Speaker 1: Cool Media. Hello, and welcome to Cool People Who Did
Speaker 1: Cool Stuff, a podcast that is sometimes recorded. Well, Margaret's
Speaker 1: dog licks her hand and then Margaret has to move
Speaker 1: her hand away from the dog, and then Margaret thinks,
Speaker 1: rather than not have this be the introduction, it will
Speaker 1: be the introduction. I'm your host, Margaret Kiljoy, and this
Speaker 1: is Cool People Who Did Cool Stuff. And my guest
Speaker 1: is really Holland.
Speaker 2: Hi. Hello, so deeply psyched to be here. Thanks for
Speaker 2: having me.
Speaker 1: Yeah, I'm excited to have you here. And I'm like, oh,
Speaker 1: I'm talking faster, and that's probably because I ate a
Speaker 1: banana in between breaks. And one thing I like about
Speaker 1: Crass is that they don't really do drugs or drink,
Speaker 1: because I also don't. But then instead I eat sugar
Speaker 1: and then my pace of talking begins to go up.
Speaker 2: And that's so benign that you're like, You're like, sugar
Speaker 2: rush is a banana. It wasn't like it wasn't like
Speaker 2: a little Debbie or something.
Speaker 1: Yeah, well I ran out of the sweets in my house. Besides,
Speaker 1: fruit is what happened. And there's a snowstorm coming tomorrow
Speaker 1: as I record this, so I will just be forced
Speaker 1: to eat fruit, which is very good to deal with, Sugar.
Speaker 1: But I think everyone probably knows who you are and
Speaker 1: who I am by part four, and you might even,
Speaker 1: dear listener, know who Crass is a little bit. But
Speaker 1: we're going to talk about them more because where we
Speaker 1: last left off, they had started a band and then
Speaker 1: an arcopunk had become a serious movement, only I hadn't
Speaker 1: told you what it was doing yet. So as the
Speaker 1: seventies closed, oh geez, what will I do without Sophie.
Speaker 1: Sophie's usually is our producer, but just isn't on the call,
Speaker 1: and I almost forgot to say that Sophie's our producer,
Speaker 1: and more importantly that everyone has to say hi to Rory,
Speaker 1: our audio.
Speaker 3: Engineer, Hi, Rory, Rory Hello.
Speaker 1: And our theme music was written forced by a woman
Speaker 1: who once got an entire steampunk convention kicked out of
Speaker 1: a bar. It was actually funny because then un woman
Speaker 1: was headlining the main stage of that particular convention, but
Speaker 1: as a solo act, not as a terrible Crass cover band.
Speaker 2: Anyway, I want to hear like rehearsal tapes of that band.
Speaker 1: The best you can do is that there is a
Speaker 1: version from that convention of all three of us playing
Speaker 1: Bellachow from the main stage, and so I suspect that
Speaker 1: if you look up Bellachow on Woman on YouTube, it
Speaker 1: might still be there and you can. Why did I
Speaker 1: just tell everyone that it was not my best but
Speaker 1: anyway whatever. I used to make my music playing accordion
Speaker 1: on the street, but I was never good at it.
Speaker 1: I just didn't. I had an accordion and was broke.
Speaker 2: The accordion is such a beautiful prop and that's all
Speaker 2: you need. Do you see this, Hold a beautiful instrument
Speaker 2: and be a beacon of sound.
Speaker 1: Yeah, it's a really good busking instrument because it is
Speaker 1: loud and slightly. In punk scenes, it's like cliche. But
Speaker 1: when you're out on the street, people are like, holy shit,
Speaker 1: and accordion. I haven't seen one since my granddad's accordion.
Speaker 1: And then they're like, here's a dollar, and I'm like, sweet,
Speaker 1: thank you. And that's a thing that happens.
Speaker 2: But that's all you need, just need them to give
Speaker 2: you the money.
Speaker 1: Yeah, exactly. As the seventies closed the idea of punk
Speaker 1: as a broad musical label that might include bands like
Speaker 1: The Cure and Bauhaus. Right next to the slits and
Speaker 1: the cockney rejects that ended specific subgenres started things started
Speaker 1: getting very more like particular and specific, which is it
Speaker 1: happens constantly to every genre, and it's both good and
Speaker 1: bad and equal measure, you know. And one of the
Speaker 1: main subgenres of punk, especially in the UK, was a
Speaker 1: narco punk, which basically meant sounds like crass. There's also
Speaker 1: OI that came out at around that time, which started off
Speaker 1: pretty leftist but then has earned a right wing reputation
Speaker 1: and is more into catchy songs and working class anthems.
Speaker 1: And I really like OI. I have to admit it
Speaker 1: is more my style and taste, not politically. But anyway,
Speaker 1: there's some good oy bands. So this isn't a story
Speaker 1: about OI. It's a story about anarco punk Crass. They
Speaker 1: really did walk the walk. Their albums started selling rather well,
Speaker 1: and they simply pooled all of their money and then
Speaker 1: gave themselves about five hundred pounds a year as an allowance,
Speaker 1: and then all lived in dial house together. And I
Speaker 1: think that's like minus the like food and whatever stuff
Speaker 1: they need, you know.
Speaker 2: They gave themselves five hundred pounds a year to live on.
Speaker 1: Well, I think they're living expenses is that they are
Speaker 1: in Crass and live at Dial House, so it's like
Speaker 1: five hundred pounds on top.
Speaker 3: Of that it's a tip.
Speaker 1: Yeah, totally, that's not enough.
Speaker 2: You know.
Speaker 1: In the end, I think they probably agreed. They didn't
Speaker 1: let mass me do interviews with them besides like once
Speaker 1: or twice if the if the interviewer like really proved them,
Speaker 1: because they didn't have a rule like we won't do
Speaker 1: mass media. They had a rule where like we have
Speaker 1: to trust the journalists or whatever, and it's just like
Speaker 1: they almost never did, and they gave fanzines interviews constantly,
Speaker 1: and so they said no to basically every mainstream journalist
Speaker 1: and yes to basically every fanzine. So fanzine sales started
Speaker 1: rising dramatically and the number of fanzines started going through
Speaker 1: the roof. They would spend every Tuesday answering fan mail.
