The Chris Low Obscure Punk Tape Post…

811 comments

1. 

   Sam

   May 17, 2008 at 11:18 pm

   There were two local lads from Campbell Buildings who used to hang around with us. One was called ‘Olive’ for some reason. I can’t remember his mate’s name but they were always getting at each other. I was at college in 1990 and we had temporary painting studios in this old school in Waterloo. I decided to take a nostalgic visit back to Campbell Buildings. The whole estate had been replaced by an office block but the brick wall facing the road remained, which still bore the legend ‘OLIVE IS BENT’.

   That should be the title for the Campbell Buildings book I think.

2. 

   Sam

   May 17, 2008 at 11:20 pm

   Cheers Pork!

3. 

   Sam

   May 17, 2008 at 11:28 pm

   Talking of pasty people I remember tripping with Wank Stain at 66a and both of us being fascinated by the similarity his bicep had to a Sainsbury’s frozen chicken.

4. 

   jahpork

   May 17, 2008 at 11:52 pm

   Was that before the septicaemia or after? 😉 Bernard Matthews would have put a bid in for some of those arms, they looked proper corn-fed. Bootiful!

   I remember you guys being over at Wank’s mum’s place in Plaistow and me ringing up to see what you were up to. There was a little bit of drug rhyming slang going on, and the Winter Olympics were on at the time as well. Wank’s mum answered the phone. “Hello Mrs Darrington, is Mark about?”. “Oh, no dear, Sam and Jake came over earlier and they all went out. They said they wouldn’t be long, they were just off to Lake Placid”.

   Geography not her strong point, or perhaps a very prescient comment on the time/space displacement effect of hallucinogens?

   Another couple of observations about acid: I was in The Schooner in Norbury with Jerry Thing in 81 and a punk girl called Sussie was there. Me and Thing used to call tripping “dripping” (my name had by then transmogrified from Jah Pork to “Pork Dripping”). Sussie walks into the pub with a strange look on her face, so I said to her (quite innocently) “hello mate, you dripping?”. At which point she legged it to the ladies toilet holding her hands under her chin thinking her head was melting!

   Another time, same pub, Sue (Phil’s sister, I seem to remember) was a hairdresser and she offered to bleach my hair for me for free. Nice. Except I didn’t realise she was tripping her tits off and when I got back to the pub everyone in there was kind enough not to mention that she’d missed nearly the entire back of my head with the bleach (just the bit I couldn’t see!). Took about 3 days before someone pissed themself laughing then told me. Twats!

   Same: Just looking at your book title. It’s an anagram of…

   “I live? No bets!”

   That’s about right.

5. 

   Sam

   May 18, 2008 at 12:41 am

   I think ‘dripping’ came from talking endlessly in mock Sniper accents. There was a lot of that at the time. Me and Wank spent a whole 2 weeks in Amsterdam pretending to be from Yorkshire. I think we must have been embarrassed to be ourselves. Very English that
   .
   I think I snogged with Sue once. That’s all I remember of her.

   One of the symptoms of acid comedowns was the realization someone would have to clean up. You were over at 66a once Pork (not tripping) whilst myself and Wank were under the influence. You decided to turn the lights off in the kitchen and amused us for hours by becoming ‘The Magician’. You’d take handfuls of our unused spices and throw them into the gas rings on the stove, producing multi-coloured effects and small explosions. The next day dawned and the kitchen was uniformly covered in a quarter inch deep layer of curry powder.
   Another time I managed to pinch a whole day’s stock of Wimpy hamburger buns from an early morning forage along the Finchley Road. After a day of eating these we finally used the last 5 boxes in a food fight, this time covering the kitchen in 2 inches of wet dough.

   But we made our own entertainment in those days.

6. 

   jahpork

   May 18, 2008 at 1:16 am

   Oh, fuck, that’s funny! That’s the sycophantic side of me: always trying to curry favour 🙂 I remember that so well now, and had forgotten it completely. Pork The Magician! And that ugly no-talent twatpiece Copperfield got to marry Schiffer. Life eh? Yeah, fire in all its manifestations used to fascinate me. Maybe that’s why St Monica’s was so magnetic: the campfire in the middle of the carpet in the first floor room with us all sitting round it (to make a bit of warmth as there was very little by way of windows). It even made the speed comedowns feel a bit nicer. Spent a whole evening sitting in the background behind everyone on a vicious comedown, and became totally convinced that everyone was ignoring me and plotting something (which naturally made my voice much quieter anyway – course, I was convinced I was shouting myself hoarse). In the end, I managed to grab Lou’s attention, and she spent an hour or so reassuring me that nobody was ignoring me, and that I just had to get a bit nearer the fire. Like I said earlier, a really lovely woman, Lou. I seem to remember her parents (mainly her Dad, I think) tried to get her sectioned for bunking a tube fare while looking a bit unusual and liking loud music! Really.

   I do remember spending a day or two where all any of us said (in a really cod Yorkshire accent) was “Eee, reet gradely!”. Maybe that was something to do with Captain H? And the mock Scots stuff too: “Hootsny McGrootsny McGritchly Gorbals”.

   On the snogging front, I think most of us snogged most everyone else, didn’t we? Beautifully innocent times.

