February 24, 2025 • 57 mins
Margaret talks further with Jolie Holland about a multigenerational punk band from the 70s that introduced punk ethics to punk rock.
https://expmag.com/2019/01/when-your-real-life-friend-is-your-facebook-troll/
Rebel Clothes, Rebel Songs, Rebel Pose: Anarchists on Punk Rock 1977-2010, anonymous
https://www.ubu.com/papers/cage_montague_interview.html
John Cage, Anarchy
The Story of Crass, George Berger
https://crosseyedpianist.com/2017/07/15/silence-presence-and-challenging-conventions-thoughts-on-john-cages-433/
https://www.soundoflife.com/blogs/mixtape/history-punk-music
https://fastnbulbous.com/punk/
https://www.udiscovermusic.com/stories/punk-politics-music-rebellion/
https://beltmag.com/mc5-detroits-godfathers-of-punk/
https://dangerousminds.net/comments/our_wedding_crasss_magnificent_romance_mag_prank
https://www.fifthestate.org/archive/301-february-26-1980/british-anarchists-found-not-guilty/
https://thehippiesnowwearblack.org.uk/2016/03/12/vi-subversa-and-poison-girls-an-appreciation/
https://www.ukrockfestivals.com/henge-history-80.html
https://jprobinson.medium.com/the-rotten-etymology-of-punk-86db2fcc16f8
https://www.cbc.ca/strombo/news/crass-thatchergate-prank
https://libcom.org/article/stop-city-demonstrations-1983-1984
See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
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Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:01):
Cool Zone Media. Hello, and welcome to Cool People Who
Did Cool Stuff, your weekly podcast for things that I
think are cool? And who am I to decide what's cool?
I am a person, and every person gets to decide
what they think is cool. And these are the things
that I think is cool. But my name as a
person who is the arbiter of cool like everyone else
(00:23):
is Margaret Kiljoy. And my guest who's also officially the
arbiter of cool is Julie Holland.
Speaker 2 (00:31):
So awesome to be here, Thanks for having me.
Speaker 1 (00:34):
Yeah, we were talking right before we hit record about
how this isn't a new history podcast, this is an
old history podcast, because we were talking about being incapable
of remembering the word for news and calling it new history.
That's unrelated to anything.
Speaker 2 (00:51):
It's comforting. It's like, uh, we're all gonna die kind
of comforting phrase.
Speaker 1 (01:00):
Yeah, we're all literally writing history right now, including writing
the fact that we don't have a producer again today.
But we do have a producer, she's just not on
Mike and her name is Sophie, and our audio engineer
is Rory. Everyone has to say hi to Rory. Hi,
Rory Hi, riy And our theme music was written for
us by unwoman who's going to be in this week's episode.
(01:21):
In an aside, Hell yeah, but no one's going to
know what it's about, unless do you know me, in
which case do you already know the thing? But this
is part three of a four parter about the band Crass,
about a narco punk in general, and the fact that
(01:42):
we took two episodes to not even get to the
band Crass is because of the fact that punk and
its broader impact has had a broad You can tell
I'm off script here. I am entirely making this up,
so I should probably just start, well, wait, what if
people don't know who Jolie Holland is and they somehow
skipped to just now and didn't know, would they know
(02:05):
that you're a wait? We decided to sing a songwriter
sort of an annoying word.
Speaker 2 (02:09):
Well, I mean singer songwriter. Yeah, I'm a musician. Yeah.
I like that. Sometimes people don't know that being a
singer is being a musician, which is really funny.
Speaker 1 (02:20):
Yeah, that's weird because that's like, that's the part of
musicianists that I'm worse at is singing.
Speaker 2 (02:27):
I believe everybody can sing.
Speaker 1 (02:31):
I know I technically can make singing. I don't actually
hate my singing voice. I just have to I'm not
as trained at it as I would like to be.
But it wouldn't have affected me if I'd been an
avant garde or punk singer. That's not true. Actually, punk
singers are incredibly talented.
Speaker 2 (02:48):
Absolutely, I know. It's so much power. Yeah, yeah, I
had never consciously listened to Krass until we started this.
So here we are starting episode three, and I just
listened to a whole bunch of Crass and I think
they're amazing musicians. I just really enjoyed. Yeah, it's it's
(03:09):
really technically powerful.
Speaker 1 (03:12):
Yeah, and it's it changed, well, it changed a lot
musically and not just like I'm going to talk mostly
about its cultural and political impact because of my own
background and focuses. But like when you listen to a
bunch of crafts, you're like, oh, that's where that weird
part of punk that doesn't make any sense comes from.
Speaker 2 (03:30):
You know, absolutely, Yeah, I really heard that. I heard
the formativeness.
Speaker 1 (03:36):
Yeah. Well, where we last left our unlikely heroes, they
were doing a bunch of avant garde stuff and living
in a rented cottage outside of London called Dial House.
After their divorce because they got divorced even though they
never got married. Gee moved to New York City to
work as a commercial artist, doing work for the New
(03:56):
York Times and I think the New Yorker, and she
lived around the corner from seatgb's the Classic punk club,
and just a bunch of stories about those days and
hanging out with CBGB's punks and stuff. Meanwhile, back in London,
folks in the house were working as cover designers, and
at least Penny, at least is the only person who's
like jobs I knew. I was trying to figure out
(04:18):
whether they're all just like living on the dole or whatever.
Penny was doing book design, Penny was doing like some
sort of coal delivery or carrying. I think people were
heating their houses a coal and I think Penny was
delivering it and house painting and just having a bunch
of weird jobs. This is also oddly placed his Long
(04:40):
Dark Night of the Soul. Normally that would come near
the climax of the story, but his relationship has fallen
apart and everything seems to be ending, you know, this
whole end of this era, and so he spends a
while just kind of Usually this goes really badly, but
it works this time. He spends a while just like
drinking and complaining about Christianity in the kitchen. Oh yeah,
and that's like, that's like his thing for a while,
(05:01):
as he just sits around the kitchen table at this
communal house and screams about how Jesus should have run
away from the people who were killing him. And he
wrote a pamphlet called Reality Asylum, or I think it's
called Christ's Reality Asylum. And in case anyone's wondering, I
don't know how to spell the word asylum. Still. I
took me like eight times writing the script. But he
(05:25):
wrote this thing, and he was mad that Jesus hadn't
run away from his captors. He was mad that his
friend Wally hadn't either. He was just bitter, like all
the hippie love stuff is kind of fallen apart. And
so he decides to put out this piece, and he
asks his housemate Dave King to make a piece of
art for it, design a logo for it for the cover,
and so Dave King sits down and he sketches something
(05:48):
that we now know today as the crafts symbol, which
is a sort of a circle slash made out of
Ora Boris's against a cross. And this is one of
the better pieces of branding in history. Like Crass is
an anti corporate band, but the fact that they all
come from like graphic design backgrounds and they know about
(06:11):
commercial art shows this logo is part of what makes them.
I think it's somehow kind of esoteric and slightly disturbing.
Anything with radial symmetry is going to occasionally be mistaken
for a swastika, and the Crass logo is no different.
Have you seen the Crass logo of course.
Speaker 2 (06:28):
Yeah. And I just spoke with my friend Sarah Berlin Game,
who just got out of the State House in Wyoming today,
just while I was walking my dog, and she said
that they a bit of new history here. They just
allowed open Carrie in the schools. Maybe for the students,
(06:53):
I don't know. It's really upsetting, Okay, in Wyoming. In Wyoming,
she's a she's like a lgbt Q plus organizer with
white Wyoming equality and so tough, so badass, and uh yeah,
it's just shocking. But she said her the first love
(07:16):
of her life had a Crass tattoo, and he was
always telling people that it was not a swastika.
Speaker 1 (07:25):
Yeah that Yeah, that's gonna end up sometimes a problem
for them. And it's funny to me because I even
like often think things look like swastikas that aren't. I
have never looked at the cross logo and thought it's
a swastika, but I do know an awful lot of
people with the tattoo.
Speaker 2 (07:43):
It's it's a lot like the the Bad Religion image
kind of is a iteration of the cross image in
a way.
Speaker 1 (07:51):
Right, Yeah, isn't a circle circle slash through a cross
is bad religion?
Speaker 2 (07:55):
Yeah, it's like almost the same.
Speaker 1 (07:57):
Yeah, totally. Oh that's a that's a good point. Bad
Religions is much simpler. But you know, so they have
this logo and they don't know that it's going to
be the logo of Crass yet it's just the logo
for Christ's Reality Asylum, and they make pamphlets of it
and stuff and start distributing it. Well, I guess Penny does.
(08:19):
Punk is doing this thing, And in nineteen seventy seven
the whole house went to go see the clash. I
really like the idea that they had, Like House field
trips and they left and they were like, hey, this
is fucking cool. And then they saw the Slits and
they were like, oh, this is even more earnest, this
is even better. And also they were like the Clashes
was more technically competent than the Slits, let's say, and
(08:43):
so they were like, you know what, and they can
do it. Anyone can do it, we can do it.
It also helped that Joe Strummer from the Clash used
to challenge the audience to form their own bands at
the end of shows, which is fucking cool. That is
a cool thing to do, especially when you're like the
rock star band is to be like, no, we're not
better you. We could just everyone can do it, you know.
Speaker 2 (09:03):
Yeah. I think I think they somebody gave them that
advice before they started too. They're like, we really have
we want to start a band, but we feel like
we're not good enough, and I forget some big band
was like, no, you should just start.
Speaker 1 (09:18):
Hell, yeah, that's cool. I really like the Clash. About
half of Crass is like, uh, Clash is bad and sellouts,
and the other half of Crass is like, Clash is cool.
Speaker 2 (09:27):
Yeah. I saw I saw the track where it seemed
like they was trying to start beef with them.
Speaker 1 (09:32):
Yeah. They they do a lot of beef tracks. They
are uh dis tracks, that's the word, not not beef tracks.
I'm good at knowing new history.
Speaker 2 (09:44):
On new history. Yeah. They they seem very fighty.
Speaker 1 (09:48):
Yeah, and it's interesting because like the whole time that
they're a band, they're incredibly fighty with their like lyrics
and they're the stuff they do. But then like their
house is open and they're all peaceful and you can
just like come hang out, and like it was kind
of interesting. So they get home, they've seen the clash,
they've seen the slits, and there's this young punk who
had been hanging around the house because they're in their
(10:08):
thirties and they're not punks, right, And this guy named
Steve Ignorant was coming around, which is a good punk name.
He would come around because his older brother, who was
a hippie, used to take him there. And then young
Steve he was originally a skinhead. This is before skinhead
had racist connotations, and then after that he was glam
but then he was punk and he liked this house.
(10:30):
He's like in high school or whatever they call high
school over there, maybe they called high school, I don't know.
And he starts hanging out there more and more. He's
like skipping school to hang out at dial House, even
though the weird hippies wouldn't let him eat meat and
there was like no TV to watch or whatever, you know.
And so one day he shows up at dial House
and he's like, well, I want to start a band,
(10:51):
and Penny's like, yeah, sure, fuck it, all right, I'll
be your drummer. Let's start a band. And it was
a two piece at first. Steve would shout and Penny
would smash on the RUMs. And Penny wanted to call
it les font Terrible, the fucking surrealist fucking it's a
uh in font Terrible means the terrible children, and it's
(11:11):
a reference to some weird old artsy shit, a novel
by John Jean Cocteau, Whereas Steve wanted to call it Stormtrooper,
which is also not a very good name. But it's
interesting because Stormtrooper is a better name in terms of,
like it sounds like a punk band, but it's also
a terrible name because it's a literally a Nazi thing,
you know.
Speaker 2 (11:31):
Yeah, So then they ended.
Speaker 1 (11:33):
Up picking the name crass, which comes from a David
Bowie song Ziggy Stardust, in which there's a line that
says the kids were just crass. And soon enough there's
a bunch of them in this band. And this isn't
a music history podcast, and I'm not going to give
you the names of And I feel kind of almost
like a jerk about this, but I'm not going to
give you the names of like everyone in the band,
and like when they joined them, when they left, and
(11:55):
what instruments they played and all that stuff, because that
is extensively covered. So that's not what I'm gonna do.
Everyone in this band was important, and they really were
a collective, but there were a bunch of them, and
I would have a hard time crafting a narrative around
all seven or eight of them. At first they were
all men, and soon enough there's three women in the
(12:15):
band as well. They played their first show and they
pissed off the neighbors so much that the neighbors pulled
the plug on their show. And I think that that
is a good way to start a band. The reason
that I think that is that I once was in
an acoustic crass cover band, which you're making obviously that
would be amazing face but and it was called best
(12:38):
before eighteen eighty six, so is somehow a reference to
Haymarket and crass. And it was with my friend on
woman who did the theme music for this podcast, as
well as another friend who doesn't like when they're named
on air, so will not be And we got booked
to play. This is really gonna I'm gonna really impress everyone.
We got booked to play a steampunk convention in San Antonio, Texas,
(13:00):
and we were so bad that not only were we
kicked out of the bar where we played, the entire
convention was kicked out of the bar, even though they'd
booked it for a private event.
