Clash not Crass

Posted on February 18, 2008February 19, 2008 by AL Puppy

It was the long hot hot summer of 1976. I was in London for a few days. I’d spent the past 17 years of my life living in the countryside – see it here

Now I was in West 11 looking for my hippy heaven underneath the Westway – the place where Hawkwind and the Pink Fairies had played back in 1971. I never found the place, but I wandered around getting more and more hot and bothered until I found the Portobello Road made famous by the Pink Fairies song ‘Portobello Shuffle’.

So I went back to where I was staying – a caravan in Gloucestershire- until the summer ended with a thunder storm so strong I thought the flashes were nuclear bombs taking out Bristol.

Nine months later I was an effing student in Scotland. Jefferson Airplane’s ‘White Rabbit’ was still played in the uni bar with no irony at all. At a disco a song came on which confused me into dancing . It was White Riot by the Clash. Up until this point – March 1977 – I knew nothing of punk. I was listening to second hand sixties records being flogged off by older students. The Incredible String Band. Country Joe and the Fish. Quintessence. I was living in 1967 not 1977.

But White Riot … it was a ‘what the fuck’ moment. Not sure how long it took, but eventually I worked out it was about a real riot that had happened at Notting Hill Carnival in August 1976 – in place I had been just a few weeks before. And these punks were my age – born in the fifties not the forties. And they were singing songs about what was happening now, not then.

But…it still took awhile. I found ‘Anarchy in the UK‘ , EMI version, remaindered for 37p in Woollies but that didn’t do it. Saw the Rezillos play in Castle Douglas Town Hall in summer 77 – which was impressive. And tried to find a copy of ‘God Save the Queen’…but no luck.

Then I heard Complete Control (released 23 September 1977) by the Clash played on Radio One. SHEE-IT. (Shee- ite in Scotch) Total aural orgasm. Utterly and totally blown away by the sheer intensity of the music. Though I still had long hair and a beard (well I was an anarchist, wasn’t I, and the anarchists I met at uni had long hair and beards. Apart from the one female anarchist, who did not have a beard) .

To cut this short – didn’t go back to university, went to Gloucestershire to help look after some goats and ducks and chickens and guinea fowl on a small holding in the Forest of Dean and got a job working for the Lydney branch of London Rubber. Only music I had for first few months was a tape of Clash first album. Which I played over and over again. Couldn’t make out the words so got the Clash Song book in 1978.

This had the words in Dynotape lettering plus pictures. I did get more punk records – mail order from Small Wonder – but it was the combination Clash music, words and pictures which was ‘punk’ for me. I even shaved off my beard and cut my hair short. [This caused much startlement at work]

On 1st January 1979 moved to London to work at London Rubber HQ. Lived in a bedsit in Ilford. No record player, but had tape recorder so first album Clash tape played over and over again.

And my point is?

When I talk of ‘punk’, deeply embedded in my idea of what ‘punk’ means is the combination of words, images and music of the Clash / Clash song book. The images – of the 1976 riot, of the Westway, of concentration camp victims, of tower blocks …of the City of the Dead of yankee soldiers shooting skag, of having the will to survive (to cheat if I can’t win) … that even if you close your eyes, it will not go away, – you have to deal with it – hate and war is the currency.

Hate and war not anarchy and peace.

Which is why I never could get Crass. “Are you going backward or are you moving forwards?” [White Riot]

It seemed straightforward to me. Punk was moving forward . Punk realised that the hippy dream of love and peace was dead, that the world of windmills and psychedelic dreams [General Bacardi/Crass and Undercurrents magazine] was over.

“All the power is in the hands of people rich enough to buy it”.

But was it over?Or had something new only just begun?

As I passed beyond the wall of sleep last night it came to me. “Green is the missing word” – like I had already said, the long-haired eco-friendly veggie anti-nuke anarchist group I joined in 1876 (oops, time slip, there) 1976 would nowadays be a group of green activists, not anarchists.

So maybe what Crass invented in 1978 was not ‘anarcho-punk’ but ‘green-punk’.

If you stop trying to wrestle greenish punks into an anarchist straight-jacket (as in “if it hadn’t a been for all those damn punk kids back in the eighties, we would have won the class war … “) then it kinda makes more sense.

