Part Four: Crass: How Some Hippies Reinvented Punk and Changed the World
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Hello, and welcome to Cool People Who Did Cool Stuff, a podcast that is sometimes recorded while 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 Julie Holland. Hi. 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. That's so benign. You're like sugar rush is a banana. Yeah.

It wasn't like a little Debbie or something. Yeah, well, I ran out of 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 AnarchoPunk had become a serious movement. Only I hadn't told you what it was doing yet. So, as the 70s closed... Oh! Jeez!

What will I do without Sophie? Sophie 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 for us by Unwoman, who once got an entire steampunk convention kicked out of a bar. It was actually funny because then Unwoman 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 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 Bella Chao from the main stage. Classic. I suspect that if you look up Bella Chao on Woman on YouTube, it might still be there. Why did I just tell everyone that? It was not my best. But anyway.

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. Yeah. And that's all you need. You just need to 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, an 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. You just need them to give you the money. Yeah, exactly. As the 70s 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 particular and specific, which is... It happens constantly to every genre, and it's both good and bad in equal measure, you know? And one of the main subgenres of punk, especially in the UK, was anarcho-punk, which basically meant...

Sounds like crass. There's also OI that came out 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 OI bands. So this isn't a story about OI. It's a story about a narco punk. Crass. They really did walk the walk. Their album started selling rather well.

And they simply pooled all of their money and then gave themselves about 500 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 500 pounds a year to live on? Well, I think their living expenses is that they are in crass and live at Dial House. So it's like 500 pounds on top of that. It's a tip, right?

Yeah, totally. That's not enough. You know, in the end, I think they probably agreed. They didn't let mass media do interviews with them besides like once or twice if the if the interviewer like really proved that 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 200 letters a week and they would like refuse to answer with like form letters. So they 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 outselling ACDC and they are doing this. That's amazing. Yeah, it would be like, I don't know, whoever, I don't, I clearly don't know. What do we call it? New history. I don't know who's currently the people who would be comparable to, but yeah.

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 one proposition is we just talk about music because I feel like so much music journalism is just all about gossip. 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, I've seen, um, uh, sort of worse. Like, uh, you know, I had this one band where one of the bandmates admittedly had a fantastic beard and,

And literally this interviewer only wanted to talk to the guitarist about his beard. Oh my God. Uh-huh. Yeah, it gets stupider than even like...

your proposal seemed to suggest or like 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 regressive absolutely

I love the, like, when I do interviews with Feminazgul, 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 Crass. And they just let people do it. They knew that that was happening. They didn't care. That's great. And their stencil campaign spread to listeners because they would include stencils in the leaflets that they passed out and teach people how to spray paint.

And then in 1980, they released a benefit split with the Poison Girls that was meant to benefit a bunch of anarchists who were on trial because of this... 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 being 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's this whole thing where like it basically seems like the UK cops were terrified that the IRA was going to move more anarchist.

And they started 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 were on trial or the five people who were 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. And one of them, I can't keep it again. I read a bunch of different things, whatever. Um,

And so they were like, okay, we don't need this 10,000 pounds we just raised. And so 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 10,000 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 how to spell it.

And they I had to make at least one joke about this. It's just like I'm constitutionally incapable of not making fun of the British. Gotta 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 and, you know, and they made their money on that by beer sales, basically. Yeah.

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 1980, 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 the me wanting to learn more about is true. Remember I was talking about the Stonehenge festivals that their friend had started? Like several episodes ago where Wally was like, we're all going to go squat Stonehenge. That sounds so flaky. They kept happening. The Stonehenge festivals lasted almost a decade.

And in 1980, Crass was like, all right, well, we're going to bring punk to it. And not just Crass, 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 offense 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 beat up all the punks. They just went around and beat everyone up. And it was like a beating up massacre where punks were running away into the woods and being chased by bikers and beaten up. It's actually really bad. To quote Penny Rimbeau 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 gotta be people, obviously, who know. Who are 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 Rimbaud 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 Crass 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 it, 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. 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.

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And we're back. So in 1981, 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 their following does that for them. Their logos on 100,000 black leather jackets and their name is sprayed on town halls and bus stops from Amsterdam to Aberdeen.

Kras 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 shoot 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 is

can be applied as well to how we make a living. And there's just, there's no one way. There's no one way to be an artist. 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.

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 also, you have to be extremely wary of things that are independent as well and don't just trust that because they're punk or because they have a certain aesthetic or background that they will have the same ethics as you and 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 was...