Speaker 2 (13:12):
That's incredible. And this is wait, this is an acoustic band.
Speaker 1 (13:16):
Yeah it was one one was playing cello, I was
playing accordion, and my friend was playing acoustic guitar.
Speaker 2 (13:23):
So wait, you were wait you were amplified right.
Speaker 1 (13:26):
No, no shit, no, we were just shouting loud as hell.
Speaker 2 (13:30):
Yeah, So that that is I'm deeply impressed. That's thank you,
that's that's that's another level. You got the convention kicked out.
Speaker 1 (13:41):
I know, I know, I was really impressed by that.
Uh No, one else was impressed by that. Everyone else
is upset by that.
Speaker 2 (13:49):
But you know, that's success, that's really success.
Speaker 1 (13:54):
Yeah. That was the only time we ever played. We
did not continue. We got booked to play that convention.
That was it.
Speaker 2 (14:03):
Wait was the name of the band again.
Speaker 1 (14:05):
Best before eighteen eighty six? Yeah, so soon enough Krass,
the actual Crass, not the brilliant derivative band Best before
eighteen eighty six. Soon enough, Krass developed their whole deal,
which was to wear all black like a uniform and
play in front of a bunch of political banners. Eventually
they start using projection from various like artsy films and
(14:28):
all kinds of imagery, and they use the big old
Crass logo banner and this is all really effective branding.
But for a long time, even though they were eventually
like the a narco punk band, a lot of people
saw them and were like, are these Nazis? And it
didn't help that they all wore red armbands.
Speaker 2 (14:46):
Oh lord, yeah, because everybody knew what Nazis were, and
people did not know what anarcho punks were.
Speaker 1 (14:55):
Well, because a narco punks weren't a thing yet, and
what's and what's fascinating about it is that they like
and they weren't like wearing like patches and stuff, right,
they were like wearing solid all black. And to this day,
like there's kind of a slight division in punk. It's
not named, but there's like a slight division where the
more Anarco you are, the more clean black, and the
(15:15):
more punk you are, the more color and like patched
up black, you know, but like punks wear a lot
of black, but like the like slightly cleaner Anarco look like.
I think this is the idea that punks just wear
all black comes from crass And what's fascinating is I
think they were doing it kind of to look a
(15:36):
little bit like fascists because and this is a thing
that like, Okay, the playing around with fascist imagery is
a thing that is hard to look at in retrospect.
But a lot of early punks were using this for
three different reasons, as best as I can tell, a
lot of people like Susie Sue, who has a kind
(15:57):
of racist named or band. Anyway, Susi Sue used swastikas
and stuff, and I believe is basically shock value. I'm
not an expert on Suzi Sue and then some people
were using swastikas and stuff because they were actually right wing,
and Krass never used swastikas, but they used this kind
of imagery, I believe, in a similar way to what
(16:18):
they were doing with their visual art, whereas like Crass's
like art is like close up photos of children on
fire and the horrors of war and mutilation and all
of this like edge Lord imagery, right, they were doing
it to be like, look, these are the horrors of
war that they're trying to hide from you. We're going
to put it in your face that war is bad.
Speaker 2 (16:40):
Yeah, this is the expression of empire that and we're
all living on the slightly cleaner side of it, but
this is the reality.
Speaker 1 (16:51):
Yeah, Like we're going to show you the shit that
is being done in the rest of the empire here
in the colonial center, you know. And so I think
that they are sort of playing around with like edgy
uniforms and like being like kind of fashy in some
of their fashion comes from that, like that desire, whereas
like these days, most of the time when people dress
(17:15):
up fascy, it's just bad, you know, Yeah, I.
Speaker 2 (17:18):
Mean it's also it also seems like it could be
read as just an expression of militancy totally.
Speaker 1 (17:25):
Yeah, And then it's like kind of fun and interesting
because they are like pacifists from the go, but they
are like loud and angry pacifists in a way that
like you don't see a lot of these days. You know, Yeah,
there's a oh I haven't read it, but there's a
book that someone I know wrote called a pacifismin What
(17:46):
it Used to be. Oh no, non violent ain't what
it used to be anyway. So Crass is starting to play,
and they didn't have advertisers cutting into the middle of
their shows. They just didn't. They were really that is
a thing that they were against. But that's fifty years
ago and things are different. Sometimes advertisers come right now
(18:16):
and we're back. So Crass is starting to play and
they're not like a tight professional band for a very
long time. They actually start getting more and more like
technically competent or whatever, but they've never prioritized like clean
production or technical mastery of their instruments. There's a lot
of like some of the people from Krass talking about
how they had sometimes had trouble at other shows because
afterwards all the other musicians would like want a jam
(18:37):
or something, and they're like, I know how to play
the three chords that are in my song.
Speaker 2 (18:41):
Yeah, I know how to play the songs that I
wrote and not not anything else. Yeah, which I love that.
I really appreciate those kind of musicians.
Speaker 1 (18:50):
I appreciate it because I am literally that kind of person.
I cannot I love playing piano. I play piano. It
was like my main happy place. I cannot play a
piano song and write. I barely know how to read music,
and I like write music, and I feel like a
jerk because then people are like, oh, let's Jim, and
I'm like, I no, No, I kind of can if
someone tells me what key we're in, I can do it.
(19:12):
But anyway, there's a part of why I like Crassis. Yeah,
they prioritize their overall aesthetic and they prioritize political messaging.
But they did write some fucking bangers right out of
the gate. Their main issues included feminism and the peace movement.
One of their first songs is one of their classics.
I think it's like the second song they wrote. It's
(19:33):
called do They Owe Us a Living? And the chorus
is do they owe us a living. Of course they do.
Of course they fucking do. And it's just this like angry,
like no society needs to take care of people.
Speaker 2 (19:45):
Yeah. I just went and went by my friend Jessica
Kinney's house and she comes walking down her hill and
she's she's a old punk and I had told her
that we were doing this and uh huh, she comes
walking down our hill. She's screaming that song at me.
Speaker 1 (20:06):
Hell yeah, the song is fucking good. And there's a
punk club in London at this time called the Roxy.
And I think this part's actually important. It grew out
of a gay club and Crass played there twice, the
second and last time they ever played there. Is it
still in their very early stages, they were too drunk
(20:27):
to play, possibly too high to play, but I've like
read one thing that's too high to play. But overall
I read that they kind of didn't do drugs, so
at the very least they were too drunk to play,
and they made such a shit show of it that
they got banned from the Roxy, which is why they
wrote a song called Band from the Roxy.
Speaker 2 (20:45):
When I read the lyrics, it seemed to imply that,
like they were too cool, for the roxy, but they
just couldn't they couldn't make it happen on stage. It
sounds like.
Speaker 1 (20:57):
Yeah, basically like I've read a couple of different takes
of it, but it was like they went up and
they were too drunk, and so the club was like,
get the fuck off stage, and they were like no.
And then eventually the band was like, fine, you can
finish your set, but your fucking band. And then afterwards
they decided even though they were like, oh, we were
(21:18):
unjustly banned or whatever, and you know, they were like, hey,
maybe we shouldn't get so drunk before we play anymore.
Like you can have like a beer or two before
you play. That's the that's the new rules in Crass
is we don't want to be too drunk to play,
which is important. It's like a funny I see the
like as a musician, you're like, okay, like, especially when
(21:38):
you're first starting or something, you're like, you know, a
drink might help loosen you up to be a little
bit less nervous on stage, but it gets real, real bad,
real quickly.
Speaker 2 (21:48):
Yeah, it doesn't doesn't do anything for me.
Speaker 1 (21:50):
Yeah, but.
Speaker 2 (21:52):
Yeah, so it's nice to having The writer is nice
to share with friends, if if people whatever that you
want to.
Speaker 1 (22:01):
Say, like to give drink tickets and drinks or whatever
to your friends.
Speaker 2 (22:03):
And yourself to hang out in the hang out in
the dressing room and then drink some tequila.
Speaker 1 (22:09):
Yeah, fair enough. I think by the end of Crass,
I think only Steve Ignorant was drinking at all. And
at Dial House there was almost no drinking and almost
no drug use. And part of that was strategic cops
like came by to raid and search and knock and
talk to them like all the time. And you don't
(22:31):
want a bunch of drugs at your anarchy house. That's
a general.
Speaker 2 (22:35):
Rule, absolutely not. It's yeah, especially yeah, if you look
really cool, other people are gonna notice.
Speaker 1 (22:42):
Yeah, And they eventually become like too serious for drinking
and drugs or whatever. And they are they're such good
kill joys. They are like the archtypical like yeah.
Speaker 2 (22:57):
They really are.
Speaker 1 (22:58):
Yeah, and kind of negative way as well, Like a
lot of the stuff you read retrospectively about Krass is like, oh,
basically they kind of created a puritanical scene, and they
they built kind of this politically pure scene. This is
their weakness and their strength for example, there was this
Rock against Racism movement that I brought up last time.
(23:19):
It's all these big concerts happening in London, pretty much
in a response to Eric Clapton's wild unhinged racist rant.
And Krass played Rock Against Racism once and then they
decided not to again because they were so offended that
they were offered money to play for it. Come on,
they are like, you know, they we stand on the
(23:42):
shoulders of giants. You know, they like offered a really
important critique of the music industry, but like people need
to eat food on a regular basis.
Speaker 2 (23:52):
Yeah, for real, I'm gonna take this moment to Okay,
Well two thoughts. Okay, Number one, they're commercial artists. Why
how what's going on? Like they already they're already, but
I guess they're like that's somebody else's job, you know
(24:13):
that they're working on. So like like if they're creating
the artistic parameters of the vision of their band, part
of that is like this anti whatever. I don't know
what their deal is. And then the second, the second
thing that I wanted to say is that I was
(24:34):
offered a lot of money for to do music for
a de Beer's ad early in my career, before it
was obvious what a shit talker I am or whatever,
And that was at least a down payment on a house,
Like my life could have been a lot better. So
(24:55):
I'll at least I get to talk about it on
your podcast.
Speaker 1 (24:59):
Yeah, did you end up doing it?
Speaker 2 (25:01):
Hell no?
Speaker 1 (25:03):
Fuck yeah cool.
Speaker 2 (25:04):
Buck No Yeah, oh no, I didn't get the house.
All I got to do is tell you that I
didn't do it.
Speaker 1 (25:12):
Hell yeah. Because that's like, that's like a good example of, like,
you know, there's a kind of a way of going
a little bit too far in both directions. You know,
you're like, yeah, if you can get away with it,
don't work for de beers, you know. But then like
I don't know, if you sell records and then use
the money to eat, I don't know, this would be
(25:34):
a great place to pivot to ads. But we don't
have to pivot to ads. But like, I mean, I
guess this whole thing about Crass is kind of a
reflection on the commercialism of art, and so one of
the things that they do is that they're basically always
playing benefits. Basically every show they play is a benefit show,
which is cool, and they like make amazing things happen
during their career. And at one point they're playing with
(25:54):
this band, the UK Subs, and then the UK Subs
played a song called All I Want to Know is
does She Suck? And so Kras was like, that song
is sexist, and so they storm the stage, pull the
singer off the stage in the middle of the show.
But then later they all sit down after the show,
they all sit down and talk about it, and the
(26:16):
person who wrote that song is like, this is the
context of why I wrote it, And they discussed the
lyrics at great length, and in the end they all
become friends.
Speaker 2 (26:24):
That makes me very happy. I'm trying to have room
for that kind of energy in my life right now.
Speaker 1 (26:31):
Yeah, because like, if you're going to kind of create
a vaguely puritanical scene, you need to not be complete
assholes about it. You need to be like, Okay, I
hear where you're coming from. But this is why we
think it isn't presenting a good you know, it's like
causing it. You know, it's a sexist thing to go
up and sing and like, you know, this is why
we have a problem with it. But I also think
it's cute that they ripped them off stage.
Speaker 2 (26:52):
Oh me too, makes me very happy that they pulled
them off the stage.
Speaker 1 (26:55):
Yeah, And so they didn't become a giant success over,
but they started building a fan base though in the
early years an awful lot of people headed for the
doors when they started playing. Although I get the impression
that that's kind of like a mystique that they're building up. Also,
I suspect it's true, but I suspect they're like playing
into that when they talk about it, especially since their
previous band was called Exit, because they were like, ha
(27:16):
ha haa, we're going to drive away all of our
listeners or whatever.
Speaker 2 (27:18):
You know. They're good at that.
Speaker 1 (27:21):
Yeah, I mean it clearly by sticking to what they
were doing. Yeah, they drove away a lot of listeners,
and then they brought in even more, you know. And
then geev ousher who's living in New York at this time,
she books them some shows in America, so they go
over and they loved New York, at least Steve did.
Steve talked about how he loved that there was cross
(27:41):
dressers everywhere, and there's vegetarian food everywhere, and the food
actually tasted good, which makes sense because I've eaten British food,
so I think that going to New York would be
a culinary revelation. And then they headed back to England
and Gee moved back to England with them. Basically, Ge
was getting more and more politically radical, and she was
getting tired of the feel good liberal vibe of the
(28:04):
New York Times and the New Yorker and her employers
in general, for example. And this was actually the final straw.