7. 

   jahpork

   May 18, 2008 at 1:20 am

   Just thought… Lisa was known as Witchypoo, wasn’t she? And though she claimed vehemently to be completely asexual, Ruth claimed with equal vigour to have had her very own Night Of The Flying whassname with her.

   The point of this is that we were all SO innocent, that none of us could really figure out what it was that they would have been getting up to if indeed they’d got up to it!

8. 

   Sam

   May 18, 2008 at 2:19 am

   I remember Lisa at Campbell buildings being very individual and bravely being obsessed with Kate Bush. Now you mention it ‘a-sexual’ was a big fad for awhile – a state of grace I never aspired to as I knew only too well I was ‘a-bigtart’. The gorgeous Liz was, I was dismayed to find out, asexual too. Or maybe it was just a ploy to keep us off. I also remember rescuing her dog ‘Benson’ from the clutches of Scarecrow (he wasn’t a saint) and some cunt called Dirk. They’d trap her dog in a metal dustbin while she was at work and put the lid on top. One would sit on it while the other one banged as loudly as they could on the side with a large stick. The dog would naturally go apeshit and they’d let it out and it’d go beserk around the flat, which they found hilarious. It had been rescued from Battersea dog’s home and had probably been abused before. Sorry to sully Crow’s name but he could be an arsehole.
   I remember speeding one time at St Monica’s and talking at length (again) about Bomber by Motorhead. After explaining the rockin’ orgasm trapped within blue vinyl for a good while, I realised I was desperate for a piss. I managed to get up on my hands and knees before another important torrent of verbage held me in this state for a good half hour. ‘I seem to be stuck in the Scott of the Antarctic position’ I said. Scott had been found, frozen solid in a similar pose but I still couldn’t bring myself to stop yakking despite the aching in all limbs and bladder. I seem to remember a room of poo at St Monicas. Is this just my imagination?

9. 

   Sam

   May 18, 2008 at 2:28 am

   “I do remember spending a day or two where all any of us said (in a really cod Yorkshire accent) was “Eee, reet gradely!”. Maybe that was something to do with Captain H? And the mock Scots stuff too: “Hootsny McGrootsny McGritchly Gorbals”. ”

   This was the counter-revolutionary anti-regionalistic discourse that Officer Dibbol objected to so strongly in one of the early house meetings.

10. 

    Sam

    May 18, 2008 at 2:31 am

    It was a laugh stencil spraying situationist stuff around the area but Mike couldn’t spell. Thus West Hampstead was covered in neatly stencilled:

    Back Britian
    Fuck Britian

11. 

    Sam

    May 18, 2008 at 4:46 am

    I’ve just remembered another Heretics legend. Slug went around Kilburn and Queen’s Park spray painting ‘The Heretics’ everywhere. We’d come up with this ‘Circle H’ abbreviation (like the anarchy sign but an ‘H’). A year or two later the anti-H Block movement started using it and it became their symbol. They must have mistook our circle H’s for that or just stolen it. You’d think they’d have used an H within a square though.

12. 

    johng

    May 18, 2008 at 11:38 am

    mike-‘Yes,Benalyn was a good one.’
    someone recommended i drink a bottle of benelyn,’it’ll get you off yer face’ he said,so,my mates mum gave me a huge bottle that i drank over a period of a few hours washed down with olde english cos the taste made me wretch,a few hours later i felt a whitey coming on so went to the bog to throw up,i then blackout and woke up to find myself having some sort of epileptic fit,scared the shit out of me and i never touched it again,its something to do with a colourant that they add to it that can cause fits if taken in large amounts.
    fuckin punk rock……………………..

13. 

    jahpork

    May 18, 2008 at 1:26 pm

    One of the thing about 79 punk was for me the sense of humour involved in the whole thing. I loved Captain Sensible’s painted guitar strap at the time that Greenpeace was just coming to the fore: “SOD THE WHALE”. There really was that sense that although we knew that political issues were important, being right-on wasn’t the way to bring attention to them. What was important was a good sense of theatre and a healthy dose of sarcasm. I think it mutated a bit as hippies weedled their way in insidiously (I don’t know Mike Diboll’s background, but a tenner gets you a one-r that there’s an ethically-sourced afghan coat and some beads in there somewhere). When I found myself being forcibly re-educated by the punk maoists, I thought it was time to get the fuck out of Dodge.

    Perhaps “Back Brit-Ian, Fuck Brit-Ian” was a Freudian slip on the Commandante’s part? Young Pigg could be quite alluring in the right light, I’m told.

    @johng-> Over-the-counter drugs were shite, weren’t they? Me, Wank and Thing purchased 72 Pro-Plus once, when unable to acquire amphetamines of any kind. It said “don’t take more than 4 in any 24-hour period. So we had about 20 each (leave a few for the comedown, as it were). After running round the Barbican for an hour or so stopping only to yammer at the goldfish in the ponds there, then talking crap to each other for another hour, we got the most monumental doubling-up stomach cramps and headaches that had us running back home to various parts of London. In a strange display of synchronicity, when we all spoke on the phone the next morning, we’d all had the violent and lasting shits come upon us (and wouldn’t that have been a great name for a single?) at exactly 3.20 in the morning. Interconnectedness of all bowels? Stupidity on the quantum level! I don’t think even Starbucks would serve that much caffeine to an individual punter.

