedicated to my other self, a self that exists, intact, beyond the social conventions that give me a name, a number, an identity, and a definite space in time. They describe my deep sense of unity, peace, and love: they are my declaration of war against those who want to desecrate and destroy it. These poems are the expression of my desire for revolution, the description of what I believe is possible, and for this very reason they are the reason for the anger I feel”.
He continued with this sentence: “It is an attempt to show that the origin of our anger is not hatred, but love” that I feel is very important to understand Crass as a collective.

Wally Hope was the nickname of Phil Russell, a dearest friend of Penny and Gee and one of the regulars at their shared home, Dial House, when it had just opened. Russell was an anarchist/mystic pacifist and visionary, one of the creators and organizers of the earliest British free festivals, whose premature death, the result of forced confinement in a psychiatric hospital and compulsory medical treatment, prompted the two future members of Crass to transform the hippy philosophy of “peace and love” into the raw anger of punk. Penny writes extensively about him in “The last of the hippies” and in the subsequent “Shibboleth”.

“…Wally had travelled the world and had met fellow-thinkers in every place that he had stopped, but always he returned to England… Wally could talk and talk and talk. Half of what he spoke about seemed like pure fantasy, the other half like pure poetry… On our first meeting, Wally described Windsor Free and other gatherings that he had attended. Not particularly liking crowds, I had always chosen to avoid festivals, so my knowledge of them was very limited. Wally outlined their history and then went on to detail his ideas for the golden future. He proceeded to unfold what seemed to me to be a ludicrous plan. He wanted to claim back Stonehenge, a place that he regarded as sacred to the people and stolen by the Government. He wanted to make it into a site for free festivals: free music, free space, free mind. At least that, like happily ever after, is how the fairy story goes…” (Penny Rimbaud, excerpts from “The last of the hippies”)

Credited solely to Penny Rimbaud, a version of “Acts of love” was published by Exitstencil Press in 2012, in the form of a CD and a booklet with all the lyrics and illustrations made smaller in a 5”x5” format. In addition to the restored and digitalized version of the original recordings, the CD features about twenty other fragments and a poem by Eve Libertine.
In 2023, One Little Independent released a limited edition double vinyl of 1,000 copies, which collects the original recordings and a reinterpretation by Japanese pianist and music experimenter Mikado Koko. You can find some interesting contributions on Penny’s YouTube channel here.

Two documentaries, both independently produced and extremely well made, tell the story of Crass. “There is no authority but yourself” is the work of Dutch filmmaker Alexander Oey (released in 2006 – a low-resolution version can be viewed on YouTube). “The Sound of Free Speech” by British director Brandon Spivey, was released in 2023 and focuses on ”Reality asylum” – it is available for streaming on the Streeen platform here.
Almost twenty years apart, the two directors went to Dial House to ask almost the same questions to the same two or three former members who agreed to answer – and I note that the silence of the others is equally significant.
From both films, it is clear that the collective as such has disappeared: Penny answers the questions, Gee answers, sometimes Steve answers – Crass does not answer. Those who were among the main inspirers of punk proved completely useless in organizing any kind of birthday party, and in fact were left out of the media circus surrounding the 20th, 30th, and 40th anniversary celebrations. No doubt they will be left out of the 50th anniversary celebrations, which the entertainment industry is already organizing in grand style: I wonder what awaits us in 2027, certainly not a Crass reunion… Could it be that with the help of AI and big money from the multinational record companies, someone will manage to resurrect and perhaps virtually exhibit together Sid Vicious and Joe Strummer.

Marco Pandin
stella_nera@tin.it