I believe there had been this homophobic attack in Central Park,
and so she did art for an article about it,
and it included two men kissing in her art, and
her boss got mad at her for including two men
kissing in this article about people being attacked, no homophobic attack,
(28:26):
and so she was like, you know what, fuck this
and quit, you know, commercial art, and moved to back
to London, into back into dial house and started a
plane and cross And at this point, around this point
when they get back from New York, they're like, are
(28:46):
we doing this? Like is this? Are we going to
take this seriously? And they all committed, and there's this
whole thing where like basically and there's people saying that
this didn't didn't happen there's a version of the story
where Penny was like, Hey, if we don't take this seriously,
I'm quitting and everyone was like, fine, then quit and
so he quit, and then a day later everyone was like, no,
(29:07):
let's take it seriously. You can come back, like and
at this point, this is when when women started the band,
including Eva Libertine, who's a mom and who's we were
talking about before as an amazing vocal style and just
like does really cool shit. And they Once women joined
the band, more women started coming to the show. But
(29:28):
as best as I can tell, the audience of punk
music overall was drifting further and further towards angry young
men instead of where it started as this like larger,
more inclusive, youth led subculture. And I feel like punk
has always had this like multiple sides to it, and
one of them is this like beautiful feminists, liberating movement,
(29:51):
and then there's this other part of it that's always
been at least since the you know, late seventies, early eighties,
like a angry young men are angry m hm. Around
this point, they actually banned the word kunt from their lyrics.
And this is kind of interesting to me because every
British person I've ever met has tried really hard to
(30:12):
convince me. I think they're right that the word kant
has very different connotations in the UK than it does
in the US.
Speaker 2 (30:18):
I love the word kunt.
Speaker 1 (30:20):
I know, it's such a yeah.
Speaker 2 (30:22):
I just think like I love it as as an
anti imperialist word in a way, because the other the
other terms, the like medical terms that we use for
for the genitalia are fucking Roman okay, huh. And then
the the English word gets turned into a swear word,
(30:46):
and I would say, I.
Speaker 1 (30:49):
Was is kunt The English word kant.
Speaker 2 (30:51):
Is an English word interesting and it's and it's a
venerable fucking word. It's it has the same root as kundalini, Okay.
So it is like you know, classic, like Indo European
ancient ass word, and it signifies the entire organ, unlike
(31:13):
the you know, the medical words which are you know
they are? They come from uh, from Rome, from Rome,
from the colonizing force. And that always happens, like colonized people,
their language gets turned into curse words.
Speaker 1 (31:32):
Yeah, even like when Finland is not well. Actually Finland
was a colonized space for a very long time, but
one of the Finnish course words Badcula is the name
of like and it's like meant to be sort of
like a word for satan, but it's just an old
pagan deity. Like it's not a bad word at all,
you know.
Speaker 2 (31:49):
Yeah, My a friend of mine is his mom is Filipino,
and he was saying like his mother's language was very crass,
and I was like, is it crass or is this
just like a colonized perspective.
Speaker 1 (32:03):
Yeah, no, that's that's interesting, and like I think it's
like such a good indicative of crass, the band being
like we're not gonna use the word cunt and songs
because we're doing feminism in the nineteen seventies and eighties.
And it's interesting because like again, like Kant has much
stronger negative like if you call someone a count in
(32:24):
the US, it's a very like strong thing to say,
and it it isn't as much that way in the UK.
And so I think that the best comparison is like
if they stopped using the word bitch in their.
Speaker 2 (32:36):
Lyrics exactly, yeah, I was gonna I was gonna.
Speaker 1 (32:39):
Call that yeah, yeah.
Speaker 2 (32:40):
But like in I think in Scotland or something where
somewhere over there they have a They're just like, there's
a cunt of lake.
Speaker 1 (32:48):
Oh hell yeah.
Speaker 2 (32:49):
So it's it's like you can see that, like it
did not have this kind of like very negative characterization
in the past. And also I've seen some etymology that
suggests that the word queen comes from the word cunt.
Speaker 1 (33:06):
That would rule, well, do you know who? I won't
call a bunch of cunts, because then I wouldn't have
a job anymore. It's our advertisers.
Speaker 2 (33:15):
It depends on whether or not you mean it as
an honorific.
Speaker 1 (33:18):
That's true. Why in that case that I wouldn't as
an honor You know what, sometimes some of our advertisers
are right. You know, sometimes we get the like go
walk in the woods more ads, and you know what,
here's a free one for go walk in the woods more.
It's nice, go walk in the woods more, especially right
now when they're all being destroyed by the current administrator. Anyway,
here's advertisers who have something to tell you.
Speaker 2 (33:48):
And we're back.
Speaker 1 (33:49):
And that was probably the most I've ever towed the
line wait towd the line is like it has like
two opposite meetings. The most I've ever been like, uh,
can I get away with this anyway?
Speaker 2 (34:01):
Sorry, we'll find out.
Speaker 1 (34:04):
So if there was a if there was an episode
where I should do that. And so the band Crass
has a whole mystique around them. No one individual was
under the spotlight. They were actually fairly anonymous, Like now
we kind of talk about all the individuals in the band,
but I'm under the impression that they didn't do that
as much. And I think they would usually sign things
as the band, like this is what Krass said, rather
(34:25):
than this is what G said or Penny said or whatever.
No one knew their names as far as I can tell,
for a long time, and they lived in some mysterious
house in the country, but the house was open and
people started camping there, going and hanging out. And then
they started a graffiti campaign, which political graffiti is as
(34:45):
old as politics and walls as far as I can tell.
But I think that they kicked off a lot of
the idea of stencil graffiti in the UK. And it
started with G and Penny going out every Saturday to
stencil basic slogans like fight war not wars.
Speaker 2 (35:00):
I was like, I love that one. It's really good.
Speaker 1 (35:02):
Yeah, yeah, it captures that militancy so well, right, because
you're like, no, we're going to fight something, but what
we're fighting is the concept of war, you know.
Speaker 2 (35:10):
And it's like all of this, the like going out
and like with their gorilla ad campaign, it really and
like the ability to like create this like beautiful slogan,
it's all. It all feeds back into thinking about them
as coming from commercial art.
Speaker 1 (35:29):
Oh my god, you're completely right. This is an advertising campaign,
but it's not, and it does promote the band, but
they are set up to not cash in on it.
They're set up to then use it to promote the ideas.
And so for eighteen months, every Saturday they would go
out and stencil until touring basically took up kind of
all of their time. But that point more people have
(35:50):
been doing it anyway, including as soon as they started
doing stenciling campaigns, a conservative Christian group started counter stenciling
to them, and they had this whole graffiti war, and
soon enough all kinds of groups were getting into stenciling.
And they put out their first album. They called it
a single, but I think this was like literally around
how they wanted to price it really cheap. It was
(36:11):
twelve songs, long, so a little bit long for a single,
and it was a twelve inch record called The Feeding
of the five Thousand. I love how they play with
all this sort of anti Christian imagery and lyrics constantly.
But the Feeding of the five Thousand is a reference
to when Jesus fed as many poor people as he could.
Speaker 2 (36:27):
I one thing I was trying to do in the
minutes between these episodes is come to an understanding of
Crass's theology.
Speaker 1 (36:39):
It is hard, have you come to conclusions because I
haven't read everything yet.
Speaker 2 (36:43):
But you were raised, you were raised Catholic? Is that right?
Speaker 1 (36:46):
Yeah?
Speaker 2 (36:47):
I was raised in uh. I was raised Jehovah's Witness, okay,
And like I never got baptized, I never drank the
kool aid and it's blood, yes, So I had to
(37:08):
That's so funny. I had to really grapple with theology
from a very young age, you know, because I was
I was just like presented with like this giant pile
of bullshit as a child. So and it was like
this language that I had to grapple with. So it's
(37:28):
it was really fun looking at their theology because it's
their stuff is so religious.
Speaker 1 (37:34):
Oh yeah, absolutely, yeah. I like that about it. I
like how they are playing with this. And when they
put out The Feeding of the five thousand, every other
album at the time was three ninety nine, and so
they made theirs one ninety nine, and to make sure
that shops wouldn't mark it up, they printed pay no
more than one ninety nine right on the sleeve.
Speaker 2 (37:57):
They must have lost money, right, so they didn't.
Speaker 1 (38:00):
On this first one. They actually occasionally do lose money
on their releases, but they basically like, we'll get into it.
And so they had a song on there called Reality Asylum,
and it was based on that pamphlet that Penny had written.
But this was the most blasphemous track on the album,
and the pressing plant refused to press the record because
it was so blasphemous. So they cut out Reality Asylum
(38:23):
and then replaced it with two minutes of silence shout
out John Cage, and they called that song the sound
of free Speech. Yeah, And they were able to sell
their records so cheap because they lived collectively. They grew
most of their own food, they didn't do a bunch
of drugs, they didn't stay at hotels while they were touring.
(38:43):
And then they like from their point of view, they
passed the savings onto the customer.
Speaker 2 (38:47):
And they knew how to cook beans.
Speaker 1 (38:50):
Yeah, you watch the young ones.
Speaker 2 (38:53):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (38:54):
And when I think whenever I think of the UK
people eating slop, I think of the guy, the hippie
guy with his lentils that he's always trying to feed everyone.
Speaker 2 (39:03):
That's too real. My lentils are really good.
Speaker 1 (39:07):
Though I believe it. I've probably even said this on
the air before, but my favorite name for punk cooking
is that when I stayed at a squad in Germany,
they called it rice mitchie rice with shit, and it
was just a stir fry of whatever shit you whatever
you've dumpstered or grown or stolen, and then rice.
Speaker 2 (39:28):
Rice mit chice.
Speaker 1 (39:29):
Yeah, hell yeah. I think they ate a lot of
rice mitche And I think that refusing to stay at
hotels and they also refused to have roadies. They carried
all of their own gear and stuff. It kind of
fucked them up a little bit and burned them out.
Speaker 2 (39:43):
I think, yeah, it's it's it's brutal. I have sometimes
I'll get a taxi to carry my gear sometimes between
you know whatever, between from place to place on tour,
and sometimes it's hard for me to justify it to myself,
but I just by myself, this is cheaper than the
body work, like if I if I rip a muscle
(40:06):
or whatever, or like, yeah, it's it's brutal. Carrying that
gear is brutal. I have friends who've broken toes from
dropping things on their feet. It's it's awful.
Speaker 1 (40:19):
Yeah, no, it it makes sense to me as someone
who's like I've before I ever toured on my own.
I like tour it as like a roadie and like
a merch girl or whatever.
Speaker 2 (40:27):
What is your tour with? Can you say? Are you
at liberty to say?
Speaker 1 (40:30):
Oh, yeah, a goth bank called Ego likeness, Okay, yeah,
I don't know them. Yeah, no, that's that's fair. Yeah.
And eventually I toured as their drummer, which was funny
because they called me to be like, hey, we you know,
our our guitarist left the band and we're about to
go on tour. And I was like, I'd love to
play guitar, and they were like, do you want to
play drums? And I was like, I'd love to play
(40:51):
key tar and they were like no, come be a drummer.
And so but it was a very dead simple drum set.
It was electronic drum, was just a kick and a
snare on pads, and I was basically a glorified stage dncer.
It was very fun.
Speaker 2 (41:05):
That sounds so fun. You're a stage dancer.
Speaker 1 (41:08):
Yeah, more or less. Yeah, I especially new because no,
I don't want to reveal their secrets. Okay, Anyway, so
they refuse to have roadies and they refuse to stay
at hotels and this fucked them up a little bit
and kind of burned them out. And they because they
they never got a good night's sleep and they were
all tired all the time while touring.
Speaker 2 (41:27):
Yeah, you need to stay in a goddamn hotel. I mean, yeah,
nah fucking Airbnb, but.
Speaker 1 (41:32):
You need a private space with beds.
Speaker 2 (41:34):
Yeah, you need to shut the door, you need to
like have some mental health.
Speaker 1 (41:39):
Yeah yeah.
Speaker 2 (41:41):
And I like, I've arrived at Airbnb's in the middle
of the night and there's like no toilet paper. So
that's one of the reasons why I'm like, no, I
want a real hotel that like knows what they're doing.
Speaker 1 (41:51):
Yeah. No, especially because like if your goal is just
to go there and sleep, a hotel is what works.
And like on this last book tour I went on.
I was I usually would go on tour and to
stay with people who book the shows and stuff like that,
or go camping and you know, my truck or whatever.
And then while I was on this tour, I was
just like, I am in my forties, and I am
so exhausted and I am so oversocialized that I don't
(42:13):
want to talk to anyone anymore. I would like to
go to a space where me and my dog, because
also had my dog with me, who's like kind of reactive,
and so I was like, I just need a controlled environment.
Now I'm done. I did my uncontrolled environment. But anyway,
your dog.
Speaker 2 (42:26):
Wants to sleep too. Your dog needs to sleep as well.