50 comments

Stewart
July 14, 2008 at 7:07 pm

I would reply, but I’ve lost the will to live…
Jah Pork Pie
July 15, 2008 at 12:31 pm

@Stu-> Come on mate…

It was only a Fruedian clit. Sorry, “SLIP”.

Puns don’t kill people, people kill people.
Stewart
July 15, 2008 at 1:49 pm

Depends if the pun’s loaded or not, I suppose…
Jah Pork Pie
July 15, 2008 at 8:16 pm

Loaded puns? Yep, in fact we’re back to the subject of this thread nicely…

I swear by Almighty God
To tell the whole truth
And nothing but the truth

Puns puns
They torture all the women and children
Then they’ve put the men to the pun
‘Cos they crossed the human frontier
Freedom’s always on the run

Puns puns a-shaking in terror
Puns puns killing in error
Puns puns guilty hands
Puns puns shatter the lands

A system built by the sweat of the many
Creates assassins to kill off the few
Take any place and call it a court house
This is a place where no judge can stand

Sue the lawyers and burn all the papers
Unlock the key of the legal papers
A jury of a billion faces
Shouted out “condemn that last man”

Puns puns, and nobody’s kidding
Puns puns, or foolin’ around
Puns puns, the violence is singing
Puns puns, a silence the sound

‘N I like to be in Aferica
A-beatin’ on the final drum
‘N I like to be in U.S.S.R.
Makin’ sure these things will come
‘N I like to be in U.S.A.
Pretending that the wars are done
‘N I like to be in Europa
Saying goodbye to everyone

Puns puns there’s puns on the roof
Puns puns they’re made to shoot

(Copyright Punner/Jones 1978)
Jah Pork Pie
July 15, 2008 at 8:22 pm

@Stu-> Torrid pun. You ain’t happy less you got one.
Jah Pork Pie
July 16, 2008 at 1:30 am

Enough puns already! I’d genuinely like to know what you lot think of

“The Revolutionist is a doomed man. He has no private interests, no affairs, sentiments, ties, property nor even a name of his own. His entire being is devoured by one purpose, one thought, one passion – the revolution. Heart and soul, not merely by word but by deed, he has severed every link with the social order and with the entire civilized world; with the laws, good manners, conventions, and morality of that world. He is its merciless enemy and continues to inhabit it with only one purpose – to destroy it”

This sounds very much like classical Stoicism to me, except replacing “nature” with “the Revolution”. All the attributes seem to be there, don’t they? There’s the rejection of sentiment and material property, the deterministic belief in a single right to be arrived at logically at the expense of all convention and man-made law and existing morality. There are certainly naturalistic overtones too, to my ears.

Perhaps the most obvious difference would be that the Stoic may be more akin to an autonomist inasmuch as he/she would suffer the world’s injustices believing that he would be more free *because* of the acts of suffering. That’s to say, an independent sovereign individual existing in a hostile world and accepting that the world is currently not as it should be, but living a pure life on his/her own terms.

I’m interested in a phrase that Jake used on another thread here: he made a joke about a badge that Robbo gave him which said “Buddhist punk” but then said that he felt that was exactly what he was these days. This seems to resonate with the tenets of Stocism (from Wiki):

“In the life of the individual man, virtue is the sole good; such things as health, happiness, possessions, are of no account. Since virtue resides in the will, everything really good or bad in a man’s life depends only upon himself. He may become poor, but what of it? He can still be virtuous. A tyrant may put him in prison, but he can still persevere in living in harmony with Nature. He may be sentenced to death, but he can die nobly, like Socrates. Therefore every man has perfect freedom, provided he emancipates himself from mundane desires”

The route to Nirvana through meditation and relinquishing earthly desires and accepting suffering, and “the interconnectedness of al things” seem to have definite parallels here. I know little about the Diggers or the Levellers, but there do seem to be veins of reductionism and naturalism, not to say fatalism, running through a lot of these philosophies.

My point above about Nechayev’s statement is that I can’t figure out whether he feels that the revolutionary is a doomed man because society feels threatened by the revolutionary and will ensure his untimely end to ensure its own survival, or because he feels that the revolutionary is dooming himself to a life of suffering in the eyes of society (in his view the revolutionary’s life is unworthy). Or perhaps even that the revolution itself will destroy the revolutionary upon its completion?