    Benylin: Food colourings were rock’ ‘n’ roll in the 70s too! I still defend to the death our right to enjoy proper 70’s style orangeade with the luminous orange colour of high-concentrate Tartrazine. Now that WAS a drug!

    Dirk was a mate of Ruth’s wasn’t he? Big Ants fan (obviously). There was just something a bit disquieting about him, wasn’t there? Wouldn’t wish to impugn the bloke’s reputation in any way but just personally I wouldn’t have left him alone with the grandkids 🙂

    @Sam-> Yeah, the circle-H was everywhere, wasn’t it? I bet, these days, if you asked a bunch of people who weren’t into the punk thing but lived up there at the time, they’d still remember The Heretics!

    Anyone else remember graffiti they didn’t understand from that time? There was a bit of graffiti in Tibbets’ Corner roundabout in Putney that I never got (it’s still there, faded but glorious): “Joo-Bee-Lee, Set ‘Em Free 77”. I still haven’t got a clue!

14. 

    Sam

    May 18, 2008 at 10:08 pm

    “When I found myself being forcibly re-educated by the punk maoists, I thought it was time to get the fuck out of Dodge.”

    You were very wise. I hope I wasn’t one of them as I did fall for this for a while. Looking back on it I think it was mainly a case of strong peer pressure (accompanied by merciless piss-taking) and wanting to keep my mates who were suddenly full of rules and regulations. The whole Anarchist philosophy was a complete head fuck and I now view it as no different from other one-sided philosophies such as fundamentalist Christianity. I was an adult (of sorts) at the time so it’s my own fault for falling for something I was suspicious of to begin with. The end result was feeling that I was completely disconnected with my true feelings, instincts and opinions and I had to rethink the most simple things to return to the real world. It was akin to some weird religious sect. My turning point came in Australia when a bunch of Anarchos were debating, quite seriously, whether the children of ‘Pigs’ should be shot along with the grown up ‘Pigs’. I’m sure Pol Pot and the Nazis had similar intellectual discussions. There’s that scene in The Killing Fields of these children, raised on just such philosophies going around on witch hunts and singling out people to be shot or suffocated. At least democracy, flawed as it is, admits, allows and encompasses difference. Truth, in my opinion, is usually found in paradox, not absolutism. Another simple realization that occured to me at the time was that a bunch of (mainly middle class) squatters with green dreadlocks who were incapable of washing their own dishes weren’t ever going to convert anyone to a system which involved absolute personal and social responsibility.

    Ah well…rant over. The late seventies/early eighties were politically extreme and I think all this was inevitable.

15. 

    jahpork

    May 19, 2008 at 12:23 am

    @Sam-> Yeah, I quite agree about the similarities between religious fundamentalism and capital-A Anarchism.

    Additionally, in the case of the Anarchos, these are people who are supposedly instinctively against communism with its ideas of an intellectual elite and a proletariat. However, once they’ve read a book, the temptation to impose their new-found ideas, through ridicule, ostracism and re-education, rather than to share them, becomes overwhelming. It’s just swapping one metanarrative for another where they’re more equal than the rest of us (us my dad used to say).

    You’re right about having to re-think the very basic things in life, but I’m sure the way I’ve re-thought them is more tolerant and egalitarian than anything that the Anarcho thought police would have had me believe. In essence, anarchism doesn’t work in any modern industrial system – it’s an agrarian and co-operative lifestyle which doesn’t have any answers to living in today’s world (probably why the “A”-word is so universally equated in political circles with Islamic fundamentalism). the one question I’ve never found an Anarcho able to give a very good answer to is: “How far do you tolerate intolerance?”

    All I’ve taken from that period is a deep mistrust of anyone who attempts to tell me that they know better how I should live my life than I do, or who tells me that I should know better how anyone else should live their life than they do. That’s left me quite well-equipped. I’m no better and no worse than anyone else, and I like to hear what other people think about the world because it enriches my own experience of it, whether I agree with them or not. In fact, re-reading this paragraph: it sounds like a reasonable definition of “growing up”!

    I think that going to college when I was 29 did me the world of good too: it astonished me that there were a bunch of clever people there (the lecturers) who were not only there to talk to me (so I learned some stuff), but were actually there to LISTEN to me as well and seemed to anjoy it!

    The doctrine of reciprocity is about where I pitch up these days: do unto others as you’d have done unto you. and whether there’s a lot of difference between Karma and “ragged-trousered philanthropy” I don’t know but I try to bridge the gap in reciprocity between acting and walking by when I could act with some of those thoughts too.

16. 

    Sam

    May 19, 2008 at 2:30 am

    I don’t think the concept of ‘denial’ was in usage at the time but it does explain a lot of our behaviour. The simple unhealhiness of indoctrinating yourself with a worldview that basicly says ‘EVERYTHING is shit’ is never going to lead to anything very good. But the Crass philosophy was on the cards. Punk was supposed to be political but The Clash posing about in RAF t shirts was always open to scrutiny and someone had to pull them up about it. Andy Palmer (out of Crass) was in the year above me at St Martin’s when I went there. You couldn’t hope to meet a nicer bloke, and I chatted to him about the band and Anarchism a couple of times. He said he started to get worried when kids’d phone up and say “OK….I’ve disowned my parents, I’m living in a squat in Hackney and I don’t eat meat or wear leather……..now what?”. Human beings are human beings and you tend to get leaders and followers. I spent years and years beating myself up for having un-politically correct thoughts, such as getting turned on by pornography or thinking racist thoughts if some Indian woman wasn’t walking fast enough and blocking the pavement. We’re all human with all those nasty little traits. Nothing wrong with idealism but it’s important to recognize the dark side too. I blame Plato.