Speaker 1 (42:29):
Yeah, exactly, because he was protecting the car from all
the other cars all day. So and so, no matter
how big Crass got, they always would just stay at
people's houses. And since punks are super young, this meant
that they were often crashing at their fans' parents' houses.
And I love it because, like, hey, mom, can this
multimillion records selling anarchist punk fans stay on our living
(42:51):
room floor? They're all about your age, you know, Like
I love it.
Speaker 2 (42:56):
That's adorable.
Speaker 1 (42:58):
Yeah, and so they put out this record and it
was like the spiciest punk album yet to people. It
was full of cussing and blasphemy. It was also almost
specifically designed to be unable to be played on radio
because it was so full of curse words. And they
got an awful lot of negative reviews in the music press,
so they would print the negative reviews in their liner
(43:20):
notes or whatever their.
Speaker 2 (43:21):
Next thing was, that's lovely, and some of the.
Speaker 1 (43:25):
Negative reviews this kind of caught me by surprise. Some
of them were basically leftist political infighting because the UK
didn't have the same kind of red scare that the
US did, and so a huge chunk of the working
class and the intellectual class in the UK were leftists,
especially Trotskyists, people who like Lenin but not Stalin, and
(43:46):
you know, they don't like the worst excesses of state communism.
Speaker 2 (43:50):
So these leftist journalists were trotsky Ice and what did
they want to fight about?
Speaker 1 (43:54):
So they didn't like the fact that Crass didn't do
the traditional left stuff, and they weren't like trying to
build the right kind of like mass movement, and also
specifically Krass like wasn't fucking around with the traditional left.
They were anarchists and the traditional left didn't like them either,
and so the feeling was mutual. So the most influential
(44:16):
music journalist in the country at the time was a
Trotskyist named Gary Bushnell, and he was obsessed with how
much he hated Krass, which is part of what made
them so big. He constantly talked shit on them, and
that really helped Crass grow like the ultimate Yeah.
Speaker 2 (44:34):
That's glorious, Thank you for your service, Gary.
Speaker 1 (44:37):
Yeah. But as anarchists, Crass were kind of outsider anarchists,
although I'm going to complicate that in a moment when
I talk about one of their best friends, the band
Poison Girls. But eventually Crass is going to integrate, with
various degrees to the with the mainstream anarchist movement. But
they are coming from the outside. They are coming from
having kind of hit upon their own ideas of anarchism,
(45:00):
not from like bacun and reading groups. Steve Ignorant later
said quote, if you ask me I'm an anarchist, I
suppose it's the closest to what I believe. But I'm
not going to loads of bloody rallies or meetings or
to sit in a semicircle and chunder on about the
minor strike in Poland in nineteen eighteen or whatever, which
I both appreciate, but I also basically, if there was
(45:22):
a minor strike and Poland in nineteen eighteen, I'll probably
covered eventually on this show.
Speaker 2 (45:25):
So you're, yeah, the old history, the real history.
Speaker 1 (45:31):
Yeah, but I like, you know, he basically he was like,
I don't like the traditional anarchist culture that was around.
Speaker 2 (45:37):
Yeah he's and he's probably not like constitutionally suited for it.
And that's you know, and that should that should always
be fine. Like you know, diversity, diversity is strength.
Speaker 1 (45:50):
No, totally, absolutely, and their their biggest break with the
traditional anarchist culture was that they were pacifists. In a
weird way, you could say that Crass kind of developed
or popularized the modern idea of the lifestyle anarchist in
contrast to the revolutionary anarchist. But I hate this dichotomy
and I think it's bullshit, and I think the way
(46:10):
that you expressed it is what we should actually do,
which is diversity as our strength, and different people want
to do different types of organizing and living, and that
is great. Crass's main selling point was just their sincerity.
I mean also their songs were really fucking good. But
sincerity became basically the cultural currency of the anarcho punk
(46:31):
scene and the movement, honestly to kind of a problematic degree, right,
you could prove like I'm the most earnest, you know,
Krass for example, you called this earlier. Krass for example,
once put out a single that said pay no more
than forty five ps. So they lost money on every
record that they sold.
Speaker 2 (46:48):
Yeah, you got to look out for that.
Speaker 1 (46:51):
And so what they did is that after that they
hired a financial manager, which is where we started this conversation.
Speaker 2 (46:57):
Maybe it was smiled business manager, although those they were
a great firm that used to work for me. But
like basically all they did was they weren't super intimate
in the work. They were just kind of like making
sure I was ready to you know, pay taxes or
something like that.
Speaker 1 (47:17):
Yeah, no, I mean that makes sense. Crass also passed
up a lot of money because they wouldn't sell merch.
They would like, if you wrote them a letter, they'd
send you back like a one inch button or whatever
you had a beg for, But they didn't make shirts.
Speaker 2 (47:31):
I knew this guy who would talk about his new
record and he would say like, have you heard my
new T shirt?
Speaker 1 (47:40):
And so so Crass wouldn't sell T shirts even though
that's like where most of the money is at least
currently that and you know, ticket sales. So all the
T shirts were bootlegs. And after the nonsense with the
first album being censored, they started to start their own label,
Crass Records. They released the censored song as a single.
(48:00):
Talked for a while about arresting them for this very
blasphemous single, and Krass was investigated for a while, but
in the end the government was like, fuck, if we
arrest them for this, they'll just get more famous, and
so they dropped it. True, there was another super earnest
anarchist band worth mentioning here who was close friends with Krass.
It was called Poison Girls. Have you heard the Poison Girls?
Speaker 2 (48:21):
Have not?
Speaker 1 (48:23):
They were fronted by a middle aged housewife named Visa
Versa who started I think she was in her early
forties when she started this band, and that fucking rules.
Speaker 2 (48:36):
Yeah that's so wait, So how old was everybody else
in the band?
Speaker 1 (48:41):
So Kras were like mostly in their thirties and I
think Steve was like probably in his late teens early twenties,
and so they were like they were like half a
generation older. And then but V was like had kids,
and I mean so did Eve, but but yeah, Va
was a little bit older.
Speaker 2 (48:56):
So the front woman for Poison Girls was she started
in her forties, and then how old was the rest
of the band?
Speaker 1 (49:04):
I actually don't know that. I think they were a
little bit younger than her, because I know that some
of the Dial House people ended up playing in Poison Girls.
I actually did this thing where I kind of got sad,
where I was like, I almost wish I'd done this
entire thing about poisoned Girls instead. So I almost like
I did some research on Poison Girls, and then I
was like, oh, this is too much.
Speaker 2 (49:19):
You can do another thing on boys and girls sometime.
Speaker 1 (49:22):
It's true. And so V started Poison Girls independently actually
before Crass and I think seventy six, but then moved
it to a cottage near Dial House, and eventually Poison
Girls and Crass would play one hundred shows together, and
they were basically like they would really splits together. They
were like the two things, and it's just Crass is.
Speaker 2 (49:41):
More famous, but they're like twin bands.
Speaker 1 (49:44):
Yeah, totally. And what's interesting is there's all this stuff
about Crass being kind of outsider anarchists or whatever. Visa
versa is not visa versa from the Poison Girls comes
from the traditional anarchist movement. She had come up selling
anarchist newspapers on the street, a newspaper called Freedom, and
her partner in Baby Daddy was another anarchist activist guy.
(50:05):
So this is like, she does come from this. Krass
and the Poison Girls fit oddly into London punk In
some ways they were kind of the biggest and most
influential acts, but in other ways they were seen as
old and out of touch. Visubverse in particular, have kept
have to prove that she belonged there, because you will
be shocked to know that there was misogyny and agism
(50:26):
in the punk scene. I know this is gonna blow
you away with surprise, but oh, it's.
Speaker 2 (50:30):
Just it's perennially disgusting.
Speaker 1 (50:33):
Yeah, but yeah, so these are like old hippies living
in the countryside. What do they know about the like
London squatter punk scene, right? Is kind of the presentation that,
you know, is what people say when they're mad at
Crass and Poison Girls. And there's this huge squatter punk
scene by nineteen seventy nine, and Crass aren't in it,
but they were influential on it, and they constantly played
(50:55):
benefits for it. They actually stopped playing outside the UK
pretty early on. They played a show in Germany and
the German punks overturned a cop car and set it
on fire, and cops shut down the event, or rather
cops tried to shut down the show, but Kras was like, look,
if you shut down this show, all of the punks
(51:16):
who just set a cop car on fire are gonna
be like extra mad. And the cops were like, yeah,
you're right, and so they let them keep playing. It's
the kind of thing that doesn't happen in America as
far as they can tell. One time, years ago, I
was at a squad bar in Amsterdam and the old
barkeep was telling a story about a punk night where
cops had parked in front of the squat and then
(51:38):
gone somewhere else, and so then the drunk punks came
out and set the cop car on fire, and so
then all these cops came and my friend, the bartender
went out to negotiate with the cops, and the cops
were like, we're so sorry about that. It was a rookie,
he didn't know not to park in front of your bar.
It'll never happen again.
Speaker 2 (52:00):
That's adorable, I know, I know.
Speaker 1 (52:03):
And it also made me feel like I was a
never never Land because I was like, yeah, people go
to prison for a long time for that stuff in
the US, you know, there's currently a lot of people
in prison from twenty twenty for that. But in Germany,
when this thing happened, with this like sort of almost
riot happened, Krass like thought about this really hard, and
they were like, look, we're kind of role models. We
show up, we sing about anarchy, we sing about fighting
(52:25):
the police, and you know all this stuff. If we
play shows in people riot in the UK, we know
what to tell people, Like they would make pamphlets about
know your rights and how to make it through court
hearings and shit right, they would see it as their
responsibility on some level if their fans did something like that,
But what the fuck do we know about German law.
We don't know how to support people. So they decided
(52:46):
that if they couldn't help people handle the government repression.
They shouldn't be inspiring people to fight that government as directly,
and they stopped playing overseas, and this is I don't know,
that's interesting. That is admirable, is it? I don't know
if it's what, I don't know, it's just interesting.
Speaker 2 (53:04):
I like it.
Speaker 1 (53:05):
Yeah, these were some of the early days of punk
versus Nazi skinhead fights, and Krass actually didn't do the
Mostly the anarchist punks and stuff would just be like,
all right, we're going to fight all the Nazis. Crass
are like pacifists, and occasionally they would get into fist
fights to protect themselves or each other, but largely they
actually didn't try to kick skin heads out of their
shows and instead were like, oh, we should expose them
(53:27):
to anarchism, and we should expose them to pacifism and
we'll help change their ways. And the middling success they
succeeded sometimes, but I will say, from my point of view,
the biggest l of their career that I've been made
aware of is that there's this big Trotskyist versus Nazi
bral At a benefit show that they played, and Krass
later were like, the leftists are the red fascists basically
(53:50):
like both sides are bad or whatever. Look, I don't
like stay communism either, but when they are fighting the Nazis,
I'm on their side, you know.
Speaker 2 (53:58):
But whenever I was trying to understand some of the
things that Krass had said publicly, and some of it
was just pretty confusing or like badly reported on and
like including stuff about the Rock against Racism, I was
just like, it seemed very reverse world.
Speaker 1 (54:21):
And I don't know, no, I understand. That's how I
feel reading some of their stuff. I'm like, huh, everything
is different at different times in history, and people have
really different opinions despite this having the same labels as
each other. Yeah, And so they were seen as out
of touch for a while. And it's interesting because as
the world starts getting worse, Crass actually starts struggling with
(54:41):
their pacifism and starts taking on a more militant and
more traditionally anarchist line with certain things, because things are
about to get a lot worse. Specifically, in nineteen seventy nine,
a far right politician who was known to history as
quote the only bad Margaret came to power. I think
that's what people called her. I think people called her
(55:02):
the only bad Margaret. Her name was Margaret Thatcher, and
Thatcher wasn't the UK's Ronald Reagan. Reagan was the US's Thatcher.
Thatcher came into power and was like, I am going
to declare war on the leftist working class of the
United Kingdom. She hated unions, she would give raises to
cops that killed protesters. She agreed to host US nuclear
(55:25):
weapons in the UK, and, in a move that will
be quite familiar to modern listeners, she cozied up to
the middle class to get their votes by pretending to
support their interests. But in the end she only supported
the rich, and so punk starts becoming more of an
actual social movement in the Thatcher era. All of this
a couple years after punk had been declared quote dead
(55:46):
by the music press because it was no longer like
the hot new thing. Like basically like the music press is, like, oh,
punk was from seventy six to seventy eight, and then
it was done, and then like this supposedly dead thing
becomes an incredibly powerful social movement and aesthetic culture. But
as for what it did once it became a movement,
we're going to talk about that on Wednesday. Yeah, anything
(56:10):
you want to plug.
Speaker 2 (56:12):
I have a show coming up March sixth at the
Oddfellows in Bellingham and then Constellation in Chicago. Hell yeah
on March fifteenth.
Speaker 1 (56:23):
Hell yeam On March third, my book The Immortal Choir
Holds Every Voice goes to Kickstarter and I'm really excited
about it. And you're all probably tired of hearing me
say that, but you're going to have to hear it.
