Independence Days

by Alex; Ogg

  As the sleevenotes would (somewhat piously) attest, “Don’t expect music when the melody is anger, when the message sings defiance, three chords are frustration when the words are from the heart”. Again, this was a knowing twist on punk lore – whose early history those mythical ‘three chords’ had long loomed large in. Sniffin’ Glue had produced a (misprinted) diagram with the slogan “Here’s one chord, here’s another, and there’s a third. Now go out and form a band”. And there was the similarly infamous “The Damned can now play three chords, The Adverts can play one, here all four at…” tour billing. Now, even that entry-level stipulation – knowledge of a barre chord or two – was ripped away.

  “Bullshit Detector was more than another unimaginative compilation series,” notes Brian Sheklian, of Californian record label Grand Theft Audio. “It was a small but well deployed battering ram against the industry imposed barrier that separated the audience from the performer, and the performer from releasing a record without major backing. The graphics, the recordings, screamed anyone can do it, anyone can have a say. How many of the bands on it had a manager, a lawyer, a booking agent, or even enough money for a trip to a proper recording studio? Sure there were a few ropy recordings on there, but those bands inspired others who thought they could do better, to put those words into action and actually do something.”

  Bullshit Detector also provided something of a template for punk compilations; similarly politicised DIY labels springing up in France (New Wave Records), Brazil (the Ataque Sonoro compilations) etc, alongside thousands of cassette releases. Labels such as Xcentric Noise in Cottingham, run by Andy ‘Shesk’ Thompson, actually predated BSD. Thompson had sent Crass a copy of his Beat The Meat C-60 compilation, the first in a series of cassette releases documenting worldwide punk, sometime in late 1979. “I definitely remember getting Bullshit Detector in stock in 1980 at the record shop I worked in, the late great Sydney Scarborough’s in Hull, and thinking ‘they’ve copied me, the bastards!’ No, I didn’t think bastards to be honest, because Crass were just something so special, sincere and intense. I definitely recall that ‘Cancer’ by Icon [who later became Icon AD] was on there from the Beat The Meat tape, and I got a letter from Penny. But the scene was all about that, anyone creating-inputting-outputting and having things to say was a great thing and it was worthy word and tuneage to be spread.” The releases also featured some of the earliest drawings by hardcore/metal legend Pushead (aka Brian Schroeder). “I was never a businessman,” confesses Thompson. “Things just got bigger than I could handle on about £35 a week at the record shop. Red Rhino were brilliant and helped me out loads. I started trying to help some local bands but just didn’t sell enough.” These days a photographer, Thompson recalls with huge affection the days when “it was just me in my bedroom, knocking out cut ‘n’ paste, excited every morning in case another Brazilian or European gem of a C-60 might pop through the door.”

  That excitement was transmitted readily. This was a new global village whose principal currency was self-addressed envelopes – usually with postage stamps ‘soaped’ for repeat use – and tape-trading, with money rarely changing hands. “Xcentric Noise R.A.T.S (Records And Tapes) was the first UK label to my knowledge to actively promote international punk from outside the UK and USA,” remembers Charlie Mason, whose group Atrox contributed to the label. “Andy’s cassettes turned me and a host of other people onto the worldwide explosion of punk and hardcore that we’d spend the next few years immersing ourselves in. Along with BCT Tapes in the US, he produced compilations of bands from around the world, opening up a lot of minds to foreign language punk.” The better known protagonists included Finland’s Rattus, Brazil’s Olho Seco and Canada’s Neos. It was a gateway not only for the curious, but also a restorative boost to isolated punk communities everywhere from Poland to apartheid South Africa; territories still under the yoke of state censorship and repression. “It gave them the exposure outside their countries they deserved,” Mason continues, “at a time when only a tiny number of pioneering ‘zines or mail order outlets would give them a mention.”