So they released this album called Penis Envy. That was an intentionally feminist piece. It was maybe their first 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. They actually had really good nuanced gender politics as far as I 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 Joy DeVive, which is one of the crass singers.

And it was published by, according to them, when Crass wrote, they were like, oh, this is a new song by Joy De Vivre, published by Creative Recording and Sound Services, Crass. Oh, so good. I know, and that's like a seamless acronym. That wouldn't raise any red flags if I saw that, you know? It 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 Vivre has captured all the happiness and romance of that all-important big day, your wedding. So make sure you send off for your copy in 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 it's...

Yeah, I feel like one of my bandmates' 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 thing.

Yeah. It's something that really, really deserves to be roasted hard. And I think that I really love how feminist they were out 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 feminist.

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 an aggressive and an unpleasant manner. That's true. And they hadn't broken any laws. They did not. And yeah, if you listen to the song, like,

It really could just be played on the radio as like a love song. Yeah. Because that's how patriarchal so many love songs are. I mean, it's very like, it's very Phil Spector-y in a way. I don't know who Phil Spector is. I feel terrible about that. He was a murderer. Oh, shit. Okay. Who was like a really important...

Oh, fuck. Okay. And like he, like he was part of, I don't know fully, but cause 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 the concept of like what a lot of the like no wave bands and stuff we're doing of like, it's kind of like,

It's kind of as loud as possible. I love your misinterpretation of that. No, like, no, it was like a 60s sound aesthetic. 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 1981, 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, 23 million people still employed. Uh...

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 1982, Crass released what they sort of figured 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 talk about the Falklands War. And I was like, I had no idea what it was. I was like 17 or whatever. That's an Elvis Costello song, right? New Model Army? Oh, New Model Army gets its name from... It was part of the English Civil War. There was a kind of group...

tied in with the levelers and stuff that were 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 in like you in like England, they have this like, oh, the people fighting for good. But then Cromwell used them as like useful idiots. 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. It wouldn't surprise me if Elvis 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 are these islands off the coast of Argentina called the Falklands Islands. And they are part of the U.K. for whatever dumb colonial reason. They are still part of the U.K. In 1982, Argentina was like, we want our shit back. And so they invaded. And the U.K. was like, are you kidding me? We're the fucking U.K.,

The war lasted 74 days and ended in Argentina's surrender. The UK stomped them. About 1,000 people died, mostly Argentinians, but 255 Brits were killed in the fighting too. At the start of the conflict, Crass 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. Shots fired. Yeah.

But as the war got all like, you know, killy, 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 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.

And as the podcast idiot, I truly was an idiot. I was just in a scene where some people obviously talked about crass and were 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 this anger aimed outward and it doesn't state the self lyrically. And I just loved like...

I'm a fucking, I'm the truly the, the podcast idiot. What's, what's the big song that we were talking about earlier? Do they owe us a living? Do they owe us a living? Yeah. 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. Yeah.

As opposed to like, so I remember. It's not just your bad. It's like, we're going to, we're going to 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 is 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 astounding. It's really beautiful. Yeah. And when they write this song, the Tories actually, 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 selling their record. And about half of their shows were shut down by cops before they even got started. And with the Falkland War, Kress 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 Krasnitz 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 get a chance to listen to that one. Did they, like, do their voices? Like, how, like...

No, they found old recordings of them and cut them up and then did enough audio magic to... It's like a lot of people can tell it's faked, right? But not everyone. And it's fairly well done. And this thing that they put out and they leak it ahead of the 1982 UK general election. And it claims that Thatcher allowed a British ship to be attacked so that the UK could counterattack.

And Kras 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 MI6 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 Kras. And, like, basically, like, got them to fess up. Yeah.

Yeah, I love that the journalist was just like, nah, I've heard this audio production style before. Incredible. And it's called Thatchergate, 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, it's still upsetting. Yeah.

Around this time, Crass opened up a squat. I suspect there's more than just Crass. I suspect there's 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 12-band show, which 1,000 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 i people who listen 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 Rimbaugh 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 tactic of community gardens. Yeah, me 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 also 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.