Actually you don't have to hear it. You can actually
hit stop now and then just start the next episode
and be fine. But instead you could hear me also
talk about how I work with an anarchist collective publisher
called Strangers in a Tangled Wilderness and you should check
(56:45):
us out at Tangled Wilderness dot org. If you give
us ten bucks a month, we'll send you a zine
every month anywhere in the world. We also put out
a bunch of podcasts and do a bunch of stuff,
and so you could check that out if you're like, wow,
I've this is the first time I've heard of an arco.
What does the collective make? Well, we make some stuff.
We'll see you on Wednesday. Cool people who did Cool
(57:13):
Stuff is a production of cool Zone Media. For more
podcasts on cool Zone Media, visit our website foolzonemedia dot com,
or check us out on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts,
or wherever you get your podcasts.
Cool Zone Media. Hello, and welcome to Cool People Who
Did Cool Stuff, your weekly podcast for things that I
think are cool? And who am I to decide what's cool?
I am a person, and every person gets to decide
what they think is cool. And these are the things
that I think is cool. But my name as a
person who is the arbiter of cool like everyone else
(00:23):
is Margaret Kiljoy. And my guest who's also officially the
arbiter of cool is Julie Holland.
Speaker 2 (00:31):
So awesome to be here, Thanks for having me.
Speaker 1 (00:34):
Yeah, we were talking right before we hit record about
how this isn't a new history podcast, this is an
old history podcast, because we were talking about being incapable
of remembering the word for news and calling it new history.
That's unrelated to anything.
Speaker 2 (00:51):
It's comforting. It's like, uh, we're all gonna die kind
of comforting phrase.
Speaker 1 (01:00):
Yeah, we're all literally writing history right now, including writing
the fact that we don't have a producer again today.
But we do have a producer, she's just not on
Mike and her name is Sophie, and our audio engineer
is Rory. Everyone has to say hi to Rory. Hi,
Rory Hi, riy And our theme music was written for
us by unwoman who's going to be in this week's episode.
(01:21):
In an aside, Hell yeah, but no one's going to
know what it's about, unless do you know me, in
which case do you already know the thing? But this
is part three of a four parter about the band Crass,
about a narco punk in general, and the fact that
(01:42):
we took two episodes to not even get to the
band Crass is because of the fact that punk and
its broader impact has had a broad You can tell
I'm off script here. I am entirely making this up,
so I should probably just start, well, wait, what if
people don't know who Jolie Holland is and they somehow
skipped to just now and didn't know, would they know
(02:05):
that you're a wait? We decided to sing a songwriter
sort of an annoying word.
Speaker 2 (02:09):
Well, I mean singer songwriter. Yeah, I'm a musician. Yeah.
I like that. Sometimes people don't know that being a
singer is being a musician, which is really funny.
Speaker 1 (02:20):
Yeah, that's weird because that's like, that's the part of
musicianists that I'm worse at is singing.
Speaker 2 (02:27):
I believe everybody can sing.
Speaker 1 (02:31):
I know I technically can make singing. I don't actually
hate my singing voice. I just have to I'm not
as trained at it as I would like to be.
But it wouldn't have affected me if I'd been an
avant garde or punk singer. That's not true. Actually, punk
singers are incredibly talented.
Speaker 2 (02:48):
Absolutely, I know. It's so much power. Yeah, yeah, I
had never consciously listened to Krass until we started this.
So here we are starting episode three, and I just
listened to a whole bunch of Crass and I think
they're amazing musicians. I just really enjoyed. Yeah, it's it's
(03:09):
really technically powerful.
Speaker 1 (03:12):
Yeah, and it's it changed, well, it changed a lot
musically and not just like I'm going to talk mostly
about its cultural and political impact because of my own
background and focuses. But like when you listen to a
bunch of crafts, you're like, oh, that's where that weird
part of punk that doesn't make any sense comes from.
Speaker 2 (03:30):
You know, absolutely, Yeah, I really heard that. I heard
the formativeness.
Speaker 1 (03:36):
Yeah. Well, where we last left our unlikely heroes, they
were doing a bunch of avant garde stuff and living
in a rented cottage outside of London called Dial House.
After their divorce because they got divorced even though they
never got married. Gee moved to New York City to
work as a commercial artist, doing work for the New
(03:56):
York Times and I think the New Yorker, and she
lived around the corner from seatgb's the Classic punk club,
and just a bunch of stories about those days and
hanging out with CBGB's punks and stuff. Meanwhile, back in London,
folks in the house were working as cover designers, and
at least Penny, at least is the only person who's
like jobs I knew. I was trying to figure out
(04:18):
whether they're all just like living on the dole or whatever.
Penny was doing book design, Penny was doing like some
sort of coal delivery or carrying. I think people were
heating their houses a coal and I think Penny was
delivering it and house painting and just having a bunch
of weird jobs. This is also oddly placed his Long
(04:40):
Dark Night of the Soul. Normally that would come near
the climax of the story, but his relationship has fallen
apart and everything seems to be ending, you know, this
whole end of this era, and so he spends a
while just kind of Usually this goes really badly, but
it works this time. He spends a while just like
drinking and complaining about Christianity in the kitchen. Oh yeah,
and that's like, that's like his thing for a while,
(05:01):
as he just sits around the kitchen table at this
communal house and screams about how Jesus should have run
away from the people who were killing him. And he
wrote a pamphlet called Reality Asylum, or I think it's
called Christ's Reality Asylum. And in case anyone's wondering, I
don't know how to spell the word asylum. Still. I
took me like eight times writing the script. But he
(05:25):
wrote this thing, and he was mad that Jesus hadn't
run away from his captors. He was mad that his
friend Wally hadn't either. He was just bitter, like all
the hippie love stuff is kind of fallen apart. And
so he decides to put out this piece, and he
asks his housemate Dave King to make a piece of
art for it, design a logo for it for the cover,
and so Dave King sits down and he sketches something
(05:48):
that we now know today as the crafts symbol, which
is a sort of a circle slash made out of
Ora Boris's against a cross. And this is one of
the better pieces of branding in history. Like Crass is
an anti corporate band, but the fact that they all
come from like graphic design backgrounds and they know about
(06:11):
commercial art shows this logo is part of what makes them.
I think it's somehow kind of esoteric and slightly disturbing.
Anything with radial symmetry is going to occasionally be mistaken
for a swastika, and the Crass logo is no different.
Have you seen the Crass logo of course.
Speaker 2 (06:28):
Yeah. And I just spoke with my friend Sarah Berlin Game,
who just got out of the State House in Wyoming today,
just while I was walking my dog, and she said
that they a bit of new history here. They just
allowed open Carrie in the schools. Maybe for the students,
(06:53):
I don't know. It's really upsetting, Okay, in Wyoming. In Wyoming,
she's a she's like a lgbt Q plus organizer with
white Wyoming equality and so tough, so badass, and uh yeah,
it's just shocking. But she said her the first love
(07:16):
of her life had a Crass tattoo, and he was
always telling people that it was not a swastika.
Speaker 1 (07:25):
Yeah that Yeah, that's gonna end up sometimes a problem
for them. And it's funny to me because I even
like often think things look like swastikas that aren't. I
have never looked at the cross logo and thought it's
a swastika, but I do know an awful lot of
people with the tattoo.
Speaker 2 (07:43):
It's it's a lot like the the Bad Religion image
kind of is a iteration of the cross image in
a way.
Speaker 1 (07:51):
Right, Yeah, isn't a circle circle slash through a cross
is bad religion?
Speaker 2 (07:55):
Yeah, it's like almost the same.
Speaker 1 (07:57):
Yeah, totally. Oh that's a that's a good point. Bad
Religions is much simpler. But you know, so they have
this logo and they don't know that it's going to
be the logo of Crass yet it's just the logo
for Christ's Reality Asylum, and they make pamphlets of it
and stuff and start distributing it. Well, I guess Penny does.
(08:19):
Punk is doing this thing, And in nineteen seventy seven
the whole house went to go see the clash. I
really like the idea that they had, Like House field
trips and they left and they were like, hey, this
is fucking cool. And then they saw the Slits and
they were like, oh, this is even more earnest, this
is even better. And also they were like the Clashes
was more technically competent than the Slits, let's say, and
(08:43):
so they were like, you know what, and they can
do it. Anyone can do it, we can do it.
It also helped that Joe Strummer from the Clash used
to challenge the audience to form their own bands at
the end of shows, which is fucking cool. That is
a cool thing to do, especially when you're like the
rock star band is to be like, no, we're not
better you. We could just everyone can do it, you know.
Speaker 2 (09:03):
Yeah. I think I think they somebody gave them that
advice before they started too. They're like, we really have
we want to start a band, but we feel like
we're not good enough, and I forget some big band
was like, no, you should just start.
Speaker 1 (09:18):
Hell, yeah, that's cool. I really like the Clash. About
half of Crass is like, uh, Clash is bad and sellouts,
and the other half of Crass is like, Clash is cool.
Speaker 2 (09:27):
Yeah. I saw I saw the track where it seemed
like they was trying to start beef with them.
Speaker 1 (09:32):
Yeah. They they do a lot of beef tracks. They
are uh dis tracks, that's the word, not not beef tracks.
I'm good at knowing new history.
Speaker 2 (09:44):
On new history. Yeah. They they seem very fighty.
Speaker 1 (09:48):
Yeah, and it's interesting because like the whole time that
they're a band, they're incredibly fighty with their like lyrics
and they're the stuff they do. But then like their
house is open and they're all peaceful and you can
just like come hang out, and like it was kind
of interesting. So they get home, they've seen the clash,
they've seen the slits, and there's this young punk who
had been hanging around the house because they're in their
(10:08):
thirties and they're not punks, right, And this guy named
Steve Ignorant was coming around, which is a good punk name.
He would come around because his older brother, who was
a hippie, used to take him there. And then young
Steve he was originally a skinhead. This is before skinhead
had racist connotations, and then after that he was glam
but then he was punk and he liked this house.
(10:30):
He's like in high school or whatever they call high
school over there, maybe they called high school, I don't know.
And he starts hanging out there more and more. He's
like skipping school to hang out at dial House, even
though the weird hippies wouldn't let him eat meat and
there was like no TV to watch or whatever, you know.
And so one day he shows up at dial House
and he's like, well, I want to start a band,
(10:51):
and Penny's like, yeah, sure, fuck it, all right, I'll
be your drummer. Let's start a band. And it was
a two piece at first. Steve would shout and Penny
would smash on the RUMs. And Penny wanted to call
it les font Terrible, the fucking surrealist fucking it's a
uh in font Terrible means the terrible children, and it's
(11:11):
a reference to some weird old artsy shit, a novel
by John Jean Cocteau, Whereas Steve wanted to call it Stormtrooper,
which is also not a very good name. But it's
interesting because Stormtrooper is a better name in terms of,
like it sounds like a punk band, but it's also
a terrible name because it's a literally a Nazi thing,
you know.
Speaker 2 (11:31):
Yeah, So then they ended.
Speaker 1 (11:33):
Up picking the name crass, which comes from a David
Bowie song Ziggy Stardust, in which there's a line that
says the kids were just crass. And soon enough there's
a bunch of them in this band. And this isn't
a music history podcast, and I'm not going to give
you the names of And I feel kind of almost
like a jerk about this, but I'm not going to
give you the names of like everyone in the band,
and like when they joined them, when they left, and
(11:55):
what instruments they played and all that stuff, because that
is extensively covered. So that's not what I'm gonna do.
Everyone in this band was important, and they really were
a collective, but there were a bunch of them, and
I would have a hard time crafting a narrative around
all seven or eight of them. At first they were
all men, and soon enough there's three women in the
(12:15):
band as well. They played their first show and they
pissed off the neighbors so much that the neighbors pulled
the plug on their show. And I think that that
is a good way to start a band. The reason
that I think that is that I once was in
an acoustic crass cover band, which you're making obviously that
would be amazing face but and it was called best
(12:38):
before eighteen eighty six, so is somehow a reference to
Haymarket and crass. And it was with my friend on
woman who did the theme music for this podcast, as
well as another friend who doesn't like when they're named
on air, so will not be And we got booked
to play. This is really gonna I'm gonna really impress everyone.
We got booked to play a steampunk convention in San Antonio, Texas,
(13:00):
and we were so bad that not only were we
kicked out of the bar where we played, the entire
convention was kicked out of the bar, even though they'd
booked it for a private event.
Speaker 2 (13:12):
That's incredible. And this is wait, this is an acoustic band.
Speaker 1 (13:16):
Yeah it was one one was playing cello, I was
playing accordion, and my friend was playing acoustic guitar.
Speaker 2 (13:23):
So wait, you were wait you were amplified right.
Speaker 1 (13:26):
No, no shit, no, we were just shouting loud as hell.
Speaker 2 (13:30):
Yeah, So that that is I'm deeply impressed. That's thank you,
that's that's that's another level. You got the convention kicked out.
Speaker 1 (13:41):
I know, I know, I was really impressed by that.
Uh No, one else was impressed by that. Everyone else
is upset by that.
Speaker 2 (13:49):
But you know, that's success, that's really success.