17. 

    jahpork

    May 19, 2008 at 3:00 am

    I think that Bush/Blair/Brown and their ilk have gone a long way to furthering the cause of human beings not wanting to follow the kind of thing that’s been on offer (but then I can be a terrible optimist sometimes). I’d rather live on and by my wits, and take a position on individual issues. Of course, that doesn’t sit perfectly with a democratic system that includes a manifesto which has to be voted on every 5 years, in the meantime giving the elected government carte blanche to walk all over the electorate, but it’s the best we’ve got. I do start to get animated when elected leaders either don’t fulfil a manifesto commitment or perform verbal gymnastics by claiming that something fundamental which they’re going to do WAS in their mandate when it plainly wasn’t.

    What else can be done though? Electronic voting on individual issues? I’d like to think that it’s possible, but in the kind of economy we have, there does need to be some kind of medium-term planning. Going to war would be something that I’d have liked to see a referendum on, though. We didn’t even need a vote in Parliament for it… the Prime Minister had absolute power to take us to war without any kind of consultation.

    I wouldn’t say that a worldview which says “everything is shit” wouldn’t lead to anything very good, but it WOULD take a hell of a lot of work to dismantle a whole political, social, industrial, religious, military, health and education system and replace it with something better. Not impossible, but persuading people to give up what they’ve got already would be a job which only the major TV networks could take on 😉

    I think you should only worry if you watch too much porn AND start fancying a hot on-camera session with the little old Indian woman on the pavement 😉 The thoughts you’re talking about are only racist thoughts if all Indian people walk slowly, or sexist if all women walk slowly, I think! As for porn, I’m with Bill Hicks on that one when he said that the US Supreme Court’s definition of pornography is something with no artistic merit which seeks to tittilate. “Sounds like every TV commercial I ever heard. When I see that Wrigley’s advert with the twins on it, you can bet I ain’t thinking about gum!”

    Being bipolar means that at times I can be very bleak and misanthropic, and at other times I can see no wrong with the world. As soon as one realises that it’s just brain chemistry playing tricks though, normal service is resumed. It’s a big place with a lot of competing views which just have to be respected wherever possible. It’s just there to be enjoyed as much as possible, without hurting anyone else. We’re no more in Earthly terms than a virus with shoes. One thought that I do like though is Einstein saying “There are only 2 infinite things in life: the Universe and human stupidity. And I’m not sure about the Universe”.

18. 

    Sam

    May 19, 2008 at 3:29 am

    I should say I find pornography boring and I had more racist thoughts when I went around calling other people racists. It wasn’t all slow Indian women but “Come on you dawdling paki bitch!” could pop involuntarily into my head so there you go. It’s human unfortunately. As I never burned any crosses it doesn’t really make much difference. It was the whole ideal of your mind being born again that caused the personal angst and the witch hunts that went on if the words ‘cunt’ or ‘girl’ slipped out in the wrong company.

19. 

    Sam

    May 19, 2008 at 3:41 am

    “I wouldn’t say that a worldview which says “everything is shit” wouldn’t lead to anything very good, but it WOULD take a hell of a lot of work to dismantle a whole political, social, industrial, religious, military, health and education system and replace it with something better.”

    Absolutely. As Josef Porter said in his excellent manifesto, sitting around in little church groups deconstructing Carry On films on the tele isn’t going to change much in the big bad world outside.
    I remember one of our number declaring one day that he would never go the the cinema again as it was the ultimate spectacular experience. Beats digging for turnips in Epping though if you ask me.

20. 

    jahpork

    May 19, 2008 at 3:45 am

    I think in the 90s the admen and film-makers gave it their best effort to shock us into buying stuff and failed. Everyone got immune to shock-horror, and everyone seemed to be getting a bit more tolerant of alternative lifestyles etc. As a bit of an exercise in the pub one night, a mate and me decided to come up with something that would shock everyone in Britain.

    What we decided on was a baby in a crib, dressed in full Nazi uniform, tourniquet’d up with a full syringe of gear in one hand and a bunch of fivers and a pair of crusty knickers in the other. Didn’t work though: everyone was just immune to it and shrugged it off. We had to add in one more facet to make it shock the average British drinker: said baby, as well as all the other stuff, was shagging a burning dog. that brought the animal lover in them out and they were really offended!