  Certainly, Bullshit Detector and its offspring served as a reaffirmation of core values in stark contrast to the inexorable slide of some of the original punks in seeking acknowledgement for their musical chops – coded by plaintive cries that they were just good, old-fashioned rock ‘n’ roll bands at heart. Key offenders? That’d be The Clash. “I think that our ethos hasn’t altered,” Rimbaud observes, “which is why we’re still broke and didn’t ‘make’ anything, in that sense of the word, out of that era of our lives. It’s because we’re still playing. When I say playing, I mean in the way that kids do. Our interest has always been to turn things upside down, to make things available, to say, yeah, this is possible. And part of the way we live here is a statement of that possibility; that you can live with nothing, and that’s how we survive. I got very disillusioned with punk because to me it very quickly became rock ‘n roll. And I’m not interested in rock ‘n’ roll. I never have been really. Jazz, to me, carries the ethos of punk far more purely than all of this retro stuff.”

  Of course, one of the big problems was that Crass inspired a wave of copyists. It prompted a stylised makeover that ran from the visual presentation of records to the ‘barking’ Estuary English vocals. But parrot-like plagiarists aside, looking at the sequence of singles that Crass released, there is extraordinary variety there, from the Dada-inspired lunacy of The Cravats to the apocalyptic lullabies of The Mob to the playful insurrection of Zounds, etc. The Cravats’ ‘Rub Me Out’ is arguably the finest of that initial run of singles; stewed in off-kilter saxophone, with The Shend playing the hunted paranoiac to thrilling effect. “I think Pete Stennet at Small Wonder gave Penny one of our singles,” he says. “He just got in touch and said he’d really like to produce the next single. We did that with him and [engineer] John Loder. It was more like being part of a family rather than a business. Just sitting round in someone’s lounge talking about going on holiday and making records, rather than how many units you could shift.”

  When asked which are his favourites among those Crass singles, Rimbaud struggles. “It’s difficult to say, really. One of the most important things to me was that I liked who I was working with. I can honestly say that all of the people I worked with, I got on with and enjoyed. There’s some tracks I did with other bands that I absolutely adored – Chappaquidick Bridge for the Poison Girls, which was a massive production job. Or ‘No Doves Fly Here’ by The Mob, or the K.U.K.L. album, where I put in a huge production load, was involved in the arrangements, etc. Those are the ones that jump to mind. But whatever I got involved in, I got completely involved in, or I don’t do it. So everyone I worked with, I put the same degree of effort and enthusiasm in. I can’t do things unless I’m 100% involved with them. Otherwise I get so bored I can’t be there. If I become divorced from it, I just lose all interest, and go to bed and sleep. Because there’s nothing better to do. I feel that with everything that I do, so it’s a difficult question for me, because I was 100% into it.

  “I was really trying to act as simply a go between with most of the bands,” he explains further. “When I felt that what they were trying to say could be said in a more dramatic way – then I’d do that. And that’s what happened with ‘No Doves’. I thought, this is potentially a really great song, but what they’re doing is really not that interesting. It was like a canvas that hadn’t been properly completed. I said to Mark, look, I think we could make this ‘big’, we could really do something with it, because you’ve got a strong song. And Hit Parade was another record where I put in a huge amount of my own personal creativity, on top of their own, to enlarge on their ideas; because their ideas were so good. And there tended to be other people – Conflict or Dirt, the more archetypal punk bands, that I didn’t really do a lot with, because there wasn’t an awful lot there to do. It was raunchy punk or whatever, and that’s how it came out. That’s why Poison Girls were so lovely to work
with, because they were so rich in ideas, and sometimes not able to push them through to the conclusions that they wanted. And they were the only people, initially, we did albums with, because they were our particular mates, and they’d helped us finance the label, etc.”

  All the Crass singles’ covers featured a distinctive brand logo; a black circle with the artist name and record title stencilled in white. “Both Gee [Vaucher] and myself trained as graphic artists,” explains Rimbaud. “Both of us prior to Crass had brought money into the house by doing book design and that sort of stuff. And part of training as a graphic artist wasn’t just learning type[setting], it was also thinking in terms of marketing; a lot of the projects at college were – this is the product, how do you design and market it? How do you create a corporate idea?” In fact, Naomi Klein credited Crass as being one of the first innovators of brand identity in her book, No Logo. “And it was,” agrees Rimbaud. “It was very much the idea of creating a corporate identity.”