Speaker 1 (13:54):
Yeah. That was the only time we ever played. We
did not continue. We got booked to play that convention.
That was it.
Speaker 2 (14:03):
Wait was the name of the band again.
Speaker 1 (14:05):
Best before eighteen eighty six? Yeah, so soon enough Krass,
the actual Crass, not the brilliant derivative band Best before
eighteen eighty six. Soon enough, Krass developed their whole deal,
which was to wear all black like a uniform and
play in front of a bunch of political banners. Eventually
they start using projection from various like artsy films and
(14:28):
all kinds of imagery, and they use the big old
Crass logo banner and this is all really effective branding.
But for a long time, even though they were eventually
like the a narco punk band, a lot of people
saw them and were like, are these Nazis? And it
didn't help that they all wore red armbands.
Speaker 2 (14:46):
Oh lord, yeah, because everybody knew what Nazis were, and
people did not know what anarcho punks were.
Speaker 1 (14:55):
Well, because a narco punks weren't a thing yet, and
what's and what's fascinating about it is that they like
and they weren't like wearing like patches and stuff, right,
they were like wearing solid all black. And to this day,
like there's kind of a slight division in punk. It's
not named, but there's like a slight division where the
more Anarco you are, the more clean black, and the
(15:15):
more punk you are, the more color and like patched
up black, you know, but like punks wear a lot
of black, but like the like slightly cleaner Anarco look like.
I think this is the idea that punks just wear
all black comes from crass And what's fascinating is I
think they were doing it kind of to look a
(15:36):
little bit like fascists because and this is a thing
that like, Okay, the playing around with fascist imagery is
a thing that is hard to look at in retrospect.
But a lot of early punks were using this for
three different reasons, as best as I can tell, a
lot of people like Susie Sue, who has a kind
(15:57):
of racist named or band. Anyway, Susi Sue used swastikas
and stuff, and I believe is basically shock value. I'm
not an expert on Suzi Sue and then some people
were using swastikas and stuff because they were actually right wing,
and Krass never used swastikas, but they used this kind
of imagery, I believe, in a similar way to what
(16:18):
they were doing with their visual art, whereas like Crass's
like art is like close up photos of children on
fire and the horrors of war and mutilation and all
of this like edge Lord imagery, right, they were doing
it to be like, look, these are the horrors of
war that they're trying to hide from you. We're going
to put it in your face that war is bad.
Speaker 2 (16:40):
Yeah, this is the expression of empire that and we're
all living on the slightly cleaner side of it, but
this is the reality.
Speaker 1 (16:51):
Yeah, Like we're going to show you the shit that
is being done in the rest of the empire here
in the colonial center, you know. And so I think
that they are sort of playing around with like edgy
uniforms and like being like kind of fashy in some
of their fashion comes from that, like that desire, whereas
like these days, most of the time when people dress
(17:15):
up fascy, it's just bad, you know, Yeah, I.
Speaker 2 (17:18):
Mean it's also it also seems like it could be
read as just an expression of militancy totally.
Speaker 1 (17:25):
Yeah, And then it's like kind of fun and interesting
because they are like pacifists from the go, but they
are like loud and angry pacifists in a way that
like you don't see a lot of these days. You know, Yeah,
there's a oh I haven't read it, but there's a
book that someone I know wrote called a pacifismin What
(17:46):
it Used to be. Oh no, non violent ain't what
it used to be anyway. So Crass is starting to play,
and they didn't have advertisers cutting into the middle of
their shows. They just didn't. They were really that is
a thing that they were against. But that's fifty years
ago and things are different. Sometimes advertisers come right now
(18:16):
and we're back. So Crass is starting to play and
they're not like a tight professional band for a very
long time. They actually start getting more and more like
technically competent or whatever, but they've never prioritized like clean
production or technical mastery of their instruments. There's a lot
of like some of the people from Krass talking about
how they had sometimes had trouble at other shows because
afterwards all the other musicians would like want a jam
(18:37):
or something, and they're like, I know how to play
the three chords that are in my song.
Speaker 2 (18:41):
Yeah, I know how to play the songs that I
wrote and not not anything else. Yeah, which I love that.
I really appreciate those kind of musicians.
Speaker 1 (18:50):
I appreciate it because I am literally that kind of person.
I cannot I love playing piano. I play piano. It
was like my main happy place. I cannot play a
piano song and write. I barely know how to read music,
and I like write music, and I feel like a
jerk because then people are like, oh, let's Jim, and
I'm like, I no, No, I kind of can if
someone tells me what key we're in, I can do it.
(19:12):
But anyway, there's a part of why I like Crassis. Yeah,
they prioritize their overall aesthetic and they prioritize political messaging.
But they did write some fucking bangers right out of
the gate. Their main issues included feminism and the peace movement.
One of their first songs is one of their classics.
I think it's like the second song they wrote. It's
(19:33):
called do They Owe Us a Living? And the chorus
is do they owe us a living. Of course they do.
Of course they fucking do. And it's just this like angry,
like no society needs to take care of people.
Speaker 2 (19:45):
Yeah. I just went and went by my friend Jessica
Kinney's house and she comes walking down her hill and
she's she's a old punk and I had told her
that we were doing this and uh huh, she comes
walking down our hill. She's screaming that song at me.
Speaker 1 (20:06):
Hell yeah, the song is fucking good. And there's a
punk club in London at this time called the Roxy.
And I think this part's actually important. It grew out
of a gay club and Crass played there twice, the
second and last time they ever played there. Is it
still in their very early stages, they were too drunk
(20:27):
to play, possibly too high to play, but I've like
read one thing that's too high to play. But overall
I read that they kind of didn't do drugs, so
at the very least they were too drunk to play,
and they made such a shit show of it that
they got banned from the Roxy, which is why they
wrote a song called Band from the Roxy.
Speaker 2 (20:45):
When I read the lyrics, it seemed to imply that,
like they were too cool, for the roxy, but they
just couldn't they couldn't make it happen on stage. It
sounds like.
Speaker 1 (20:57):
Yeah, basically like I've read a couple of different takes
of it, but it was like they went up and
they were too drunk, and so the club was like,
get the fuck off stage, and they were like no.
And then eventually the band was like, fine, you can
finish your set, but your fucking band. And then afterwards
they decided even though they were like, oh, we were
(21:18):
unjustly banned or whatever, and you know, they were like, hey,
maybe we shouldn't get so drunk before we play anymore.
Like you can have like a beer or two before
you play. That's the that's the new rules in Crass
is we don't want to be too drunk to play,
which is important. It's like a funny I see the
like as a musician, you're like, okay, like, especially when
(21:38):
you're first starting or something, you're like, you know, a
drink might help loosen you up to be a little
bit less nervous on stage, but it gets real, real bad,
real quickly.
Speaker 2 (21:48):
Yeah, it doesn't doesn't do anything for me.
Speaker 1 (21:50):
Yeah, but.
Speaker 2 (21:52):
Yeah, so it's nice to having The writer is nice
to share with friends, if if people whatever that you
want to.
Speaker 1 (22:01):
Say, like to give drink tickets and drinks or whatever
to your friends.
Speaker 2 (22:03):
And yourself to hang out in the hang out in
the dressing room and then drink some tequila.
Speaker 1 (22:09):
Yeah, fair enough. I think by the end of Crass,
I think only Steve Ignorant was drinking at all. And
at Dial House there was almost no drinking and almost
no drug use. And part of that was strategic cops
like came by to raid and search and knock and
talk to them like all the time. And you don't
(22:31):
want a bunch of drugs at your anarchy house. That's
a general.
Speaker 2 (22:35):
Rule, absolutely not. It's yeah, especially yeah, if you look
really cool, other people are gonna notice.
Speaker 1 (22:42):
Yeah, And they eventually become like too serious for drinking
and drugs or whatever. And they are they're such good
kill joys. They are like the archtypical like yeah.
Speaker 2 (22:57):
They really are.
Speaker 1 (22:58):
Yeah, and kind of negative way as well, Like a
lot of the stuff you read retrospectively about Krass is like, oh,
basically they kind of created a puritanical scene, and they
they built kind of this politically pure scene. This is
their weakness and their strength for example, there was this
Rock against Racism movement that I brought up last time.
(23:19):
It's all these big concerts happening in London, pretty much
in a response to Eric Clapton's wild unhinged racist rant.
And Krass played Rock Against Racism once and then they
decided not to again because they were so offended that
they were offered money to play for it. Come on,
they are like, you know, they we stand on the
(23:42):
shoulders of giants. You know, they like offered a really
important critique of the music industry, but like people need
to eat food on a regular basis.
Speaker 2 (23:52):
Yeah, for real, I'm gonna take this moment to Okay,
Well two thoughts. Okay, Number one, they're commercial artists. Why
how what's going on? Like they already they're already, but
I guess they're like that's somebody else's job, you know
(24:13):
that they're working on. So like like if they're creating
the artistic parameters of the vision of their band, part
of that is like this anti whatever. I don't know
what their deal is. And then the second, the second
thing that I wanted to say is that I was
(24:34):
offered a lot of money for to do music for
a de Beer's ad early in my career, before it
was obvious what a shit talker I am or whatever,
And that was at least a down payment on a house,
Like my life could have been a lot better. So
(24:55):
I'll at least I get to talk about it on
your podcast.
Speaker 1 (24:59):
Yeah, did you end up doing it?
Speaker 2 (25:01):
Hell no?
Speaker 1 (25:03):
Fuck yeah cool.
Speaker 2 (25:04):
Buck No Yeah, oh no, I didn't get the house.
All I got to do is tell you that I
didn't do it.
Speaker 1 (25:12):
Hell yeah. Because that's like, that's like a good example of, like,
you know, there's a kind of a way of going
a little bit too far in both directions. You know,
you're like, yeah, if you can get away with it,
don't work for de beers, you know. But then like
I don't know, if you sell records and then use
the money to eat, I don't know, this would be
(25:34):
a great place to pivot to ads. But we don't
have to pivot to ads. But like, I mean, I
guess this whole thing about Crass is kind of a
reflection on the commercialism of art, and so one of
the things that they do is that they're basically always
playing benefits. Basically every show they play is a benefit show,
which is cool, and they like make amazing things happen
during their career. And at one point they're playing with
(25:54):
this band, the UK Subs, and then the UK Subs
played a song called All I Want to Know is
does She Suck? And so Kras was like, that song
is sexist, and so they storm the stage, pull the
singer off the stage in the middle of the show.
But then later they all sit down after the show,
they all sit down and talk about it, and the
(26:16):
person who wrote that song is like, this is the
context of why I wrote it, And they discussed the
lyrics at great length, and in the end they all
become friends.
Speaker 2 (26:24):
That makes me very happy. I'm trying to have room
for that kind of energy in my life right now.
Speaker 1 (26:31):
Yeah, because like, if you're going to kind of create
a vaguely puritanical scene, you need to not be complete
assholes about it. You need to be like, Okay, I
hear where you're coming from. But this is why we
think it isn't presenting a good you know, it's like
causing it. You know, it's a sexist thing to go
up and sing and like, you know, this is why
we have a problem with it. But I also think
it's cute that they ripped them off stage.
Speaker 2 (26:52):
Oh me too, makes me very happy that they pulled
them off the stage.
Speaker 1 (26:55):
Yeah, And so they didn't become a giant success over,
but they started building a fan base though in the
early years an awful lot of people headed for the
doors when they started playing. Although I get the impression
that that's kind of like a mystique that they're building up. Also,
I suspect it's true, but I suspect they're like playing
into that when they talk about it, especially since their
previous band was called Exit, because they were like, ha
(27:16):
ha haa, we're going to drive away all of our
listeners or whatever.
Speaker 2 (27:18):
You know. They're good at that.
Speaker 1 (27:21):
Yeah, I mean it clearly by sticking to what they
were doing. Yeah, they drove away a lot of listeners,
and then they brought in even more, you know. And
then geev ousher who's living in New York at this time,
she books them some shows in America, so they go
over and they loved New York, at least Steve did.
Steve talked about how he loved that there was cross
(27:41):
dressers everywhere, and there's vegetarian food everywhere, and the food
actually tasted good, which makes sense because I've eaten British food,
so I think that going to New York would be
a culinary revelation. And then they headed back to England
and Gee moved back to England with them. Basically, Ge
was getting more and more politically radical, and she was
getting tired of the feel good liberal vibe of the
(28:04):
New York Times and the New Yorker and her employers
in general, for example. And this was actually the final straw.