    Coincidentally, my hearing isn’t what it used to be (should have listened to my mum when she told me to put cotton wool in my ears when I was gigging/rehearsing) and I went out on a works do to a posh restaurant in London a few years ago. Unfortunately the trip on the London Eye was overbooked and as I was the last one to join the company, they asked me if I’d mind spending the afternoon in the pub with the company credit card instead. At the time, I was no stranger to the odd small sweet sherry (alcohol really was always my drug, wasn’t it?) so I tried to look diffident as I snatched at the opportunity. A right skinful was had, and when they all got back they bought me a few more. We got to the restaurant, which was quite noisy anyway, got some wine in and started chatting. One of the guys I worked with, Simon, I’d chatted about punk to (he was a nice fella). We all got taking about music and one of them said something I didn’t agree with, so I told him so quite politely. Simon then (I thought) said “That’s cos you’re a cunt”. I took grave exception to this and said, at the top of my voice, “I may be a cunt, but at least I’m a fucking OLD cunt”. The boss’s secretary was sitting next to me and got the right hump “Don’t EVER use that word in my company again”. “Fuck you too” I said. Simon then pointed out to me that he’d said “That’s because you’re a PUNK”.

    Funny enough, I didn’t stay long with that firm after that!

21. 

    jahpork

    May 19, 2008 at 3:48 am

    “I remember one of our number declaring one day that he would never go the the cinema again as it was the ultimate spectacular experience. Beats digging for turnips in Epping though if you ask me.”

    I make you right there mate: they’re joyless bastards. It’s a sad and meaningless world without art.

22. 

    Sam

    May 19, 2008 at 4:27 am

    Whatever happened to Mad Dog? He was another one who was ostracised for being too laddish. I last saw him around 1984. Me and Tony met him in this pub. He seemed much the same, in a very good way. I think he was lighting technician for U2. A very witty character.

23. 

    Sam

    May 19, 2008 at 2:27 pm

    Just read this snippet from an unpublished chapter from The Story of Crass. Very interesting:

    “Unpublished Chapter:

    EPILOGUE – REFLECTIONS

    A couple of years ago, Pomona Books released a book of all the Crass lyrics entitled ‘Love Songs’. Bassist Pete Wright wrote to publisher Mark Hodgkinson with his thoughts on Crass:

    “Things were fine when we started gigging, before we had any status or
    influence. The main discomfort I felt and still feel about what the band promoted,
    started when I realised that Thatcher’s sordid right-wing laissez-faire was little different
    from what we were pushing. It was an unpleasant shock. Neither Thatcher nor we
    considered the damage done. We concentrated on the ‘plus’ side always. To say that
    everyone can ‘do it’, and counting it a justification when the talented, the motivated, or
    the plain privileged responded, while ignoring the majority who couldn’t ‘do it’, and
    those who got damaged trying, is a poor measure of success.”

    “Just as Putin has become the new Tzar of Russia, Crass used the well worn
    paths to success and influence. We had friends, people with whom we worked and
    cooperated. We were educated, socially connected. We networked, lied, cheated,
    intimidated, tricked, bought, bribed, mocked, flattered, self-deluded, and
    accommodated all manner of contradictions to maintain our ‘rightness’. And we worked
    hard.”

    “The early ad hoc nature of the band led to some weird rationales. The Anarchy
    banner at gigs was there purely to stop us being co-opted by the far left or right who
    were circling at the time. That’s all it was, an inspired move, suggested by Penny, I
    think, because who the hell knew about the academic aspect? It was what we said it
    was. This was England. Anarchy is as bollocks in this country, as it is bourgeois on
    the continent.”

    “The barrage of querulous questions that ensued crammed us into defining a
    cod ideology, a chimera of individualistic libertarianism. Blue-black.”

    “The parallels between Crass and the opposition penetrated everywhere. The ‘
    apocalyptic’ nature of our outlook, our ‘all or nothing’ message, reflected the State
    pacifying its population through fear of total destruction. It’s not easy to put forward a
    reasoned analysis of the use of bogeymen to justify State oppression, if the supposed
    radicals are plying the same trade to bolster an identical ‘us and them’, ‘all or nothing’
    mentality.”

    “I think it was about 1982 when I came across an article by an Australian
    scientist/scientific journalist who suggested that if all the nuclear weapons in the world
    were launched, arrived and exploded at the same time – an unlikely worst case, but go
    with it – then the net result, excluding the highly improbable occurrence of a
    catastrophic crust split or some such, would be that most of northern Europe and parts
    of north America would be a wasteland. Since most people in the world live south of
    the equator, and the weather systems north and south hardly mix, the result for this
    majority would probably be a move to the right in their governments and a marginally
    increased radiation count. Our big bombs just weren’t that big. The Apocalypse which
    we projected on the rest of the world was our local apocalypse, limited to ourselves. “
    We are the world.” Oh yeah? It’s the same today. Me is everything.”

    “The writer’s coda to the Crass world view was that it made fighting for
    substantial reforms virtually impossible. The view we promoted was the view the State
    promoted. The grooves run deep.”

    “The early quality of Crass was a much more hopeful, anarchic, irresponsible ‘
    f**k off to the system’, inchoate, intelligent and insidious.”

    “The central premise of your book: Crass lyrics as love songs troubles me.
    What can I say. It seems almost churlish to carp, although I get a mischievous image,
    as Crass members wax lyrical about love, of maudlin alkies crying into their Special
    Brew. The Crass people were personable, affectionate, hospitable, but the Crass
    engine was something altogether darker.”

    “Those poignant claims – yes I’m as guilty – of a bedrock of love and sensitivity
    driving all that bilious doggerel and poetry was the lure of mystification that flooded
    through the last thirty years, like the uncritical taste for alternative medicine and
    self-centred views of the beast, ‘human spirit’. Hand in hand: State, media, and us
    proles alike. We were all at it. Still are.”