Lordy lordy, it’s late – that’s well enough from me. Hope you all have a bit to share back, even if it’s just to tell me to buy a proper book or two! 🙂
Stewart
July 16, 2008 at 6:16 pm

*shoots himself in the head to end the misery*
Penguin
July 16, 2008 at 7:10 pm

Oh well, that’s the end of Stewey then…poor bloke never got credited for the acting work he performed in Betty Stew, One Stew Over The Cuckoo’s Nest, Apocalypse Stew and the Monty Python classic The Life Of Stew.
Shall we hold a wake or just forget about him?
Jah Pork Pie
July 17, 2008 at 1:33 am

Pity he wasn’t in “The Cannibal Run” either, or we could have made a nice Stu in his own juices.

Sorry.
Sam
July 17, 2008 at 6:25 am

“When Crass came along what you ate became more important than your music. In fact your music was probably one of the last things people considered when they were weighing up whether they liked your band. Your artwork, politics, diet etc all had to read like a check list as a group of aging hippies sucked all of the individuality, talent, musicianship, free will, thought and fun out of punk. ”

End of story. Well said mate!
Nic
July 17, 2008 at 9:14 am

“End of story”?
Perhaps for a very small microcosm inside a hothouse scene located in certain parts of one city (London)…but not necessarily the case for other people across the United Kingdom and the rest of the globe…

Crass’ music was far more interesting musically than the ‘Punk’ which preceded it: it retained the aggression of the music stemming from 1960’s English R&B and The Stooges, and concurrently filtered it through the interesting aspects of Free Jazz, Modern Composition and atonality (all far more interesting than the same old 3 Chuck Berry chords which bands like 999 and The Lurkers used)…

Their example – which eschewed received (and oppressive) notions of musicianship and advocated creativity for the self – was FAR more inspiring (and liberating) than the restrictive one-dimensioanl view of music put forward by those children of Pub Rock who were themselves desparate to be the rock stars they purported to despise…

My ‘free will’ was never reduced due to the minor scene which developed around the Crasstafarian bands, just as it was never reduced by the oppressive fashion strictures of the ‘Positive Punks’ or the mob mentality of the ‘UK 82’ punks…Each person makes decisions…

Being interested in politics and political music (which all music – by its very nature – is – and to attempt to enforce an artifical separation between the two is either naive or deceptive) never stopped me having a good time…
Jah Pork Pie
July 17, 2008 at 12:17 pm

I think that to introduce aspects of free jazz into one’s music, one needs to be an accomplished musician as well as having creativity: my partner is a very good classical violinist but never improvises as she says that she doesn’t feel that she’s able (I think she is, but that’s by the by). She feels that anyone who can improvise must be a much more accomplished musician than she is (I don’t – but that’s up to her).

The first thing I heard of Crass’s music was “Do They Owe Us A Living” and thought it was the punkiest thing I’d ever come across. It seemed to me that they weren’t even as accomplished musically as myself and the other Plague Dogs, and that was very attractive. It had enormous energy and spite in every line, and they didn’t seem to be bothered about learning to play their instruments. The more I heard of them, though, the more I began to suspect that they were, indeed, very good musicians who were making music which was intended to appear amateurish and that there was some other agenda at work (or in the case of “DTOUAL”, *not* at work 🙂 )

By the time I got to see them live I’d formed the opinion that they were rather more akin to an arthouse cinematographer who makes films in monochrome and with a single camera to *achieve* a raw effect, rather than a kid who borrows his dad’s cine camera for the day and doesn’t know any better. They might have been eschewing musicianship, but it felt as though they’d already been given plenty of opportunity to play with received notions of musicianship before deciding to eschew it (The Ruts, for instance, didn’t: they carried their musicianship into punk and for me, oddly, that gave them something extra too).

What I found unusual about Crass’s music was, therefore, that they didn’t start off their ‘career’ as a band with sophisticated, atonal, improvised, Modern Composition-influenced work. They started off with music which sounded very much like the sort of thing that kids were making in their own bedrooms. And simultaneously, they built up a large following of punks. Combining this with the idea that they must already have been accomplished musicians (as above), I always wonder if this was an early and rather cynical example of anarcho-marketing (done for very good reasons, of course).