  “There were only two bands who released singles through Crass who somehow persuaded us to alter in some way the corporate logo,” he continues. “On the Poison Girls ‘Promenade’, we only used half a circle. And The Cravats wanted to do it black lettering on white, rather than white on black.” The Cravats were happy with the concession, but otherwise fit snugly into Crass’s brand vision. “We really liked it, actually,” The Shend admits, “because a lot of the graphics were based on Dada, which was the art we employed with all our releases anyway. Utilising surrealism and Dada and the childlike qualities of music, to make music ridiculous and funny to get a point across. All the Crass symbols and stuff like that, that stuff was invented in 1918 or whatever – so we felt aligned with them on that. We basically didn’t sound like any other Crass bands. Not straight down the line punk, we were jazzy wierdos. I think people were surprised they released Cravats stuff. How does this fit in? But we didn’t really care.”

  “It’s interesting,” Rimbaud notes of those two releases, “that because they weren’t instantly recognisable as being part of the corporate identity, it did affect the sales – no question of that. Minute variations, but sufficient variations to make them not recognisable. It was a very distinct policy that things should have an instantly recognisable image. So we developed a format into which anything could slip; in most cases the bands were left to do the artwork, BUT the artwork had to fit into the circle that went on the front.”

  In fact, it’s largely only in retrospect that the artwork that emerged from Dial House has come to be acknowledged for both its conceptual integrity and its aesthetic richness. “Gee [Vaucher] is an extraordinary artist,” says Rimbaud. “If Gee were to paint a corpse, for example, it would be hand-painted with extraordinary care and incredible beauty. So though the art might have been a vile subject, the care and love that went into the creation of it was of itself the energetic. Whereas just cutting out a picture of a corpse and sticking it on a piece of paper has a rather negative energetic. And I think that was the hidden power of Gee’s work; the fact that so much obvious love went into its creation. However ghastly the image was, one was at the same time being made to look at it and think – my goodness, this is extraordinary. Peter Kennard, the political artist who teaches at Royal College, had been showing Gee’s paintings, thinking they were photographic. He’d been showing students examples of her work for years, projected in lectures, as photo montage. It wasn’t until he met Gee that he learned they were paintings, and he then understood the true meaning of her work.”

  Some of those designs ended up becoming almost universal symbols, though their cultural cache may not have been taken in exactly the way intended. “It’s strange,” nods Rimbaud, “particularly when it’s people like [David] Beckham. He was wearing stuff with Crass written in diamante for quite a while [as did Angelina Jolie]. I think it’s even stranger when it’s your own handwriting. On one of our early things, I did an ‘a’ with a circle around it, and I’ve got a very distinctive line in my handwriting, which was actually a copy of Bernard Buffet, his way of writing. It was a way of pissing off my dad, who could write in perfect copperplate. I didn’t want to write like my dad, even though he was always trying to make me. I’d seen a Bernard Buffet picture with his signature – oh, that looks good. So I developed this rather cranky way of writing, which I still employ, I can’t write any other way now. And that ‘a’ became THE ‘a’ (i.e. the circled ‘A’ denoting anarchism), with the ends sticking outside the circle, because I don’t stop my line. That’s strange, because it’s a very personal thing that becomes a very public thing. When I travel and see people wearing Crass stuff on their flesh, never mind their jacket. I don’t think I like it very much.”

  It’s fascinating to examine Crass’s A&R policy, in so much as it was totally divorced from its conventional function; to identify music that will sell. And it becomes even more complicated when you add in the benevolent paternalism that was at work. Because, whether he liked it or coveted it at all, and you suspect he did not, Rimbaud was wise enough to realise that ‘power’ exists within all situations and relationships. It cannot be extinguished by good intentions. “I suppose I have to admit to a degree,” says Rimbaud, “there was some cynicism. Someone like Conflict – I really, really liked Colin [Jerwood; vocalist]. He’s a very complex personality, but I liked him. They used to be followers of the band, and Steve [Ignorant] got on with them particularly well. I can’t say I was particularly enamoured of their public face. To a degree, it was a case where it was better to have them on board than not. To what degree there was an element of control going on – cynically, there probably was. I don’t know how much of that is retrospective thinking. There was a very deep belief that we could manage if we could stick together.”