    “I wonder when we’ll be able to face up to the essential nature of evangelism, of
    proselytising. Forceful persuasion requires a platform plus charisma plus bigotry (plus
    the promotion of the same message in a different package if possible). That works well.”

    “Crass was bigoted. A singleness of message, a polar view shorn of checks and
    balances and considerations. The nature of the people who are good at this is by
    nature skewed. Balanced people don’t cut it.”

    “Bigotry is widespread. Rarer, is that extremist edge to society which allows the
    centre to adjust as it sees the need. The raw material for this edge is always the
    fuckup people, and they usually get more f***ed up in the process. That’s the cost. I
    feel we failed. We were the raw material, but somehow we fluffed it.”

    “The pacifism that ran through the Crass output is something else that has
    pretty much escaped examination. If you can get what you want by your class,
    education, charm, money, contacts, location – where is the need to fight? In the far off
    places where the s**t that this country generates is manifest, the difference between
    the pacifist and non-pacifist, is that the first chooses to suffer to change things, while
    the second chooses to inflict suffering on the opposition. In this country pacifism is a
    convenience, a safe, assured parking bay.”

    “And part of the Crass pacifist ‘message’ was the recognition of the exposed
    and public nature of our lives, and the danger of kids screwing up theirs with serious
    but naive, ‘on message’ bravura. It was also a sharp cut-off point to what we were
    prepared to do. We could shout as loud and as violently as we wanted, while holding
    tight the lid.”

24. 

    jahpork

    May 19, 2008 at 3:45 pm

    “We were educated, socially connected. We networked, lied, cheated, intimidated, tricked, bought, bribed, mocked, flattered, self-deluded, and accommodated all manner of contradictions to maintain our ‘rightness’. And we worked hard.”

    “The early ad hoc nature of the band led to some weird rationales. The Anarchy banner at gigs was there purely to stop us being co-opted by the far left or right who were circling at the time. That’s all it was, an inspired move, suggested by Penny, I think, because who the hell knew about the academic aspect? It was what we said it was. This was England. Anarchy is as bollocks in this country, as it is bourgeois on the continent.”

    “The barrage of querulous questions that ensued crammed us into defining a cod ideology, a chimera of individualistic libertarianism.”

    WELL… Just forces me to ask: “Why were they doing it then?”

    Was it for the groupies?

    It’s a bit revisionist to say that Thatcher was pushing anything “laissez-faire” unless you’re talking deregulating financial markets. Look at her positions on immigration, public order and militarism. Nothing laid-back there.

    ” “The early quality of Crass was a much more hopeful, anarchic, irresponsible ‘f**k off to the system’, inchoate, intelligent and insidious.” ”

    That might be intuitive, but there ain’t anything all that intelligent about it.

    ” “I wonder when we’ll be able to face up to the essential nature of evangelism, of proselytising. Forceful persuasion requires a platform plus charisma plus bigotry (plus the promotion of the same message in a different package if possible). That works well.” ”

    That’s exactly what we were saying yesterday about leaders. Are you sure this guy isn’t Officer Diboll under a nom-de-guerre?

    I don’t agree with him about pacifism in this country. The suffering undergone is different, but it’s there.

25. 

    Mike

    May 19, 2008 at 4:16 pm

    Pete Wright may be just over-analysing his past,which,as for many of us,is done and therefore pointless to wring your hands over (beyond trying not to repeat your mistakes).Sometimes I look at the bland homogenous and vacuous present and fondly remember people agonising over the contents of chocolate bars,but as we’ve said before it did all get v.silly even if it was a product of the times.The end was that Conflict riot at Brixton in ’87,I heard that people were setting their dogs on punks with leather on when exiting the tube station.Knew a couple of folk who did time for animal rights stuff and their rhetoric had a disturbing capacity to gather a life of it’s own and become action way beyond their original intention.I’ll say no more.

    Sam:quite a coup to talk Lemmy off the planet! I was v.over-protective of my little sis at times,she followed me down the punk route and I tried to dissuade her,knowing the abuse she was gonna suffer outside the front door. Pretty sure I loomed over the shoulders of most of her prospective suitors (and there were many) too.She got her own back on me by going out w/Jim Kerr of Simple Minds,but that’s another story.I then became (in his words) the “passe punk brother”.This in 1979 too,but not quite as passe as copying old Kraftwerk records and invoking the frigging Weimar Republic methinks.Should have given it up after Johnny & the Self Abusers,ha!

    Pork:I remember Dexys having a worse comedown,I’m sure,at least the paranoia-quiotient was far worse.Speckled blues cut w/strychnine..or urban myth? agonising stomach cramps at the least.Me & Womble were reminiscing about all this stuff Saturday night over a beer or 2,he remembers going up to Campbell Bldgs to visit Del from Harrow & recalls pills jammed in holes in the rafters.Think Paul/Raggity from Chaos was there for a bit too.Skinhead Kenny was Kenny Brighton,apparently.It all comes back after a while…(well,hopefully he won’t!)

26. 