I believe there had been this homophobic attack in Central Park,
and so she did art for an article about it,
and it included two men kissing in her art, and
her boss got mad at her for including two men
kissing in this article about people being attacked, no homophobic attack,
(28:26):
and so she was like, you know what, fuck this
and quit, you know, commercial art, and moved to back
to London, into back into dial house and started a
plane and cross And at this point, around this point
when they get back from New York, they're like, are
(28:46):
we doing this? Like is this? Are we going to
take this seriously? And they all committed, and there's this
whole thing where like basically and there's people saying that
this didn't didn't happen there's a version of the story
where Penny was like, Hey, if we don't take this seriously,
I'm quitting and everyone was like, fine, then quit and
so he quit, and then a day later everyone was like, no,
(29:07):
let's take it seriously. You can come back, like and
at this point, this is when when women started the band,
including Eva Libertine, who's a mom and who's we were
talking about before as an amazing vocal style and just
like does really cool shit. And they Once women joined
the band, more women started coming to the show. But
(29:28):
as best as I can tell, the audience of punk
music overall was drifting further and further towards angry young
men instead of where it started as this like larger,
more inclusive, youth led subculture. And I feel like punk
has always had this like multiple sides to it, and
one of them is this like beautiful feminists, liberating movement,
(29:51):
and then there's this other part of it that's always
been at least since the you know, late seventies, early eighties,
like a angry young men are angry m hm. Around
this point, they actually banned the word kunt from their lyrics.
And this is kind of interesting to me because every
British person I've ever met has tried really hard to
(30:12):
convince me. I think they're right that the word kant
has very different connotations in the UK than it does
in the US.
Speaker 2 (30:18):
I love the word kunt.
Speaker 1 (30:20):
I know, it's such a yeah.
Speaker 2 (30:22):
I just think like I love it as as an
anti imperialist word in a way, because the other the
other terms, the like medical terms that we use for
for the genitalia are fucking Roman okay, huh. And then
the the English word gets turned into a swear word,
(30:46):
and I would say, I.
Speaker 1 (30:49):
Was is kunt The English word kant.
Speaker 2 (30:51):
Is an English word interesting and it's and it's a
venerable fucking word. It's it has the same root as kundalini, Okay.
So it is like you know, classic, like Indo European
ancient ass word, and it signifies the entire organ, unlike
(31:13):
the you know, the medical words which are you know
they are? They come from uh, from Rome, from Rome,
from the colonizing force. And that always happens, like colonized people,
their language gets turned into curse words.
Speaker 1 (31:32):
Yeah, even like when Finland is not well. Actually Finland
was a colonized space for a very long time, but
one of the Finnish course words Badcula is the name
of like and it's like meant to be sort of
like a word for satan, but it's just an old
pagan deity. Like it's not a bad word at all,
you know.
Speaker 2 (31:49):
Yeah, My a friend of mine is his mom is Filipino,
and he was saying like his mother's language was very crass,
and I was like, is it crass or is this
just like a colonized perspective.
Speaker 1 (32:03):
Yeah, no, that's that's interesting, and like I think it's
like such a good indicative of crass, the band being
like we're not gonna use the word cunt and songs
because we're doing feminism in the nineteen seventies and eighties.
And it's interesting because like again, like Kant has much
stronger negative like if you call someone a count in
(32:24):
the US, it's a very like strong thing to say,
and it it isn't as much that way in the UK.
And so I think that the best comparison is like
if they stopped using the word bitch in their.
Speaker 2 (32:36):
Lyrics exactly, yeah, I was gonna I was gonna.
Speaker 1 (32:39):
Call that yeah, yeah.
Speaker 2 (32:40):
But like in I think in Scotland or something where
somewhere over there they have a They're just like, there's
a cunt of lake.
Speaker 1 (32:48):
Oh hell yeah.
Speaker 2 (32:49):
So it's it's like you can see that, like it
did not have this kind of like very negative characterization
in the past. And also I've seen some etymology that
suggests that the word queen comes from the word cunt.
Speaker 1 (33:06):
That would rule, well, do you know who? I won't
call a bunch of cunts, because then I wouldn't have
a job anymore. It's our advertisers.
Speaker 2 (33:15):
It depends on whether or not you mean it as
an honorific.
Speaker 1 (33:18):
That's true. Why in that case that I wouldn't as
an honor You know what, sometimes some of our advertisers
are right. You know, sometimes we get the like go
walk in the woods more ads, and you know what,
here's a free one for go walk in the woods more.
It's nice, go walk in the woods more, especially right
now when they're all being destroyed by the current administrator. Anyway,
here's advertisers who have something to tell you.
Speaker 2 (33:48):
And we're back.
Speaker 1 (33:49):
And that was probably the most I've ever towed the
line wait towd the line is like it has like
two opposite meetings. The most I've ever been like, uh,
can I get away with this anyway?
Speaker 2 (34:01):
Sorry, we'll find out.
Speaker 1 (34:04):
So if there was a if there was an episode
where I should do that. And so the band Crass
has a whole mystique around them. No one individual was
under the spotlight. They were actually fairly anonymous, Like now
we kind of talk about all the individuals in the band,
but I'm under the impression that they didn't do that
as much. And I think they would usually sign things
as the band, like this is what Krass said, rather
(34:25):
than this is what G said or Penny said or whatever.
No one knew their names as far as I can tell,
for a long time, and they lived in some mysterious
house in the country, but the house was open and
people started camping there, going and hanging out. And then
they started a graffiti campaign, which political graffiti is as
(34:45):
old as politics and walls as far as I can tell.
But I think that they kicked off a lot of
the idea of stencil graffiti in the UK. And it
started with G and Penny going out every Saturday to
stencil basic slogans like fight war not wars.
Speaker 2 (35:00):
I was like, I love that one. It's really good.
Speaker 1 (35:02):
Yeah, yeah, it captures that militancy so well, right, because
you're like, no, we're going to fight something, but what
we're fighting is the concept of war, you know.
Speaker 2 (35:10):
And it's like all of this, the like going out
and like with their gorilla ad campaign, it really and
like the ability to like create this like beautiful slogan,
it's all. It all feeds back into thinking about them
as coming from commercial art.
Speaker 1 (35:29):
Oh my god, you're completely right. This is an advertising campaign,
but it's not, and it does promote the band, but
they are set up to not cash in on it.
They're set up to then use it to promote the ideas.
And so for eighteen months, every Saturday they would go
out and stencil until touring basically took up kind of
all of their time. But that point more people have
(35:50):
been doing it anyway, including as soon as they started
doing stenciling campaigns, a conservative Christian group started counter stenciling
to them, and they had this whole graffiti war, and
soon enough all kinds of groups were getting into stenciling.
And they put out their first album. They called it
a single, but I think this was like literally around
how they wanted to price it really cheap. It was
(36:11):
twelve songs, long, so a little bit long for a single,
and it was a twelve inch record called The Feeding
of the five Thousand. I love how they play with
all this sort of anti Christian imagery and lyrics constantly.
But the Feeding of the five Thousand is a reference
to when Jesus fed as many poor people as he could.
Speaker 2 (36:27):
I one thing I was trying to do in the
minutes between these episodes is come to an understanding of
Crass's theology.
Speaker 1 (36:39):
It is hard, have you come to conclusions because I
haven't read everything yet.
Speaker 2 (36:43):
But you were raised, you were raised Catholic? Is that right?
Speaker 1 (36:46):
Yeah?
Speaker 2 (36:47):
I was raised in uh. I was raised Jehovah's Witness, okay,
And like I never got baptized, I never drank the
kool aid and it's blood, yes, So I had to
(37:08):
That's so funny. I had to really grapple with theology
from a very young age, you know, because I was
I was just like presented with like this giant pile
of bullshit as a child. So and it was like
this language that I had to grapple with. So it's
(37:28):
it was really fun looking at their theology because it's
their stuff is so religious.
Speaker 1 (37:34):
Oh yeah, absolutely, yeah. I like that about it. I
like how they are playing with this. And when they
put out The Feeding of the five thousand, every other
album at the time was three ninety nine, and so
they made theirs one ninety nine, and to make sure
that shops wouldn't mark it up, they printed pay no
more than one ninety nine right on the sleeve.
Speaker 2 (37:57):
They must have lost money, right, so they didn't.
Speaker 1 (38:00):
On this first one. They actually occasionally do lose money
on their releases, but they basically like, we'll get into it.
And so they had a song on there called Reality Asylum,
and it was based on that pamphlet that Penny had written.
But this was the most blasphemous track on the album,
and the pressing plant refused to press the record because
it was so blasphemous. So they cut out Reality Asylum
(38:23):
and then replaced it with two minutes of silence shout
out John Cage, and they called that song the sound
of free Speech. Yeah, And they were able to sell
their records so cheap because they lived collectively. They grew
most of their own food, they didn't do a bunch
of drugs, they didn't stay at hotels while they were touring.
(38:43):
And then they like from their point of view, they
passed the savings onto the customer.
Speaker 2 (38:47):
And they knew how to cook beans.
Speaker 1 (38:50):
Yeah, you watch the young ones.
Speaker 2 (38:53):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (38:54):
And when I think whenever I think of the UK
people eating slop, I think of the guy, the hippie
guy with his lentils that he's always trying to feed everyone.
Speaker 2 (39:03):
That's too real. My lentils are really good.
Speaker 1 (39:07):
Though I believe it. I've probably even said this on
the air before, but my favorite name for punk cooking
is that when I stayed at a squad in Germany,
they called it rice mitchie rice with shit, and it
was just a stir fry of whatever shit you whatever
you've dumpstered or grown or stolen, and then rice.
Speaker 2 (39:28):
Rice mit chice.
Speaker 1 (39:29):
Yeah, hell yeah. I think they ate a lot of
rice mitche And I think that refusing to stay at
hotels and they also refused to have roadies. They carried
all of their own gear and stuff. It kind of
fucked them up a little bit and burned them out.
Speaker 2 (39:43):
I think, yeah, it's it's it's brutal. I have sometimes
I'll get a taxi to carry my gear sometimes between
you know whatever, between from place to place on tour,
and sometimes it's hard for me to justify it to myself,
but I just by myself, this is cheaper than the
body work, like if I if I rip a muscle
(40:06):
or whatever, or like, yeah, it's it's brutal. Carrying that
gear is brutal. I have friends who've broken toes from
dropping things on their feet. It's it's awful.
Speaker 1 (40:19):
Yeah, no, it it makes sense to me as someone
who's like I've before I ever toured on my own.
I like tour it as like a roadie and like
a merch girl or whatever.
Speaker 2 (40:27):
What is your tour with? Can you say? Are you
at liberty to say?
Speaker 1 (40:30):
Oh, yeah, a goth bank called Ego likeness, Okay, yeah,
I don't know them. Yeah, no, that's that's fair. Yeah.
And eventually I toured as their drummer, which was funny
because they called me to be like, hey, we you know,
our our guitarist left the band and we're about to
go on tour. And I was like, I'd love to
play guitar, and they were like, do you want to
play drums? And I was like, I'd love to play
(40:51):
key tar and they were like no, come be a drummer.
And so but it was a very dead simple drum set.
It was electronic drum, was just a kick and a
snare on pads, and I was basically a glorified stage dncer.
It was very fun.
Speaker 2 (41:05):
That sounds so fun. You're a stage dancer.
Speaker 1 (41:08):
Yeah, more or less. Yeah, I especially new because no,
I don't want to reveal their secrets. Okay, Anyway, so
they refuse to have roadies and they refuse to stay
at hotels and this fucked them up a little bit
and kind of burned them out. And they because they
they never got a good night's sleep and they were
all tired all the time while touring.
Speaker 2 (41:27):
Yeah, you need to stay in a goddamn hotel. I mean, yeah,
nah fucking Airbnb, but.
Speaker 1 (41:32):
You need a private space with beds.
Speaker 2 (41:34):
Yeah, you need to shut the door, you need to
like have some mental health.
Speaker 1 (41:39):
Yeah yeah.
Speaker 2 (41:41):
And I like, I've arrived at Airbnb's in the middle
of the night and there's like no toilet paper. So
that's one of the reasons why I'm like, no, I
want a real hotel that like knows what they're doing.
Speaker 1 (41:51):
Yeah. No, especially because like if your goal is just
to go there and sleep, a hotel is what works.
And like on this last book tour I went on.
I was I usually would go on tour and to
stay with people who book the shows and stuff like that,
or go camping and you know, my truck or whatever.
And then while I was on this tour, I was
just like, I am in my forties, and I am
so exhausted and I am so oversocialized that I don't
(42:13):
want to talk to anyone anymore. I would like to
go to a space where me and my dog, because
also had my dog with me, who's like kind of reactive,
and so I was like, I just need a controlled environment.
Now I'm done. I did my uncontrolled environment. But anyway,
your dog.
Speaker 2 (42:26):
Wants to sleep too. Your dog needs to sleep as well.
Speaker 1 (42:29):
Yeah, exactly, because he was protecting the car from all
the other cars all day. So and so, no matter
how big Crass got, they always would just stay at
people's houses. And since punks are super young, this meant
that they were often crashing at their fans' parents' houses.
And I love it because, like, hey, mom, can this
multimillion records selling anarchist punk fans stay on our living
(42:51):
room floor? They're all about your age, you know, Like
I love it.
Speaker 2 (42:56):
That's adorable.
Speaker 1 (42:58):
Yeah, and so they put out this record and it
was like the spiciest punk album yet to people. It
was full of cussing and blasphemy. It was also almost
specifically designed to be unable to be played on radio
because it was so full of curse words. And they
got an awful lot of negative reviews in the music press,
so they would print the negative reviews in their liner
(43:20):
notes or whatever their.