Speaker 1: They responded to about two hundred letters a week, and
Speaker 1: they would like refuse to answer with like form letters,
Speaker 1: so they'd just sit around and divvy up the letters
Speaker 1: and write the people.
Speaker 2: Can we imagine any big band doing anything like this? Now?
Speaker 1: No? And this is like they are out selling ACDC
Speaker 1: and they.
Speaker 3: Are doing this, A that's amazing.
Speaker 1: Yeah, it would be like I don't know whoever, I
Speaker 1: don't I clearly don't know what we call it new.
Speaker 1: I don't know who's currently the people who would be
Speaker 1: comparable to.
Speaker 2: But can you imagine, Okay, so if they were bigger
Speaker 2: than ACDC at the time, can you imagine you're driving
Speaker 2: across Utah or whatever and you turn on the radio
Speaker 2: and it's crass and not ACDC.
Speaker 1: Yeah, but it can never be because they cuss so much.
Speaker 1: But yeah, but that same level of like they are
Speaker 1: bigger despite being underground, so which is probably why they
Speaker 1: have kind of a like being underground is better because
Speaker 1: it's working for them, you know.
Speaker 3: I imagine.
Speaker 2: I'm trying to think about different ways that artists could
Speaker 2: draw lines with media, and yeah, one proposition is we
Speaker 2: just talk about music because I feel like so much
Speaker 2: music journalism is just all about.
Speaker 1: Gossip and oh yeah, totally, and it.
Speaker 2: Often gets incredibly misogynistic.
Speaker 1: I wonder if you could just be like, I will
Speaker 1: only talk about my music or my political positions and
Speaker 1: just like not talk about like who you're dating or whatever.
Speaker 2: You know.
Speaker 3: Yeah, I mean I've seen so sort of worse.
Speaker 2: Like you know, I had this one band where one
Speaker 2: of the bandmates admittedly had a fantastic beard, and literally
Speaker 2: this interviewer only wanted.
Speaker 3: To talk to the guitarist about his beard.
Speaker 1: Oh my god, uh huh, yeah, it.
Speaker 2: Gets it gets stupider than even like your proposal seemed
Speaker 2: to suggest, or like late lately, I've seen and this
Speaker 2: makes me. This is so upsetting to me. I've seen
Speaker 2: press about bands like major press only talk about the
Speaker 2: supposed mental health of the lead singer who is a woman.
Speaker 1: Totally.
Speaker 3: Yeah, it's it's so depressing.
Speaker 2: It's like, yeah, it's it's fantastically progressive.
Speaker 1: Absolutely, I love the like when I do interviews, when
Speaker 1: I with Feminoschool, when we would do interviews, I loved
Speaker 1: because it was almost always there was a couple mainstream
Speaker 1: pieces about us, but not much. And just like the
Speaker 1: fanzine journalists, especially like weird punk and metal fanzines from
Speaker 1: Europe would have amazing questions even if it had to
Speaker 1: be like translated in both directions or whatever, And so
Speaker 1: Crass would spend Wednesdays Tuesdays answer letters. Wednesdays, fanzine journalists
Speaker 1: would come over and a lot of people I think
Speaker 1: only created fanzines literally as an excuse to meet and
Speaker 1: talk to Krass, and they just let people do it.
Speaker 1: They knew that was happening, they didn't care. That's great
Speaker 1: and their stencyl campaign spread to listeners because they would
Speaker 1: include stencils and the leaflets that they passed out and
Speaker 1: teach people how to spray paint. And then in nineteen
Speaker 1: eighty they released a benefit split with the Poison Girls
Speaker 1: that was meant to benefit a bunch of anarchists who
Speaker 1: are on trial because of this sum. There was this
Speaker 1: case that was called the Person's Unknown Case, and I
Speaker 1: don't have the full sense of it. It gets into
Speaker 1: the Angry Brigade, it gets into Irish politics, it gets
Speaker 1: into lots of complicated stuff, and I read a few
Speaker 1: sources about it and they all kind of seemed to
Speaker 1: disagree with each other about what it was about. But overall,
Speaker 1: there was this case that happened where a bunch of
Speaker 1: people were arrested as terrorists, including like some like like
Speaker 1: an IRA person or a person accused of mean part
Speaker 1: of the IRA was arrested and then accused of killing
Speaker 1: Northern Irish cops, but then started being supported by anarchist
Speaker 1: Black Cross and became an anarchist in jail. And there
Speaker 1: was this whole thing where like it basically seems like
Speaker 1: the UK cops were terrified that the IRA was going
Speaker 1: to move more anarchists, and they started like rounding people
Speaker 1: up or whatever. And four people got put on trial
Speaker 1: or five I've read both by different sources, and having
Speaker 1: anarchist literature was considered proof of guilt in this case
Speaker 1: that was happening. So Crass and Poison Girls released a
Speaker 1: benefit for the person's unknown case and the name comes
Speaker 1: from the persons were known, the four people who are
Speaker 1: on trial or the five people are on trial, but
Speaker 1: they were accused of conspiring with persons unknown. So literally
Speaker 1: it was a case where like, you are being accused
Speaker 1: of conspiring with we don't know who about, we don't
Speaker 1: know what.
Speaker 2: Oh that sounds extremely illegal.
Speaker 1: Yeah, and shockingly including in Thatcher's fucking UK. The defendants
Speaker 1: were all found not guilty, or four of them were
Speaker 1: on one of them, I keep keep again, I read
Speaker 1: a bunch of different things whatever, and so they were like, Okay,
Speaker 1: we don't need this ten thousand pounds we just raised,
Speaker 1: and so they they looked at Northern Ireland, which had
Speaker 1: an anarchist center, which I want to know more about.