I think that criticising 999 and The Lurkers for using 3 chords in their music is an argument based on their education and family background. If you grew up a working class kid in the 1960s then the pop music you would have been exposed to as a child would have been almost exclusively of the 3-chord type (it might have been orchestrated a bit for Motown or Herb Alpert-type stuff, and it might have had a chicka-wacka guitar if it was reggae/ska, but most of it was similarly structured).

I didn’t hear a single bar of classical music until I was 13, when the people at the old-established and incredibly snobbish grammar school to which I was sent decided to teach us ‘theory of music’. It meant absolutely nothing to me at the time – it didn’t apply (as far as I could see) to the music to which I’d been exposed until then. I spent 3 terms dodging it whenever I could. The middle-class kids in my year loved it because they’d been exposed to classical music from an early age and had developed – if not necessarily a liking – an ear for it. After I left school, I had the impression (of course wrongly) that Theory of Music only applied to classical music. And that was most serendipitous really, because when I picked up a guitar and started trying to make noises like the music I’d been brought up with – except louder – I wasn’t troubled by notions of scale, key, harmony, modulation or melody. I was just playing the guitar. My point is that if 999 and The Lurkers hadn’t been exposed to too much Stockhausen or John Coltrane as kids, and hadn’t received any formal musical training (they hadn’t had trills, mordants, melodic minors and compound time signatures caned into them mercilessly), then the music which they were playing simply reflected their experience of other music, as it did, I’m sure, with millions of other working class kids across the country. They wanted to make music and didn’t see what they were making as being Art.

I *did*, however, start to find all that ‘Theory of Music’ guff very useful when I got into my 30s. I hate to say it, but the bastards at that school did know something! 🙂

@Nic-> I think I understand what you mean by “political music (which all music – by its very nature – is [ ) ]”;

…but isn’t it really that *all* music (or all art – or indeed all products more generally) is only political if you use a set of political ideas to deconstruct it? It’s easy to analyse “Agadoo” as being pre-digested pap, wrapped in a veil of cynical Uncle Tom parody of Latin music and aimed at the lowest common denominator in capitalist society in order to maximise sales and continue the oppression of the underclass by keeping them docile. It’s just as easy to analyse it as nonsense poetry in the Lear tradition, or as a chauvinistic diatribe on women as sex objects, isn’t it? Not that I would, of course. It would be a Heisenberg-like use of a hammer to crack a walnut.

To me, it would be just as easy to say that all music was, by its very nature, commenting on ethics, or on gender, or on science. It’s the tools one uses to analyse the music which give it the meaning, surely? And, usually, there’s some pragmatism at work too: whomever is analysing a work usually has their preferred end result of the analysis in mind before choosing the analysis tools. I’m definitely keener to limit my definition of ‘political music’ to music which is explicitly intended by its original author to be stimulating a political reaction in its audience.
Sam
July 17, 2008 at 3:14 pm

“Crass’ music was far more interesting musically than the ‘Punk’ which preceded it: it retained the aggression of the music stemming from 1960’s English R&B and The Stooges, and concurrently filtered it through the interesting aspects of Free Jazz, Modern Composition and atonality (all far more interesting than the same old 3 Chuck Berry chords which bands like 999 and The Lurkers used)…”

Sounds like the basic premise of Rip It Up and Start Again. You can’t fault people for being ambitious artistically but much of the music created during this period just doesn’t stand up. Crass always sounded like a dirge and still has the ability to put me to sleep despite its wannabe ferocity. A band like Joy Division broke out of the mould you’re talking about much more sucessfully and with equal musical naivete and managed to put across a lot without resorting to the didactic stance Crass took up. Free form jazz isn’t very liberating if you tie it to a strict set of rules and regulations on how to live your life. The Ramones were probably the most influential band musically on our generation of punks (even if you didn’t like them) and Johnny Ramone’s barre chord philosophy was far more innovative than Andy Palmer’s (sorry Andy if you read this). ‘Havana Affair’, ‘I Don’t Wanna Go Down To The Basement’ etc… aren’t 12 bar blues. Listen to ‘ESP’ by The Buzzcocks. Nothing to do with any previous music. I think the genius of The Pistols was that it was dirty Chuck Berry on steroids but Lydon really took it to a different place.
Anyway, we were all innocent of the musical merits of this at the time and it was irrelevant. As far as I was concerned it hit me in the gut and filled my life with an energy I’d never experienced before. I don’t care if it isn’t reinventing the wheel but ‘Satellite’, ‘Bodies’ and ‘No Fun’ (Pistols) still work as angry (and witty) cries of pain in a wilderness of dross.
Graham Burnett
July 17, 2008 at 7:16 pm