    Mike

    May 19, 2008 at 4:54 pm

    Pork:I think Crass’ problem was they were put on a pedestal by sheer dint of their effort and therefore easy to throw mud at.I was ambivalent,any of the class of ’77-’79 have that tendency to take nothing seriously,especially if that something takes itself seriously (if you see what I mean).In ’79 they were fresh, exciting,the bleakness morbidly fascinating.As a band they caught the mood of London that year better than any other.By the following year and 1981,with increasing camp-followers on board,I was less interested.The merest hint of dogma put me off (again,not the fault of Crass but those who followed them).Pete Wright may well be blaming others for their own interpretation of his efforts and thus blaming himself for having started the ball rolling.
    But…”chimera of individualistic libertarianism”? by definition hardly ‘a chimera’ and surely the easiest form to practice because it involves merely oneself.Thatcher’s Libertarianism depended on pursuit of a loosely-common goal,ostensibly practised individually (with vague promises of ‘a greater good’ at the end of the rainbow as a sop to the more socially-minded),in reality given guidance and credence by her policies.Surely the difference between the ideals of Crass and Thatcher,or between DIY recording and music biz-hype signified more than each using similar methods to attain their goals?

27. 

    Sam

    May 19, 2008 at 5:17 pm

    I couldn’t find the exact quote but Steve Ignorant is on record somewhere saying as soon as he left Crass it was at last safe to to have a shufty at the barmaid’s arse. I always felt that, much as Anarchists were against any kind of mental repression they really pulled out all the stops in this regard. “Arggh! I just stared at someone’s tits. Black, horsehair shirt and 30 minutes flagellation with Society of the Spectacle!”

28. 

    Graham Burnett

    May 19, 2008 at 5:25 pm

    Penny Rimbuad has said much the same thing (about being OK to look at arses once he was no longer part of Crass), certainly in private if not in public.

    We ran a course at Dial House a while back, a few months later I was trying to describe one of the course participants to him, saying “You know the one, the woman with the dark skin, slightly Spanish looking one”, he replied, “Oh, you mean the woman with absolutely amazing tits…” “Um yeah but I didnt want to say that…”

29. 

    Sam

    May 19, 2008 at 6:07 pm

    It occurs to me that all of this was still within the Modernist era with the blinkered mindset this entailed. It seems obvious now but we were still bound by very Victorian ideas of linear progression and cultural evolution. Someone mentioned hover cars – this was the vision of the Jetsons future we all expected. I watched a fascinating documentary last time I was back in England about post war city planning. The grey tower blocks we grew up with were designed by utopianists who believed they were building new communities in the sky. I teach art history and I can’t help but go on a rant every time I reach Le Courbusier and his ‘machines for living’. A contemporary city planner of our generation said on the documentary that when he meets planners of the post-war generation he treats them as he would Nazi war criminals. Their utopianism destroyed people’s lives. Post Modernism to my mind is a much more humanitarian way of thinking in that it admits nostalgia, irony and historical reference. It also sees culture as cyclical and imperfect and celebrates this. I think original punk was very in tune with these ideas. The Crass outlook was very Modernist with all the dry theory and dialogue this reflects. The idea was that once you’d realized the truth of the idea, there’d be no going back and you could throw your previous (sinful) ways of thinking away. Unfortunately we’re not fully in control of these processes. Human nature and the subconcious have a way of busting through. Jurrassic Park and Frankenstein are good metaphors for this. Thus, we get 70 years of the Communist experiment in the USSR and the human spirit still aspires towards competition and materialism. I think what Pork said about us rejecting traditional left and right wing thought is the only way forward. Both are mental straitjackets and individuals rarely fit neatly into those definitions. Both philosophies were reactions to the industrial revolution. As we live in a post-industrial information age it’s time for something new.

    I suggest the politicians get out of their poxy offices and wander about………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………..

30. 

    Sam

    May 19, 2008 at 9:13 pm

    “Penny Rimbuad has said much the same thing (about being OK to look at arses once he was no longer part of Crass), certainly in private if not in public.”

    So public arse gazing is still counter revolutionary?

31. 

    Penguin • Post Author •

    May 20, 2008 at 12:13 am

    ATTN – Ex Heretics et al, sticking a new post up with colour photos of Heretics and Portabello punks c/o Mike Clarke. Please go on that post and tell folk who the faces are if you know. Here is a shortcut https://www.killyourpetpuppy.co.uk/news/?p=800

32. 

    Mike

    May 20, 2008 at 11:50 am

    Sam,quite right. Original punk was far more exhilirating to participate in, but necessarily brief, and dogmatic restrictions became inevitable. Post-war inner city planning:as Alexei Sayle said “You won’t catch them living in any of the shit they’ve been building for the last 40 years!”. Left & Right have become irrelevant, but the danger is of,coupled w/post-modernist fashionable disdain, you end up with the bland Blair-world the UK is increasingly becoming. It’s like crime,and the current “the kids are out of control” media-scare,the comment is less on working out why these kids are (allegedly) stabbing each other en masse and more of the “why can’t they just aspire to shopping,mortgages,Sky TV and a call-centre job like the rest of us?!”

33. 

    jahpork

    May 20, 2008 at 12:55 pm

    @Mike-> “Strychnine has indeed rarely been discovered mixed with LSD and other drugs in a few samples recovered by law enforcement agencies, but these were all found in murder or attempted murder investigations where someone was being specifically targeted for poisoning, and not associated with recreational LSD use.” [From Wikipedia].