Speaker 1: I want to know more about Northern Ireland as being
Speaker 1: kind of a center of UK anarchism for a while.
Speaker 1: And they were like, London should have an anarchist center,
Speaker 1: and we have ten thousand pounds. So they opened a
Speaker 1: short lived place called the Autonomy Center. Only they spelled
Speaker 1: center wrong because they're British and they don't know a spell,
Speaker 1: and they I had to make at least one joke
Speaker 1: about this. It's just I'm constitutionally incapable of not making
Speaker 1: fun of the British.
Speaker 2: Got to talk some shit.
Speaker 1: Yeah, And it was a rented warehouse space that they
Speaker 1: shared with an anarchist print collective called Little A. Every
Speaker 1: Sunday they put on punk shows six bands for a pound,
Speaker 1: and like people would come over it, you know, and
Speaker 1: they made their money on that by beer sales, basically.
Speaker 1: Steve Ignorant complains later about how it was all just
Speaker 1: a bunch of people sitting around talking about Bakunin. So
Speaker 1: he didn't really like the Autonomy Center very much.
Speaker 3: Boring.
Speaker 1: Yeah, sorry, that the place that once a week you
Speaker 1: get to go see six bands for a pound and
Speaker 1: drink like whatever. Anyway, the Autonomy Center itself only lasted
Speaker 1: about six months, but this version of social centers spread also.
Speaker 1: In nineteen eighty, You've got this fun event that I
Speaker 1: really wish I could find more information about. And when
Speaker 1: I say fun, that gets quotes, But me wanting to
Speaker 1: learn more about is true. Remember us talking about the
Speaker 1: Stonehenge festivals that their friend had started, like several episodes ago,
Speaker 1: where Wally was like, we're all gonna go squat Stonehenge.
Speaker 2: That sounds so flaky.
Speaker 1: They kept happening. The Stonehenge festivals lasted almost a decade,
Speaker 1: and in nineteen eighty Krass was like, all right, well,
Speaker 1: we're going to bring punk to it. And not just Krass,
Speaker 1: the Poison Girls and a bunch of other punk bands
Speaker 1: were like, We're going to go play the Stonehenge Festival,
Speaker 1: and the punks are going to come because it's a radical,
Speaker 1: free culture event. Why not. So in the crowd was
Speaker 1: a biker gang who took a fence to the punks
Speaker 1: and attacked them. And this is a very like story
Speaker 1: as all this time. At first, the bikers stormed the
Speaker 1: stage during one of the other punk bands and said
Speaker 1: that they weren't going to tolerate punks at their festival,
Speaker 1: and then they just like beat up all the punks.
Speaker 1: They just like went around and like beat everyone up,
Speaker 1: and it was like a beating up massacre, where like
Speaker 1: punks were like running away into the woods and being
Speaker 1: chased by bikers and beating up. It's actually really bad
Speaker 1: to quote Penny and Boa about it. Quote. Weeks later,
Speaker 1: a hippie news sheet defended the bikers, saying that they
Speaker 1: were an anarchist group who had misunderstood our motives. So
Speaker 1: maybe the bikers thought that the punks were all fascists.
Speaker 1: I don't know.
Speaker 2: Yeah, indecipherable. There's gotta be okay, there's there's gotta be
Speaker 2: people obviously.
Speaker 1: Who know who're at it. Yeah, yeah, so who.
Speaker 2: Have some more informed perspectives. So let's hear from y'all.
Speaker 1: Yeah, Because even when I found things about the history
Speaker 1: of the Stonehenge festival, they were just quoting Penny Rombau
Speaker 1: from the same source that I was able to find it.
Speaker 1: There's not a lot of people talking about this happening,
Speaker 1: and there's even people saying like this sounds like a
Speaker 1: huge big deal. When you read the book, the story
Speaker 1: of Krass about it, but then other people talking about
Speaker 1: the Stonehenge festivals are like, how come no one else
Speaker 1: talks about that? And so like, maybe I think it happened,
Speaker 1: but I don't feel like I totally know the story.
Speaker 2: I know I've met a couple of old punks from
Speaker 2: that from those days in England.
Speaker 1: Yeah, if you find out, we'll go back and edit
Speaker 1: in a further explanation here.
Speaker 2: Nice.
Speaker 1: So, either way, both Crass and Poison Girls were unable
Speaker 1: to play. Penny clearly wasn't having a good time at
Speaker 1: the festival his friend started because the last time he
Speaker 1: was there it also went really badly. But Crass is
Speaker 1: growing still and they just get bigger and bigger because
Speaker 1: DIY advertising, unlike mainstream advertising. The way that mainstream advertising
Speaker 1: is that in the middle of your podcast, the host,
Speaker 1: regardless of how they feel about what's about to happen,
Speaker 1: just pivots to ads.
Speaker 4: Masterfully, thank you, and we're back.
Speaker 1: So nineteen eighty one, a reviewer said, quote, you come
Speaker 1: across Crass in every place you look. They rarely play
Speaker 1: and hardly ever advertise. They live outside the music business,
Speaker 1: and they're far more successful than most people inside it.
Speaker 1: They don't need to promote themselves because they're following does
Speaker 1: that for them? Their logos on one hundred thousand black
Speaker 1: leather jackets and their name is sprayed on town halls
Speaker 1: and bus stops from Amsterdam to Aberdeen. Crass records regularly
Speaker 1: sell well in excess of the figures achieved by outfits
Speaker 1: whose faces adorn the megastore displays, yet next to nothing
Speaker 1: is known of them.
Speaker 2: It is so important to look outside of the parameters
Speaker 2: of the music industry because the way it's set up
Speaker 2: is like a cattle choote and the musicians are the livestock.
Speaker 3: Yeah.