  In effect, the approach was analogous to ‘broadening the church’. “I think so, to bring on board stuff that maybe I felt was a little bit dodgy, within my own political framework. I’m being very self-critical – maybe I saw them as a slight threat. The only people who got away with that was [anarchist group] Class War, because they weren’t containable within a rock ‘n’ roll framework. So they were actually able to set up an alternative to the trajectory that we were on, and it actually became quite a powerful alternative. I like Ian [Bone; Class War founder] a lot, and get on very well with him – just as he thought our politics were crap, I thought his politics were crap. It didn’t mean we couldn’t have a bloody good laugh if we were on a demo together. I always got on very well with him. But they were a threat. I regarded the sort of empowerment that they created as very dangerous for kids who didn’t have some sort of political awareness. And I saw that happen time and time again. So in that sense I thought they were a threat to our ‘power’, our power being one that I think was deeply considerate of the dangers we might be creating for other people which we didn’t carry ourselves. I think we had a deep sense of social responsibility. My criticism of Class War is that it was deeply socially irresponsible in a lot of senses.”

  One of the drawbacks of the one-off singles deal approach was that some artists needed more than just an initial investment of time and money. “We began to realise that some bands couldn’t cope. They’d put out a single, get the exposure – and generally speaking, if they did put out a single with us, they’d get a lot of media attention by the standards of the day. And they couldn’t cope. Either they didn’t have the financing or the suss to do so. So we then created a second label, Corpus Christi, which we effectively gave to John Loder. Because we’d recorded at Southern, John was our sound engineer as well. With Corpus Christi, he was running two commercially viable outfits. One was the studio itself, the other was his own label. So he started expanding into what is now Southern Records, and also set up the distribution thing and joined the Cartel.”

  “We still had the broad control over Corpus Christi,” Rimbaud continues, “in the sense that he always would say – ‘I’d like to record such and such.’ We were more casual with that label about
content. If something cropped up that was, say, vilely sexist, we wouldn’t have allowed it to happen. But we were much freer about allowing opinions and views that maybe we wouldn’t have wanted to support directly through Crass Records. That was also a way of allowing John a financial situation where he could set up deals with bands, etc. I’m not even sure what some of the deals were. It also enabled him to expand from Corpus Christi into allowing people like Conflict or Flux of Pink Indians to create their own labels, within Southern, and then sometimes move out of Southern. Which is what happened with One Little Indian. All the time what we were trying to look for was to give people access to setting up their own thing. Initially we thought people would just do it, but that was expecting too much, and they didn’t have the financing. So Corpus Christi was invented as a stepping stone. That policy was taken through everything we did. Our gigging principle was that whatever money we made from gigs, that money would be put back into the community where we made it. Say we went to Clayton-le-Moors in the Lake District, the money would be put back into that community. We’d find out maybe there was a rape crisis centre, or a CND group, or a local band needed a drum kit. The whole policy was to expand the DIY ethos, which was very dear to us. How can we make the most of any situation for the situation itself? The way we dealt with recording was similar. We didn’t want to own anything or anyone. There were no contracts. Nothing was ever signed, it was all on trust. Inevitably within that situation, occasionally things went wrong. They do. And they’re more likely to go wrong if people take ‘a straight course’. Maybe someone would get a manager, or someone would sign with [publishing collection agency] MCPS, whatever. That would create problems for people trying to operate outside the system. Someone like John, basically speaking, the moment he got a phone call from a manager, that would be the end of his relationship with the band. Because he couldn’t and wouldn’t deal with that. His attitude was, if that’s the way you want to go, go with it. That’s how he survived.”