Speaker 2 (43:21):
Next thing was, that's lovely, and some of the.
Speaker 1 (43:25):
Negative reviews this kind of caught me by surprise. Some
of them were basically leftist political infighting because the UK
didn't have the same kind of red scare that the
US did, and so a huge chunk of the working
class and the intellectual class in the UK were leftists,
especially Trotskyists, people who like Lenin but not Stalin, and
(43:46):
you know, they don't like the worst excesses of state communism.
Speaker 2 (43:50):
So these leftist journalists were trotsky Ice and what did
they want to fight about?
Speaker 1 (43:54):
So they didn't like the fact that Crass didn't do
the traditional left stuff, and they weren't like trying to
build the right kind of like mass movement, and also
specifically Krass like wasn't fucking around with the traditional left.
They were anarchists and the traditional left didn't like them either,
and so the feeling was mutual. So the most influential
(44:16):
music journalist in the country at the time was a
Trotskyist named Gary Bushnell, and he was obsessed with how
much he hated Krass, which is part of what made
them so big. He constantly talked shit on them, and
that really helped Crass grow like the ultimate Yeah.
Speaker 2 (44:34):
That's glorious, Thank you for your service, Gary.
Speaker 1 (44:37):
Yeah. But as anarchists, Crass were kind of outsider anarchists,
although I'm going to complicate that in a moment when
I talk about one of their best friends, the band
Poison Girls. But eventually Crass is going to integrate, with
various degrees to the with the mainstream anarchist movement. But
they are coming from the outside. They are coming from
having kind of hit upon their own ideas of anarchism,
(45:00):
not from like bacun and reading groups. Steve Ignorant later
said quote, if you ask me I'm an anarchist, I
suppose it's the closest to what I believe. But I'm
not going to loads of bloody rallies or meetings or
to sit in a semicircle and chunder on about the
minor strike in Poland in nineteen eighteen or whatever, which
I both appreciate, but I also basically, if there was
(45:22):
a minor strike and Poland in nineteen eighteen, I'll probably
covered eventually on this show.
Speaker 2 (45:25):
So you're, yeah, the old history, the real history.
Speaker 1 (45:31):
Yeah, but I like, you know, he basically he was like,
I don't like the traditional anarchist culture that was around.
Speaker 2 (45:37):
Yeah he's and he's probably not like constitutionally suited for it.
And that's you know, and that should that should always
be fine. Like you know, diversity, diversity is strength.
Speaker 1 (45:50):
No, totally, absolutely, and their their biggest break with the
traditional anarchist culture was that they were pacifists. In a
weird way, you could say that Crass kind of developed
or popularized the modern idea of the lifestyle anarchist in
contrast to the revolutionary anarchist. But I hate this dichotomy
and I think it's bullshit, and I think the way
(46:10):
that you expressed it is what we should actually do,
which is diversity as our strength, and different people want
to do different types of organizing and living, and that
is great. Crass's main selling point was just their sincerity.
I mean also their songs were really fucking good. But
sincerity became basically the cultural currency of the anarcho punk
(46:31):
scene and the movement, honestly to kind of a problematic degree, right,
you could prove like I'm the most earnest, you know,
Krass for example, you called this earlier. Krass for example,
once put out a single that said pay no more
than forty five ps. So they lost money on every
record that they sold.
Speaker 2 (46:48):
Yeah, you got to look out for that.
Speaker 1 (46:51):
And so what they did is that after that they
hired a financial manager, which is where we started this conversation.
Speaker 2 (46:57):
Maybe it was smiled business manager, although those they were
a great firm that used to work for me. But
like basically all they did was they weren't super intimate
in the work. They were just kind of like making
sure I was ready to you know, pay taxes or
something like that.
Speaker 1 (47:17):
Yeah, no, I mean that makes sense. Crass also passed
up a lot of money because they wouldn't sell merch.
They would like, if you wrote them a letter, they'd
send you back like a one inch button or whatever
you had a beg for, But they didn't make shirts.
Speaker 2 (47:31):
I knew this guy who would talk about his new
record and he would say like, have you heard my
new T shirt?
Speaker 1 (47:40):
And so so Crass wouldn't sell T shirts even though
that's like where most of the money is at least
currently that and you know, ticket sales. So all the
T shirts were bootlegs. And after the nonsense with the
first album being censored, they started to start their own label,
Crass Records. They released the censored song as a single.
(48:00):
Talked for a while about arresting them for this very
blasphemous single, and Krass was investigated for a while, but
in the end the government was like, fuck, if we
arrest them for this, they'll just get more famous, and
so they dropped it. True, there was another super earnest
anarchist band worth mentioning here who was close friends with Krass.
It was called Poison Girls. Have you heard the Poison Girls?
Speaker 2 (48:21):
Have not?
Speaker 1 (48:23):
They were fronted by a middle aged housewife named Visa
Versa who started I think she was in her early
forties when she started this band, and that fucking rules.
Speaker 2 (48:36):
Yeah that's so wait, So how old was everybody else
in the band?
Speaker 1 (48:41):
So Kras were like mostly in their thirties and I
think Steve was like probably in his late teens early twenties,
and so they were like they were like half a
generation older. And then but V was like had kids,
and I mean so did Eve, but but yeah, Va
was a little bit older.
Speaker 2 (48:56):
So the front woman for Poison Girls was she started
in her forties, and then how old was the rest
of the band?
Speaker 1 (49:04):
I actually don't know that. I think they were a
little bit younger than her, because I know that some
of the Dial House people ended up playing in Poison Girls.
I actually did this thing where I kind of got sad,
where I was like, I almost wish I'd done this
entire thing about poisoned Girls instead. So I almost like
I did some research on Poison Girls, and then I
was like, oh, this is too much.
Speaker 2 (49:19):
You can do another thing on boys and girls sometime.
Speaker 1 (49:22):
It's true. And so V started Poison Girls independently actually
before Crass and I think seventy six, but then moved
it to a cottage near Dial House, and eventually Poison
Girls and Crass would play one hundred shows together, and
they were basically like they would really splits together. They
were like the two things, and it's just Crass is.
Speaker 2 (49:41):
More famous, but they're like twin bands.
Speaker 1 (49:44):
Yeah, totally. And what's interesting is there's all this stuff
about Crass being kind of outsider anarchists or whatever. Visa
versa is not visa versa from the Poison Girls comes
from the traditional anarchist movement. She had come up selling
anarchist newspapers on the street, a newspaper called Freedom, and
her partner in Baby Daddy was another anarchist activist guy.
(50:05):
So this is like, she does come from this. Krass
and the Poison Girls fit oddly into London punk In
some ways they were kind of the biggest and most
influential acts, but in other ways they were seen as
old and out of touch. Visubverse in particular, have kept
have to prove that she belonged there, because you will
be shocked to know that there was misogyny and agism
(50:26):
in the punk scene. I know this is gonna blow
you away with surprise, but oh, it's.
Speaker 2 (50:30):
Just it's perennially disgusting.
Speaker 1 (50:33):
Yeah, but yeah, so these are like old hippies living
in the countryside. What do they know about the like
London squatter punk scene, right? Is kind of the presentation that,
you know, is what people say when they're mad at
Crass and Poison Girls. And there's this huge squatter punk
scene by nineteen seventy nine, and Crass aren't in it,
but they were influential on it, and they constantly played
(50:55):
benefits for it. They actually stopped playing outside the UK
pretty early on. They played a show in Germany and
the German punks overturned a cop car and set it
on fire, and cops shut down the event, or rather
cops tried to shut down the show, but Kras was like, look,
if you shut down this show, all of the punks
(51:16):
who just set a cop car on fire are gonna
be like extra mad. And the cops were like, yeah,
you're right, and so they let them keep playing. It's
the kind of thing that doesn't happen in America as
far as they can tell. One time, years ago, I
was at a squad bar in Amsterdam and the old
barkeep was telling a story about a punk night where
cops had parked in front of the squat and then
(51:38):
gone somewhere else, and so then the drunk punks came
out and set the cop car on fire, and so
then all these cops came and my friend, the bartender
went out to negotiate with the cops, and the cops
were like, we're so sorry about that. It was a rookie,
he didn't know not to park in front of your bar.
It'll never happen again.
Speaker 2 (52:00):
That's adorable, I know, I know.
Speaker 1 (52:03):
And it also made me feel like I was a
never never Land because I was like, yeah, people go
to prison for a long time for that stuff in
the US, you know, there's currently a lot of people
in prison from twenty twenty for that. But in Germany,
when this thing happened, with this like sort of almost
riot happened, Krass like thought about this really hard, and
they were like, look, we're kind of role models. We
show up, we sing about anarchy, we sing about fighting
(52:25):
the police, and you know all this stuff. If we
play shows in people riot in the UK, we know
what to tell people, Like they would make pamphlets about
know your rights and how to make it through court
hearings and shit right, they would see it as their
responsibility on some level if their fans did something like that,
But what the fuck do we know about German law.
We don't know how to support people. So they decided
(52:46):
that if they couldn't help people handle the government repression.
They shouldn't be inspiring people to fight that government as directly,
and they stopped playing overseas, and this is I don't know,
that's interesting. That is admirable, is it? I don't know
if it's what, I don't know, it's just interesting.
Speaker 2 (53:04):
I like it.
Speaker 1 (53:05):
Yeah, these were some of the early days of punk
versus Nazi skinhead fights, and Krass actually didn't do the
Mostly the anarchist punks and stuff would just be like,
all right, we're going to fight all the Nazis. Crass
are like pacifists, and occasionally they would get into fist
fights to protect themselves or each other, but largely they
actually didn't try to kick skin heads out of their
shows and instead were like, oh, we should expose them
(53:27):
to anarchism, and we should expose them to pacifism and
we'll help change their ways. And the middling success they
succeeded sometimes, but I will say, from my point of view,
the biggest l of their career that I've been made
aware of is that there's this big Trotskyist versus Nazi
bral At a benefit show that they played, and Krass
later were like, the leftists are the red fascists basically
(53:50):
like both sides are bad or whatever. Look, I don't
like stay communism either, but when they are fighting the Nazis,
I'm on their side, you know.
Speaker 2 (53:58):
But whenever I was trying to understand some of the
things that Krass had said publicly, and some of it
was just pretty confusing or like badly reported on and
like including stuff about the Rock against Racism, I was
just like, it seemed very reverse world.
Speaker 1 (54:21):
And I don't know, no, I understand. That's how I
feel reading some of their stuff. I'm like, huh, everything
is different at different times in history, and people have
really different opinions despite this having the same labels as
each other. Yeah, And so they were seen as out
of touch for a while. And it's interesting because as
the world starts getting worse, Crass actually starts struggling with
(54:41):
their pacifism and starts taking on a more militant and
more traditionally anarchist line with certain things, because things are
about to get a lot worse. Specifically, in nineteen seventy nine,
a far right politician who was known to history as
quote the only bad Margaret came to power. I think
that's what people called her. I think people called her
(55:02):
the only bad Margaret. Her name was Margaret Thatcher, and
Thatcher wasn't the UK's Ronald Reagan. Reagan was the US's Thatcher.
Thatcher came into power and was like, I am going
to declare war on the leftist working class of the
United Kingdom. She hated unions, she would give raises to
cops that killed protesters. She agreed to host US nuclear
(55:25):
weapons in the UK, and, in a move that will
be quite familiar to modern listeners, she cozied up to
the middle class to get their votes by pretending to
support their interests. But in the end she only supported
the rich, and so punk starts becoming more of an
actual social movement in the Thatcher era. All of this
a couple years after punk had been declared quote dead
(55:46):
by the music press because it was no longer like
the hot new thing. Like basically like the music press is, like, oh,
punk was from seventy six to seventy eight, and then
it was done, and then like this supposedly dead thing
becomes an incredibly powerful social movement and aesthetic culture. But
as for what it did once it became a movement,
we're going to talk about that on Wednesday. Yeah, anything
(56:10):
you want to plug.
Speaker 2 (56:12):
I have a show coming up March sixth at the
Oddfellows in Bellingham and then Constellation in Chicago. Hell yeah
on March fifteenth.
Speaker 1 (56:23):
Hell yeam On March third, my book The Immortal Choir
Holds Every Voice goes to Kickstarter and I'm really excited
about it. And you're all probably tired of hearing me
say that, but you're going to have to hear it.
Actually you don't have to hear it. You can actually
hit stop now and then just start the next episode
and be fine. But instead you could hear me also
talk about how I work with an anarchist collective publisher
called Strangers in a Tangled Wilderness and you should check
(56:45):
us out at Tangled Wilderness dot org. If you give
us ten bucks a month, we'll send you a zine
every month anywhere in the world. We also put out
a bunch of podcasts and do a bunch of stuff,
and so you could check that out if you're like, wow,
I've this is the first time I've heard of an arco.
What does the collective make? Well, we make some stuff.
We'll see you on Wednesday. Cool people who did Cool
(57:13):
Stuff is a production of cool Zone Media. For more
podcasts on cool Zone Media, visit our website foolzonemedia dot com,
or check us out on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts,
or wherever you get your podcasts.
Host
Margaret Killjoy
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