Speaker 2: I mean, I know some musicians who've had a fair
Speaker 2: amount of success through the industry, But the creativity of
Speaker 2: artists can be applied as well to how we make
Speaker 2: a living. Yeah, And uh, there's just there's no one way.
Speaker 2: There is no one way to be an artist anything, totally,
Speaker 2: and the industry only knows the way that's going to
Speaker 2: make them the most money. So it's up to every
Speaker 2: single artist to be creative about how we survive.
Speaker 1: Yeah. And like when you work with mainstream stuff, which
Speaker 1: you can do, you just have to be really aware
Speaker 1: of what's happening. You have to be really aware of
Speaker 1: that it's not your only thing. It's like not the
Speaker 1: only way to be a musician. You can be You
Speaker 1: can engage with different labels at different levels at different
Speaker 1: times and then back out of it, like you know,
Speaker 1: you can like well, I mean they try and stick
Speaker 1: you contractually, but like, there's lots of ways of doing.
Speaker 2: It, and so you have to be extremely wary of
Speaker 2: things that are independent as well, and don't just trust
Speaker 2: that like because they're punk or because they have a
Speaker 2: certain aesthetic or background that they will have the same
Speaker 2: ethics as you.
Speaker 1: I think totally your community totally. And another thing that
Speaker 1: Crass got to do is they pulled off a bunch
Speaker 1: of really funny pranks, which is of course they did
Speaker 1: one of their better ones. So they released this album
Speaker 1: called Penis Envy that was an intentionally like feminist piece.
Speaker 1: It was maybe their first like concept album or whatever.
Speaker 1: It centered the women of the band. Also the men
Speaker 1: in the band would do shit like write songs about
Speaker 1: rediscovering how to be a man in a more feminist way.
Speaker 1: Like they were actually had really good nuanced gender politics
Speaker 1: as far as they can tell. And there's a song
Speaker 1: that they did on penis Envy called Our Wedding, and
Speaker 1: it is this over the top love song about getting married.
Speaker 1: It's like a satire of marriage. The lyrics include things
Speaker 1: like never look at anyone, anyone but me, never look
Speaker 1: at anyone. I must be all you see, set to
Speaker 1: like sweet organ music or whatever.
Speaker 2: Right, it is so creepy it is, yeah, and you
Speaker 2: could play that at lots of Christian Nationalists' weddings.
Speaker 1: And that's basically what they realized is they were like,
Speaker 1: I wonder if we can trick someone into releasing this earnestly,
Speaker 1: and so they wrote a teen girl magazine called Loving
Speaker 1: who loved this new song by Joida Viv, which is
Speaker 1: one of the Crass singers, and it was published by
Speaker 1: According to them, when Krass wrote, they were like, oh,
Speaker 1: is this new song by Joida Viv published by Creative
Speaker 1: Recording and Sound Services Crass.
Speaker 2: A Oh so good, I know.
Speaker 1: And it's like a that's like a seamless acronym like
Speaker 1: that that wouldn't raise any red flags if.
Speaker 4: I saw that, you know, and warms my heart.
Speaker 1: And so Loving Magazine agreed to release the single free
Speaker 1: to any of their readers who would send them a stamp,
Speaker 1: and then they told their readers that the single would
Speaker 1: quote make your wedding day just that extra bit special.
Speaker 1: Joy de Vive has captured all the happiness and romance
Speaker 1: of that all important big day, your wedding, So make
Speaker 1: sure you send off for your copy and time for
Speaker 1: that grand occasion. It's a must for all true romantics.
Speaker 2: It's so eerie. I was listening to it as I
Speaker 2: was walking my dog this morning, and yeah, I feel
Speaker 2: like one of my bandmate's sisters is in a really
Speaker 2: intense church and he talked about her wedding and the
Speaker 2: vows reminded me of that song. So it's a yeah,
Speaker 2: I really appreciate Crass's take on the patriarchy and religion. Yeah,
Speaker 2: it's something that really really deserves to be roasted hard.
Speaker 1: And I think that I really love how feminists they
Speaker 1: were at the gate, Like I love that, like because
Speaker 1: that's I mean, that's one of the things that you
Speaker 1: don't when I imagine old punk. I'm not immediately like, ah,
Speaker 1: good feminist politics, you know, but like many of them did,
Speaker 1: and certainly cross and when the magazine found out that
Speaker 1: they got pranked, they were really mad. And Penny just
Speaker 1: told them that their magazines and others like it were
Speaker 1: quote absolutely obscene and despicable. They exploit people in aggressive
Speaker 1: and unpleasant manner.
Speaker 2: That's true.
Speaker 1: They hadn't broken any laws, and they did not.
Speaker 2: And yeah, it sounds if you listen to the song,
Speaker 2: like it really could just be played on the radio
Speaker 2: as like a love song. Uh yeah, because that's how
Speaker 2: patriarchal so many love songs are. I mean, it's very
Speaker 2: like it's very phil Spectory in a way.
Speaker 1: I don't know Phil Specter as I feel terrible about
Speaker 1: that he.
Speaker 2: Was a he was a murderer.
Speaker 1: Uh oh shit, okay?
Speaker 2: Who who was like a really important producer?
Speaker 1: Oh fuck okay?
Speaker 2: And like he like he was part of I don't
Speaker 2: know fully, but because I I write off people who
Speaker 2: are total pieces of shit sometimes and it's hard to
Speaker 2: really remember everything about them. But like I think he
Speaker 2: created the wall of sound. If that rings a bell, it's.
Speaker 1: Just like really like the concept of like what a
Speaker 1: lot of the like no wave bands and stuff were
Speaker 1: doing of Like it's kind of as loud as possible.
Speaker 2: I love your misinterpretation of that. No, like no, it
Speaker 2: was it was like a sixties sound esthetic.
Speaker 1: Okay, Okay, no, I don't know it, but what I
Speaker 1: do know about No, it's not time for an ad break.
