The internet tells me it was the 14th of April 1981 when I saw Crass play live.
I was 11 years old. It might be a sign of how the world has changed that my youngest is 11 next February and, whilst he’s a confident kid, I can’t imagine me letting him board a train to another city with his older sibling and a group of mates, the eldest of which was 15, to watch an ‘anarcho-punk’ band play a gig that could end after the trains stop running. Maybe the world hasn’t changed and it was just a sign of my old man’s ‘relaxed’ attitude to parenting. He had let me go to the Cockney Rejects ‘early’ gig at Brannigan’s in the June of 1980 after all.
However it came about, I found myself queuing up outside what I’m pretty sure was a semi-derelict venue waiting to see what was arguably the most authentic punk band ever.
My memory has always been that it wasn’t in use as a concert hall at the time. Again, the internet seems to back that up.
I do remember that when we finally got in, a load of big wooden tables had been put on their sides to act as a barrier to the stage. More of those later.
Crass were unlike pretty much everyone at the time. Our little gang of suburban wannabes had missed the Kings Road punk explosion that Soldierant of this parish and others experienced. The Epileptics had a song called ‘Two Years Too Late’ back then. We were late by about four or five. We had The Exploited, GBH, Blitz and Discharge. But we had Crass too.
Even at that tender age, I knew Crass were different. They looked different with their ‘militia’ clothing and banners adorning the stage. They sounded different. Their lyrics were different. Their approach to everything they did was different.
As I got older, I moved further away from the ideals they espoused. But I understood and respected them more and more. They lived it. They lived it as much as anyone truly can in a developed capitalist country. They didn’t sign on because they didn’t want to conform. They wouldn’t take money from a system they didn’t believe in. They advocated a different way of living and then carried it out.
Dial House, drummer Penny Rimbaud’s anarchist commune in the Essex countryside, could be easily dismissed as a load of hippies in a run-down farm, but it was somewhere for people to be themselves and not to conform to what others told them was normal. It was where Crass was born.
I remember being genuinely excited at seeing them.
I think the gig was a benefit for the following month’s ‘People’s March For Jobs’. Annie Anxiety ‘played’ that night. I use the word ‘played’ in the loosest terms. She screamed and mumbled a lot over backing tapes of bombs being dropped, air-raid sirens and old jazz records.
The Poison Girls were next.
And this is where the tables come into play.
I was down the front. I had a Travis Bickle-esque M65-style jacket I’d got from Union Jack stores by the market. It had Crass’s iconic logo on it and the obligatory rash of badges on the front. The ‘I want to grow up not blow up’ one would definitely have been there. Nuclear war was a thing back then. We used to go to a group called ‘Youth Against The Missiles’. The meetings were at a squat on Wood Lane in Headingley and, rather bizarrely, The Leeds Rifleman pub in Little London. They usually involved lots of angst from the older folks that ran them, painting banners for the next demo and, for the pub-based get togethers, avoiding skinheads on the way in and out. They ran a coach to London in the October of that year for the CND march. A quarter of a million people. Of all the things we saw and did that day, the one thing I recall over everything else was laughing at a café with those old Pepsi signs on the front called ‘The Garfagnana’. The shit you remember, eh?
We also ended up at Menwith Hill at some point back then. Not so many made that trip. We saw Icon AD playing at the Lawnswood ‘nuclear bunker’ too. For all of the ‘right on’ protest aspects of it, there were usually punk bands to watch.
Back to Bradford.
The Poison Girls were loud. The gig was dark and hot. The crowd were mental. And I was getting crushed. Some in the band spotted me and I was hoisted up to sit on one of the ‘legs’ of the tables. I was separate from everyone else now, but it didn’t seem to matter. Vi Subversa, singer of The Poison Girls, was different too. I was now sat right by her. She looked like your Mum or your teacher and yet she was loud and thrashing out songs on a guitar.
I stayed where I was and drank it all in.
And then Crass arrived. They really were like no other band I’d seen. Spread across the stage in a line. Chainsaw guitars and rolling basslines. Steve Ignorant’s voice barking and snarling over the top.
I can’t remember the setlist. I have snapshots of how it looked but that’s all after over 40 years.
Punk had a massive impact on modern music. It changed not just how it sounded but how it was made and sold. It had the very good and it had the very, very bad. But its legacy remains for everyone who knew it. I knew my little bit of it. And that was all anyone needed. It became a fashion like everything else does. It was probably already there by the time we found it. It was marketed. There was a uniform to wear. But Crass didn’t make the brochure. They didn’t sell the lifestyle. You made your own. They just encouraged you to do it.
Of all Crass’s songs, Big A Little A is the one I’ve played the most. It’s probably up there in the list of songs that I’ve played the most full stop. It wasn’t just the approach that was different. Crass could play. The way the song is constructed and produced was and is different.
It’s brilliant. It sums up all that was good about them. And punk. The lyrics are an angry rant of youth in many ways. But as the song develops, there are lines in there that still make sense and show how a different way of doing things is possible. I can still recite every one of them.
‘If you don't like the life you live, change it now it's yours, nothing has effects if you don't recognise the cause…...if you don’t like the rules they make, refuse to play their game, if you don’t want to be a number, don’t give in your name’.
I look back now and see just how far I’ve ended up from where Crass were back then. In some ways I couldn’t be more establishment if I tried. A member of the Bar and of the Honourable Society of Lincoln’s Inn. I stand at the end of every day as court is closed with the words ‘God Save The King’. But maybe in other ways, a bit of them is still there. Sometimes in court we’re all that there is between people and the might and power of the ‘system’. Who knows.
I’ll struggle with the philosophical quandaries and let you all enjoy the phenomena that was and, through their music still is, Crass.
One of the bands they inspired, Conflict, wrote an homage to them on their classic ‘The Ungovernable Force’ album.
‘A caring group of people who worked outside the system, aiming for liberty and peace using passive resistance’.
As legacies go, I reckon that’s a pretty good one.
And we made the train home.
‘There is no authority except yourself’