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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 as the complaints department. So just tag Robert Evans in whatever social media and he'll get right on that. So at this point, crass 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 at Dialhouse to like suss them out, be like, oh, are these people going to help us on a bombing campaign? And then realized that crass are pacifists and anarchists and not likely to support them. The KGB 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 1982, the

They played an anarchist center in Belfast. And the first night, there was trouble when some like loyalist skinheads, like people who are 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 like first guess 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 it was peaceful is we did security for you without you even noticing it. 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 going to wind down. They thought that was going to 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 1984 because of George Orwell. Like everyone, everyone in the UK thought 1984 was going to be like a big deal when it happened. You know, it's kind of like a year 2000 kind of thing. But some people were like, oh, we were always going to disband in 1984. 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 as 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 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 1983, they released their most experimental album, which is called Yes, Sir, I Will, which comes from one of the generals or whatever. There was a wounded soldier, and he was like, get better soon. And the soldier was like, yes, sir, I will. 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 songs end or whatever. And this album wasn't like really enjoyable to a lot of people. It'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 back to their roots as 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 10 to 15 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 mom and dad. 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 track the name of it, so it's not in 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 and anarcho-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, oh, I'm going to look up some stuff about crass. But...

After reading more about Kras, I think that this is entirely untrue. I wasn't surprised to realize that the article had been written by an authoritarian socialist magazine. It was basically like mad that Kras 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. Totally.

Krass and anarcho-punk 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 the peace symbol, like, everywhere. You can also say that the modern anarchist movement stems at least as much from anarcho-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 80s Specifically around the turn of the millennia later the US Mexico and Europe at least had these huge anti globalization protests Which kicked off 21st century protest culture in the West and of course I have an affinity for 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 Greenpeace, which threw me through a loop because I would just read all the articles would be like, oh, London Greenpeace did this thing. And I was like, oh, okay. Greenpeace, the organization, but in London. That's what I was thinking. Right. Right. There's no relation to the organization we currently know today as Greenpeace. It turns out.

Both get their names honestly. They both grew out of the same grassroots environmental movement that called itself Greenpeace, but then a huge chunk of it became Greenpeace International, the thing that grandmas donate money to to save whales or whatever. London Greenpeace was still grassroots. And in 1983, 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. Kras 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 pacifists 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 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 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 in 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 going to 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 and the pacifists 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. It's some, it's some Hampton shit. And it's also some Judy Berry shit. So yeah, it's like when you get really effective, you get really, it's, it's a really hot water. Yeah, totally. Yeah.

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, leafleting, anti-apartheid actions against Barclays Bank, many arrests.

By the virtue of about 1,500 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 when they start doing stuff outside of just subcultural spheres, you know?

A ton of people were arrested. 200 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 1984? It's okay if you haven't, but I'm just curious. No, I have. I'm not fully informed, but yeah, no, it was gigantic. Yeah. In 1984, Thatcher had decided, in March 1984, Thatcher decided to break the working class in unions for good. About 20,000 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 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 minors and their supporters. And the reason it's so hard is that like,

The U.S. has had a strong... Ever since the Red Scare has had a pretty strong hold. The right wing has had a pretty strong hold on rural culture. Totally. Not complete. But, you know, you read your Robin D.G. Kelly, and there was so much socialism coming from the ground up, all throughout the rural South. Yeah. No, absolutely. Like...

And we have this idea that somehow rural poor people have always been right-wing, and that's just completely untrue, including in America. Socialism, leftism, and anarchism, and communism were just so completely memory-holed in the U.S., starting in the 1940s and 50s.

And when this minor strike happened, punks came out in droves to support the minors, despite this massive cultural divide between the urban weirdo queer punks and the like normie, you know, the minors 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 Gays Support the Minors. But if you ever want to cry, watch the movie Pride. It is about this. Yeah. Cool. It's an English movie? Yeah.

Yeah, it's an English movie about lesbians and gays support the minors. 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, it 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 rural 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 One where they're all playing music together. All the different factions of the... I'm getting teary-eyed. I know. Yeah. The bosses are trying to divide everybody and...

Yeah, White vs. Italian vs. Black, I think was that one. Right, and then they just all 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. He plays the child preacher in Matewan. Oh, shit. Oh, cool. Oh, you didn't know that? No, no. Yeah, that's 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. Well, no, I'll get to it. The miners are going to 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. If you ever see something in writing and you're like the Thames, 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 Kras. It read, you picked the scabs. Now the wounds will fester.

Oh, yeah. That's... Come on. They're 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. I think they each wrote different songs, but like...

They clearly were challenging each other to write poetically and well. Yeah, I love that. Just, yeah, seeing people that all keep each other on their toes. Yeah. Crass played their final show in 1984, in July 1984, and it was a benefit for Welsh miners. And then basically, it was 1984, and they sort of promised a breakup in 1984, and then they started to. Andy Palmer went first. They were all just kind of burned out.