Speaker 1: I'll just keep reading the thing. So yeah, they hadn't
Speaker 1: broken any laws, so they got away with it. In
Speaker 1: nineteen eighty one, things were getting really heated in the UK.
Speaker 1: Riots were breaking out across the country against police racism
Speaker 1: and violence, starting in Brixton. Under Thatcher, unemployment continued to rise.
Speaker 1: Punks responded with flyers that said things like national tragedy,
Speaker 1: twenty three million people still employed in Northern Ireland. Irish
Speaker 1: rebels were dying during hunger strikes in prison, and more
Speaker 1: and more people were sympathetic to the cause of Irish unification,
Speaker 1: although there were also more terrorist attacks and such, and
Speaker 1: so people were getting polarized on it. In nineteen eighty two,
Speaker 1: Crass released what they sort of figured it would be
Speaker 1: their last record, Christ the Album, a big old double album,
Speaker 1: but then the Falklands War kicked off. I actually only
Speaker 1: learned about the Falklands War because of I really like
Speaker 1: this band, New Model Army, that's like an old UK band,
Speaker 1: and so I was like listening to them since I
Speaker 1: was a teenager, and they talked about the Falklands were
Speaker 1: and I was like, I had no idea what it was.
Speaker 1: I was like seventeen or whatever.
Speaker 2: But that's that's like a that's an Elvis Costello song. Right,
Speaker 2: New Model.
Speaker 1: Army, Oh New Mottle Army gets its name from it
Speaker 1: was part of the English Civil War. There was the
Speaker 1: kind of group tied in with the Levelers and stuff
Speaker 1: that we're trying to create a more just England. But
Speaker 1: I actually hate the actual New Model Army from back
Speaker 1: then because they were who invaded Ireland and like kind
Speaker 1: of genocided them so and like you in like England,
Speaker 1: they have this like oh the people fighting for good,
Speaker 1: but then Cromwell used them as like useful idiot's. Basically
Speaker 1: that was another revolution that was betrayed from my point
Speaker 1: of view. If you want to hear more about it,
Speaker 1: you can go back and listen to me talk to
Speaker 1: John Darnell from The Mountain Goats about the Levelers and
Speaker 1: the Diggers on an old episode. So I don't know
Speaker 1: if it wouldn't surprise me if Alvis Costello would also
Speaker 1: use that as a song, but I think the band
Speaker 1: gets it from the old group.
Speaker 3: Yeah, but the.
Speaker 1: Falklands War kicks off. There're these off the coast of
Speaker 1: Argentina called the Falklands Islands, and they are part of
Speaker 1: the UK. For whatever dumb colonial reason, they're still part
Speaker 1: of the UK. In nineteen eighty two, Argentina was like,
Speaker 1: we want our shit back, and so they invaded and
Speaker 1: the UK was like, are you kidding me? We're the
Speaker 1: fucking UK. The war lasted seventy four days and ended
Speaker 1: in argentina surrender. The UK stomped them. About one thousand
Speaker 1: people died, mostly Argentinians, but two hundred and fifty five
Speaker 1: Brits were killed in the fighting too. At the start
Speaker 1: of the conflict, Krass was like, all right, well, we're
Speaker 1: going to make fun of patriotism and we're going to
Speaker 1: make fun of the British soldiers. And they put out
Speaker 1: a single called Sheep Farming in the Falklands, which is
Speaker 1: about British soldiers who just want to go there to
Speaker 1: fuck sheep.
Speaker 2: Yeah, that's fired.
Speaker 1: But as the war got all like, you know, killie,
Speaker 1: they put out a song that just actually really shook
Speaker 1: up British politics. Like I didn't go into this knowing
Speaker 1: to what degree Crass impacted world politics. They wrote a
Speaker 1: song called how does it feel. I've ever seen it
Speaker 1: both as how does it feel? And how does it feel?
Speaker 1: To be the mother of a thousand dead? Which is
Speaker 1: fucking good title. Yeah, and that song is written directly
Speaker 1: to Margaret Thatcher. Imagine writing a song aimed at a
Speaker 1: politician and then the most important politician, and then having
Speaker 1: the politician like listen to it, not like listen to
Speaker 1: reason and change what they're doing, but have the song
Speaker 1: like actually impact the country's politics.
Speaker 2: Yeah, And whether or not she listens to it, it's
Speaker 2: just important to say it and that everyone hears you
Speaker 2: say it.
Speaker 1: Yeah.
Speaker 2: And as the podcast idiot, I truly was an idiot.
Speaker 2: I was just you know, in a scene where some
Speaker 2: people obviously talked about Crass and yeah, big Crass fans,
Speaker 2: but I had never consciously listened to Crass, And so
Speaker 2: I have had my Crass immersion in the last few days.
Speaker 2: And one of the things that I immediately really have
Speaker 2: savored about Crass is how because they're part of the
Speaker 2: inventors of punk rock, they sidestepped one of the biggest
Speaker 2: pitfalls of punk rock in my opinion, which is that
Speaker 2: it's it's this anger aimed outward and it doesn't state
Speaker 2: the self lyrically, and I just loved, like, I'm a
Speaker 2: fucking I'm truly the podcast idiot. What's what's the big
Speaker 2: song that we were talking about earlier?
Speaker 1: Do they always a living?
Speaker 2: Do they always a living? It's it's so cool, and
Speaker 2: that it like it states yourself. It's like it's it's
Speaker 2: all about what we think and what we deserve as
Speaker 2: opposed to like so I remember, it's not as you
Speaker 2: are bad.
Speaker 1: It's like we're gonna we're gonna fight for what's ours.
Speaker 2: Yeah, And it's not like ranting at somebody that you
Speaker 2: hate who's not even there.
Speaker 1: Yeah, because Margaret Thatcher's there in this conversation when they
Speaker 1: write this song, you know.
Speaker 2: Yeah, and they have the power and they take aim
Speaker 2: and they are they're so conscious of who they're able
Speaker 2: to communicate with, and it's.