> The middle-class kids in my year loved it because they’d been exposed to classical music from an early age and had developed – if not necessarily a liking – an ear for it.

I was exposed to classical music from a very young age by my mother who loved classical music and was once a very accomplished violinist (before the old arthiritis got into her fingers), one of my earliest memories is of various string quartets and the like playing in our front room in Wickford. However you couldn’t get much more working class than her background, raised in Blackstock Road in Finsbury park, working in the Ever Ready battery factory and looking after me as a single parent during the early 60s onwards. She tells me that she got a place at the Royal Academy of Music and was one of the very few people from a working class background to do so, and apparently my grandad slaved to pay for her place.

I didn’t really actually appreciate classical music until later in life, but did get into free jazz and the avant garde relatively early in life (when I was about 15 and my peers at school were extolling the virtues of Pink Floyd and the like as somehow ‘progressive’ and ‘experimental’, whilst I was into Derek Bailey, Albert Ayler and John Cage), which was probably at least partly due to the music I’d been exposed to at a very young age so I basically ‘got it’ straight away when I heard Crass that their antecendents wern’t from the rock ‘n’ roll tradition unlike most punk rock despite its claims to be about a ‘musical year zero’. My mum was also part of the feminist scene from the early 70s onwards, and we always seemed to be having ‘womens consciouness raising evenings’ round my house, at the time I’d be pissed off because I’d get sent out when I was trying to watch Top Of The Pops, but in retrospect probably helped me to make the transition from the rigid and dogmatic SWP/ANL/RAR socialist politics espoused by the likes of The Clash to the more open and creative anarchist ideas I quite quickly latched onto via Crass, etc.

> It’s easy to analyse “Agadoo” as being pre-digested pap, wrapped in a veil of cynical Uncle Tom parody of Latin music and aimed at the lowest common denominator in capitalist society in order to maximise sales and continue the oppression of the underclass by keeping them docile. It’s just as easy to analyse it as nonsense poetry in the Lear tradition, or as a chauvinistic diatribe on women as sex objects, isn’t it?

Interstingly, Chumbawamba covered Agadoo as part of their first ever Peel Session, and Black Lace returned the complement by covering a Chumba song, ‘She’s Got all The Friends That Money Can Buy’, which you can find as a download on their website…
Malcolm McRimbaud
July 17, 2008 at 8:51 pm

People said we couldn’t play/They called us hippy slags/But the only jazz that really counts/Is the sort that comes in mags…
Jah Pork Pie
July 18, 2008 at 12:32 am

@Graham-> “Chumbawamba covered Agadoo as part of their first ever Peel Session, and Black Lace returned the complement by covering a Chumba song, ‘She’s Got all The Friends That Money Can Buy’, which you can find as a download on their website”

Cheers mate, I’ll definitely have a look for that one – sounds bloody delightful! I picked ‘Agadoo’ off the top of my head as the first pop song (and the least political one) that came to me: I’ve got no axe to grind with The Lace! My point was just that any piece of music can be interpreted in any way to make any argument.

> “you couldn’t get much more working class than her background, raised in Blackstock Road in Finsbury park, working in the Ever Ready battery factory”

You’re right, of course. Apologies if my comment above sounded particularly arsey (it did to me on re-reading it) – it wasn’t to do with class in itself: it was to do with a consciousness that there was more to do with music than Englebert Humperdinck and Tom Jones, and more to politics than Harold Wilson. I bet your mum would be the first to admit, though, that she was the exception rather than the rule in her locale in developing such skills and political awareness at that time.
pinkpressthreat
October 26, 2010 at 3:55 am

Bloody Hell!! I wish I had something intelligent to add but it’s 4am and you’ve done me in.