In 1985, the Miners called off the strike. Thatcher won. 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 Dial House. After Crass, Steve Ignorant said, quote,

The bands that came after Crass out-Crass'd 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 anarcho-punk culture that Crass 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 them comrade. No, it's cosplaying a bit. Yeah. Yeah. Also, politically correct started out as a leftist joke. And then the right. Oh, that makes sense. And then the right used it against the left. I'll just I'll take this moment to say that.

I learned this phrase from Eduardo Galeano. 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. Yeah.

Fuck, that is, I mean, that's what Mussolini did, right? 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. By the end of 1989, everyone from Crass, 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 came to a head without the band to keep them focused. I think their last fight that they had was about whether or not smoking was politically correct or whatever. And they would argue about, can you have milk in your tea? Everyone in Crass is vegetarian, to my understanding, but like...

People used to use the word vegetarian where we might use the word vegan now and they were like a little bit more interchangeable and you know whatever people would argue about that shit. After the band broke up Steve Ignorant started playing with the anarcho-punk band Conflict who was one of the main bands in the scene and they were a little bit less on the pacifist 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 seeing the end of bands 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. Oh shit, really? That rolls. Yeah. And like I think like got some kind of amazing degree in 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 has a happy ending on some ways, too. The land Dialhouse is on was sold to basically become a golf course. But Dialhouse sued and won. And so the landlords were like, fine, we're selling the house then. And they sold it at auction. So all the friends of Dialhouse showed up at the auction and bought it.

Is it, is it like one of the, is it like Cobb 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 was first built in like the 1400s or the oldest houses from the 1400s. And it's been added on to room after room over time. 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 couldn't tell you. It's cute. You can just 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 dox where... I think that people still just live there, you know, and are still doing their thing, like, 50 years later. And along the way, Crass sold about 2 million records in the seven years that they were around. The population of the UK was only 56 million people at the time. And I know it wasn't, like, one record for every, you know, couple... Whatever, I can't do math in my head. But, like...

Selling 2 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 2013, it couldn't be said that like, 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 oik from Dagenham actually stood up, knees trembling as he avoided the ashtrays being thrown at him, and still fucking did it. And like, yeah, here's to standing up, knees trembling, dodging ashtrays, and fucking doing it. You're making me cry again. Yeah. Yeah, I love their immediacy. I love their, you know...

Tucking 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, 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,

And, you know, people are just complicated. And we we're 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. Yeah. So, yeah, they. Yeah, sure. Of course they overdid it. They're they're people. Yeah.

Yeah. No, totally. And it was necessary to break a lot of things by saying like, no, we're just going to do this shit. And I fucking love that it came from the combination of avant-garde and punk, which are like, actually go together. I mean, if you listen to Crass, 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 as separate worlds. But in my experience, they're 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 where I was like, you know, 10, 15 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 punks, 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 sub genres 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 the like cartoonish punk um i don't know where i'm going with this well genre genre is uh i'm i i don't have a strong relationship with genre and uh personally the singer songwriter right because i you know um

When I put out 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 and just like it's it was so funny seeing 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 yeah listening to do they owe us a living for the first time a few days ago and

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 they needed all of it. You know, they took the entire palette of that scene.

that expression of the genre of punk. Yeah. I like punk. I, I don't know. Is that my closing thought is I like punk. I wasn't even like a punk as a teenager. It was a weird goth kid, but like once it became a squatter and 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 Jolie Holland. So, um, 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 anarcho punk, almost a sequel to this is an episode about the, the anarchist punk band Chumbawamba 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. That makes me want to start a band. You just start a band. Yeah. Like another band. Like two other bands. 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 Bandcamp. If you want to hear a black metal band that actually is kind of avant-garde, it's called Feminausgul. And that's, I also have a dark, gothy pop music project called Nomadic War Machine that used to be more noisy and

and I have a one-woman doom 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 doom 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 who's an amazing songwriter. And that's also on Bandcamp. There, that's my weird music shout-outs.

before podcasting consumed my life. Yeah. Well, it's, you know, it's good to figure out how to get paid. Yeah. You know, when I was, when I just started listening to Crass a few days ago, I felt that they were Blakey-an. 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? Yeah.

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, they have their own idiosyncratic theology. Theology. Exactly. Yeah.

Well, we should end it there. And I'll talk to you soon. And all you listeners, I'll talk to you next week. Adios.

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Discover is accepted at 99% of places that take credit cards nationwide. And every time you make a purchase with your card, you automatically earn cash back. Welcome to the now. It pays to discover. Learn more at discover.com slash credit card. Based on the February 2024 Nielsen Report.