Speaker 3: It's astounding.
Speaker 2: It's really beautiful.
Speaker 1: Yeah. No, And when they write this song, the Tories
Speaker 1: actually her Thatcher's party actually circulated a memo internally that
Speaker 1: was like, we really can't afford to respond to this
Speaker 1: kind of provocation and we should not arrest them. But
Speaker 1: the cops started showing up at record stores threatening anyone
Speaker 1: who was like selling their record and about half of
Speaker 1: their shows were shut down by cops before they even
Speaker 1: got started. And with the Falkland War, Cress became one
Speaker 1: of the main voices of the opposition. Instead of them
Speaker 1: writing labor politicians, labor politicians were writing them. And then
Speaker 1: they started getting leaked information by soldiers. What happened was
Speaker 1: a soldier had written them an angry letter being like,
Speaker 1: how dare you not you unpatriotic? Blah blah blah blah blah.
Speaker 1: Right and Krass had responded, and I think they'd even
Speaker 1: been like, oh, fuck you or whatever. But it had gone.
Speaker 1: It had opened up a channel of communication, and eventually
Speaker 1: this soldier who started off hating them, started telling them
Speaker 1: all of the horrible things from the war that weren't
Speaker 1: getting talked about in the press, including the fact that
Speaker 1: there was almost a mutiny among British soldiers. So then
Speaker 1: they pulled their most dangerous prank. This is the kind
Speaker 1: of prank that I think could have gotten them killed.
Speaker 1: They spoofed a conversation between Thatcher and Reagan about the
Speaker 1: Falklands War and American imperial interests in Europe with nuclear arms.
Speaker 2: I didn't I didn't get a chance to listen to
Speaker 2: that one did.
Speaker 3: They like do their voices?
Speaker 1: Like how like they no, they they they found old
Speaker 1: recordings of them and like cut them up and then
Speaker 1: like did enough like audio magic to like it's like
Speaker 1: a lot of people can tell it's faked, right, but
Speaker 1: not everyone, And it's like fairly well done. And this
Speaker 1: thing that they put out and they they leak it
Speaker 1: ahead of the nineteen eighty two UK general election and
Speaker 1: it claims that Thatcher allowed a British ship to be
Speaker 1: attacked so that the UK could counterattack, and Krass figured
Speaker 1: the whole thing was like cheap and hacky and no
Speaker 1: one would get fooled and it was just like not
Speaker 1: going to go anywhere.
Speaker 3: But people are dumb.
Speaker 1: Yeah, they tried super hard to make sure it wouldn't
Speaker 1: be traced back to them. The CIA and MI six
Speaker 1: couldn't figure out the source of the fake. They suspected
Speaker 1: it was KGB, but a journalist at The Observer was like, Nah,
Speaker 1: this is crass, and like basically like got them to
Speaker 1: fess up. Uh yeah, I love that. Like the journalist
Speaker 1: was just like, no, I've heard this audio production style before,
Speaker 1: you know, incredible, and it's called Thatcher Gate, and it
Speaker 1: did not cost Thatcher the election. The Falklands War made
Speaker 1: her popular again. War is good for popularity. I sure
Speaker 1: hope the current administration doesn't figure that out, but my
Speaker 1: money is that they will.
Speaker 3: Did I just say people are stupid?
Speaker 1: Yeah?
Speaker 2: Yeah, still upsetting.
Speaker 1: Around this time, Krass opened up a squat. I suspect
Speaker 1: this more than just Crass. I expect this other the
Speaker 1: narco punk movement, but with Crass involved, opened up a squat,
Speaker 1: an empty venue called the Zigzag that had gone under
Speaker 1: a year earlier or whatever, and they opened it up
Speaker 1: to have a twelve band show, which a thousand people
Speaker 1: came to. And this was a new tactic, and it's
Speaker 1: one that's spread across Europe. The implication in what I
Speaker 1: read is that this is the first like open a
Speaker 1: squat to throw a show in that era, in the
Speaker 1: modern era in Europe or whatever. People who've listened to
Speaker 1: the show know that I'm very skeptical anytime it's like
Speaker 1: the first time anything whatever, you know. But it seems
Speaker 1: like this is kind of how the tactic started spreading
Speaker 1: around Europe, because they distributed a pamphlet about how and
Speaker 1: why to do this kind of thing. When they did it,
Speaker 1: and they gave it to everyone who came, and it
Speaker 1: included the lines quote what happened at the Zigzag, we
Speaker 1: hope was one step towards reclaiming what is ours. Freedom,
Speaker 1: free food, free shelter, free information, free music, free ideas,
Speaker 1: freedom to do whatever does not impinge on the freedom
Speaker 1: of others. The idea of squat rock, I'm continuing to quote,
Speaker 1: the idea of squat rock is not purely another way
Speaker 1: of doing gigs, as we hope this handout explains. Hopefully
Speaker 1: it will have been and is an inspiration to other
Speaker 1: people to open up more places, whether it be for
Speaker 1: gigs to live in whatever. As for what they hope
Speaker 1: to accomplish, I want to quote Penny Rimbau from his
Speaker 1: book The Last of the Hippies quote, we can open
Speaker 1: up squats and from them start information services for those
Speaker 1: who want to do the same. Or we can form
Speaker 1: housing co ops and communes to share the responsibility of
Speaker 1: renting or even buying a property in places we already live.
Speaker 1: We can open the doors to others, form tenant associations
Speaker 1: with neighbors and demand and create better conditions and facilities
Speaker 1: in the area. We can form gardening groups that squat
Speaker 1: and farm disused land or rent allotments where we can
Speaker 1: to produce food for ourselves and others, that are free
Speaker 1: from dangerous chemicals and grow medicinal herbs to cure each
Speaker 1: other's headaches, and like, yeah, it's not limited to like,
Speaker 1: oh we can have punk shows. They're like we can
Speaker 1: have a better life.