    …Though I’m sure I remember reading an interview with Lemmy years ago where he had a mate who died in his arms after banging up some speed cut with strychnine.

    Re: Crass… I think the whole point of punk was that people should be able to throw mud. I mean by this that everyone was a potential punk musician and punk ideologist, so we could all deliver a critique of whomever we wanted. Looking back at Crass, I’m embarrassed by some of the lyrics:

    “Fuck the politically-minded, there’s something I want to say”… Well, who was more politically-minded than Crass, then? Mind you, anyone who had the manifesto “man will never be truly free until the last politician is hanged with the guts of the last priest” WOULD want to be a bit careful about aligning themselves with anything political, wouldn’t they?

    And… “Do they owe us a living?” … well, whoever ‘they’ are, the answer has got to be “Course they fuckin’ DON’T!” if you’re an anarchist mate!

    The one I did like, though, was “The Sound Of Free Speech” when the Irish pressing plant wouldn’t press the album with the song about abortion on it, so they put 3 minutes of silence on it instead. That’s classy!

    At the beginning with Crass, there was a pleasing lack of authority: in the postmodernist sense, they were the original authors of the work but instead of being passive consumers of “art” being held up on high before us, we could add our own meaning to it from our thoughts and experiences and become authors of some equally valid (and to us more relevant) idea or thing which we could pass on to be digested and modified (and added to/subtracted from) to fit their own lives by others, ad infinitum. We could build our own identities as we wanted and be respected for it by all of the others who were doing the same thing.

    As it went on though, it became clear that the generally accepted view was that Crass had all the answers and were immune from criticism or interpretation. There was no room for personal eclecticism, one had to take all of one’s political thought from “The Base” or one was ostracised as being counter-revolutionary, as Sam says. And there was certainly no room for pluralism: Steve Ignorant and Penny Rimbaud were the Way, The Truth and The Light. No-one came to Anarcho-land except through Them. As for moral relativism, something on which we’d all relied as punks before then, look back to the Crass/Anarcho years and think when you were allowed to say in any given situation with which the party line didn’t agree: “well, it is their choice after all, not my thing but I don’t judge”. It just never happened. I always thought it was a really killing irony that the Conway Hall was founded to allow people who couldn’t get a place to speak anywhere else because of their views (be they left, right, anarchist or anything else: their web page says “Today, and in the future, we will continue to provide a forum for all manner of social controversies and support to those causes which advocates of ‘the open society’ have at heart”), and then Crass would go in there and take absolutely no lessons from that whatsoever!

    The problem with it for me was that it was just as teleological as the government which we had: there was a goal for society, just a different one. And the means for getting to that goal were just as restrictive and time-critical. A popular word at the time was “alternative” and it was just that. Only 2 paths, not an infinite number of paths for each of us.

    I find these days, as I did then, that sarcasm and irony are very much the best ways of dealing with those who think they know better for me than I do. It doesn’t mean that I take them any less seriously than people who come up with a totally different path for the whole of mankind as a rebuttal of a political system. It just means that I’m not that arrogant! We’re all beautiful sovereign human beings (and if you choose, all made in your choice of deity’s image) imbued with the ability to make our own decisions. I’d say that we’ve not only got the ability to do that, we’ve got the right as well.

    @Sam-> Hover cars are a way of getting your body somewhere quickly in a large space. The Internet is a way of getting your thoughts somewhere quickly in a large space. So we haven’t done bad!

    Postmodernism eschews totally the absolutist notion of perfection, so “imperfect” has no meaning, thankfully.

    “A contemporary city planner of our generation said on the documentary that when he meets planners of the post-war generation he treats them as he would Nazi war criminals.”

    That’s a bit ironic in itself though, isn’t it? I mean, it’s a perfect example of a paradigm shift, as in: “The idea was that once you’d realized the truth of the idea, there’d be no going back and you could throw your previous (sinful) ways of thinking away.” It’s PLANNERS themselves that are the problem. They’re the politicians of architecture, subjecting themselves to the electoral process of architecture critics.

    I think there’s still a lot to do with the architecture of mass housing (and we DO still need mass housing for those of us who haven’t got the dough for a manor house in the Shires or a loft apartment in EC1). Although the postmodernist ideas of referencing the local environment and local history (here in Portsmouth we’ve got a lot of playful architecture referencing naval topics) and of the eclectic use of materials (steel, glass, wood etc), one still cannot polish a turd! The new estates (be they council ones or Barratt Homes ones) still look bland and homogenous, and under the skin they still carry the modernist dream forward. But where do we go if we can’t build in the Green Belt (NIMBYs at work) and experience has told us that tower blocks don’t work most of the time?

    But then, who am I to buck the market? Do you remember Trellick Towers just up from the Bello? The Modernist-Brutalist tower blocks designed by Erno Goldfinger? Wikipedia says: Private properties inside the tower now (Sept 2007) sell for between £250,000 for a one-bedroom flat to £465,000 for three-bedrooms, whilst the tower itself has become something of a local cult landmark and was awarded a Grade II* listing in 1998. Fuck knows why!

    I’d say my spirit longs for co-operation and difference.