Speaker 2: Yeah. I love that. Uh, that tactic of community gardens.
Speaker 1: Yeah too, Which is why this podcast I should just
Speaker 1: start doing little ads for things that I think should
Speaker 1: be the advertiser. This podcast is brought to you by
Speaker 1: community Gardens, although it was all so even more explicitly
Speaker 1: brought to you by that when we did a whole
Speaker 1: episode about community gardens. But community gardens are great. So
Speaker 1: garden and then give food to people, and that's good.
Speaker 1: And that's the only ad.
Speaker 4: And we're back.
Speaker 1: If you heard other ads, it was a mistake, and
Speaker 1: you should write to our complaints department, which is just
Speaker 1: look for someone named Robert Evans is the complaints department.
Speaker 1: So just tag Robert Evans and whatever social media and
Speaker 1: we'll get right on that. So at this point KRASS
Speaker 1: is just wildly important on the world stage in a
Speaker 1: way that I didn't realize, and so folks are kind
Speaker 1: of trying to sort them out politically. Folks from the
Speaker 1: Red Army faction, which is like a German communist urban
Speaker 1: guerrilla group, started hanging out a dial house to like
Speaker 1: suss them out, be like, oh, are these people are
Speaker 1: going to help us on a bombing campaign and then
Speaker 1: realize that Crafts are pacifists and anarchists and not likely
Speaker 1: to support them. The KG came around and tried talking
Speaker 1: to them, trying to sort out how they knew what
Speaker 1: they knew about the Falklands War. But my favorite interaction
Speaker 1: of THEIRS with traditional rebel groups was in nineteen eighty
Speaker 1: two they played an anarchist center in Belfast and the
Speaker 1: first night there was trouble when some like loyalist skinheads,
Speaker 1: like people who were not pro Irish unification but pro
Speaker 1: the UK. They attacked people at the show. But the
Speaker 1: second night, on a Sunday, there were no problems. There
Speaker 1: was no violence at the show, and so Penny was like, oh,
Speaker 1: I bet even these people take Sundays off. Was his
Speaker 1: first guests or whatever. But then they got like a
Speaker 1: letter that was like invited them to an IRA pub
Speaker 1: and they were basically told like, no, the IRA has
Speaker 1: your back. We kept the loyalists away. The reason that
Speaker 1: was peaceful is we did security for you without you
Speaker 1: even noticing it.
Speaker 3: Uh, just seamless.
Speaker 1: Yeah, and all of this political stuff that started happening
Speaker 1: kept them involved in the band. They kind of thought
Speaker 1: the band was gonna wind down. They thought that was
Speaker 1: gonna be their last release or whatever. There's like people argue,
Speaker 1: like they claim sometimes they claim that they were going
Speaker 1: to disband the band in nineteen eighty four because of
Speaker 1: George or well, like everyone everyone in the UK thought
Speaker 1: nineteen eighty four was gonna be like a big deal.
Speaker 1: When it happened, you know, it's kind of like a
Speaker 1: year two thousand kind of thing. But some people were like, oh,
Speaker 1: we were always going to disband in nineteen eighty four,
Speaker 1: and other people were like, no, that was just some
Speaker 1: bullshit we used to say. But all of this political
Speaker 1: stuff kept them involved. That makes sense to me. Suddenly
Speaker 1: being important in world political events is a bunch of
Speaker 1: weirdo punks. That has got to be a trip like
Speaker 1: that has got to feel at least interesting, you know,
Speaker 1: how do you walk away from that?
Speaker 3: Yeah?
Speaker 2: And also it's like you realize you're performing a service,
Speaker 2: and totally, once you realize that the world needs you you,
Speaker 2: you need to respond to.
Speaker 1: That no totally and it's got to be weird pressure too,
Speaker 1: and maybe even in response to that pressure, I don't know,
Speaker 1: they were like, we're going back to our roots really hard.
Speaker 1: In nineteen eighty three, they released their most experimental album,
Speaker 1: which is called yes, Sir, I Will, which comes from
Speaker 1: a like one of the generals or whatever. There's like
Speaker 1: a wounded soldier and he was like, get better soon,
Speaker 1: and the soldier was like, yes, sir, I will, like
Speaker 1: you know, and so that's what they called their album.
Speaker 1: It didn't have so much as songs as like a
Speaker 1: one noise spoken word track on both sides of the record.
Speaker 1: It theoretically holds the record for the longest punk song
Speaker 1: because there's no divisions between the different pieces of it
Speaker 1: on the record, like where the little lines of you know,
Speaker 1: you look at a record and you can see where
Speaker 1: the song's end or whatever. And this album wasn't like
Speaker 1: really enjoyable to a lot of people's very avant garde.
Speaker 1: They started playing shows that a lot of people weren't into,
Speaker 1: where they would just play the entire album start to finish,
Speaker 1: instead of playing the hits and things like that, going.
Speaker 2: Going back to their Rootsa's exit.
Speaker 1: Yeah. Basically, Steve Ignorant in particular didn't love standing around
Speaker 1: with a written script because it was so long that
Speaker 1: they just literally had the script in front of them.
Speaker 1: He was struggling at this point with the non rock
Speaker 1: and roll nature of the band. He's the young you know,
Speaker 1: the young punk who kind of started the whole thing.
Speaker 3: What's their age difference.
Speaker 1: I think he's about ten to fifteen years younger than everyone. Okay,
Speaker 1: he said quote from Crass, like from his time in Crass,
Speaker 1: I don't have any of those anecdotes. Oh there was
Speaker 1: the night where we got the fire extinguishers, etc. Which
Speaker 1: is the stuff people love to hear. We didn't have
Speaker 1: none of that, Just cups of tea and staying around
Speaker 1: people's houses and being polite to their mum and dad.
Speaker 2: Ah.
Speaker 1: I have read a ridiculous amount about Crass in the
Speaker 1: past couple weeks, but I've only scratched the surface. I
Speaker 1: did read this critique of them, though I read it
Speaker 1: on my phone and I didn't tract the name of it,
Speaker 1: so it's not my source. List. I'm sorry about that,
Speaker 1: but I also don't agree with it, and so whatever.
Speaker 1: And I read this thing that argues that the failure
Speaker 1: of Crass in an arco punk was that it had
Speaker 1: no involvement in actual social movements, and I was like
Speaker 1: nodding along reading it when I first read it, because
Speaker 1: I read it pretty early on, I was like, I'm
Speaker 1: gonna look up some stuff about Krass. But after reading
Speaker 1: more about Crass, I think that this is entirely untrue.
Speaker 1: I wasn't surprised to realize that the article had been
Speaker 1: written by an authoritarian socialist magazine that was basically like MAD.
Speaker 1: That Krass wasn't specifically part of some specific named leftist
Speaker 1: mass movement, right.
Speaker 2: Yeah, and they were. They wanted them to be their lapdogs.
Speaker 1: Yeah, totally, totally. Crass and an arcopunk in general were
Speaker 1: absolutely directly involved with all sorts of mass movements, especially
Speaker 1: the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament the CND. From what I
Speaker 1: can tell, they revitalized it like it was kind of
Speaker 1: a dying movement. But then Krass would use its logo
Speaker 1: with a piece symbol like everywhere. You can also say
Speaker 1: that the modern anarchist movement stems at least as much
Speaker 1: from a narco punk as traditional anarchism. But fortunately it's
Speaker 1: like left behind being only one subculture, because subculture is
Speaker 1: fine when it's not. When people think like, oh, in
Speaker 1: order to be a leftist or an anarchist or whatever,
Speaker 1: I have to be a punk, that is nonsense, you know.
Speaker 1: But it's cool when subcultures have radical politics within them.
Speaker 1: I just want a million subcultures, as you said, like
Speaker 1: diversity is our strength, you know. And modern protest tactics
Speaker 1: and styles, like our styles of protesting owe an awful
Speaker 1: lot to the UK in the eighties, specifically around the
Speaker 1: turn of the millennia. Later, the US, Mexico and Europe
Speaker 1: at least have these huge anti globalization protests which kicked
Speaker 1: off twenty first century protest culture in the West, and
Speaker 1: of course I have an affinity for it because that's
Speaker 1: how I got involved, and we owe an awful lot
Speaker 1: about those tactics and how those protests went to this
Speaker 1: time period, there was this anarchist group called London Green Peace,
Speaker 1: which threw me through a loop because I would just oh,
Speaker 1: the articles would be like, oh, London green Peace did
Speaker 1: this thing, and I was like, oh, okay, Green Peace
Speaker 1: the organization, but in London, that was what I was thinking, right, right,
Speaker 1: there's no relation to the organization we currently know today's
Speaker 1: green Peace. It turns out both get their names honestly.
Speaker 1: They both grew out of the same grassroots environmental movement
Speaker 1: that called itself green Peace, but then a huge chunk
Speaker 1: of it became green Peace International, the thing that grandma's
Speaker 1: donate money to do to save whales or whatever. Yeah,
Speaker 1: London green Peace was still grassroots, and in nineteen eighty
Speaker 1: three they called for some protests. At least I've read
Speaker 1: it was them. Other places say Crass called them for
Speaker 1: the protests, and other places say it came about completely
Speaker 1: organically and no one called for it. Whatever. The anarcho
Speaker 1: punks and the pacifists called for some protests. Crass says
Speaker 1: it was Greenpeace, so we'll go with that. There have
Speaker 1: been these huge peace camps and such like. Basically tens
Speaker 1: of thousands of people were showing up to block military bases.
Speaker 1: But some people were like, why are we going all
Speaker 1: the way out to the countryside to do this. The
Speaker 1: halls of power are right here in London, So they
Speaker 1: called for a stop the city demonstration. They wanted to
Speaker 1: shut down London was the idea, specifically the Financial district,
Speaker 1: and this was to bring together the pacifice and the
Speaker 1: anarchists into this big mobilization, and this was an uneasy alliance.
Speaker 1: Sometimes the pacifists were worried that anyone who defended themselves
Speaker 1: against the police or damaged property would make the movement
Speaker 1: look bad, and the cops themselves were super worried.
Speaker 2: I was just thinking, this is some Hampton shit, you
Speaker 2: know Fred Hampton. Oh yeah, yeah, yeah, totally, this is like, yeah,
Speaker 2: this is like like getting.
Speaker 1: Getting these different people. Yeah.
Speaker 2: Big coalitions really make you a target fast.
Speaker 1: Yeah, that's true. And it's interesting because this one it
Speaker 1: it forms a coalition and it is this loose one
Speaker 1: and yeah, like it absolutely worried the shit out of
Speaker 1: the state because the cops were like for decades in UK,
Speaker 1: well not nine Northern Ireland, but like in England, protest
Speaker 1: organizers had been willing to like meet with cops to
Speaker 1: coordinate the whole thing, you know, like, oh, we're gonna
Speaker 1: do our march from here to there and get permits
Speaker 1: and do everything the right way or whatever right And
Speaker 1: for some weird reason, the anarchists in the past of us.
Speaker 1: It didn't, and so cops showed up at an anarchist
Speaker 1: meeting to be like, can we can we please talk
Speaker 1: this over? Can you like we know you're doing a thing,
Speaker 1: can we just can we be part of planning? And
Speaker 1: they like, no one would work with them, and they
Speaker 1: all had to leave.
Speaker 2: Some it's some Hampton shit, and it's also some Judy
Speaker 2: Barry shit. So yeah, it's like when you get really effective,
Speaker 2: you get really it's it's really hot water.
Speaker 1: Yeah, totally. And so before the protests, they squatted an
Speaker 1: empty office building to create an anarchist social center called
Speaker 1: the Peace Center. Cops raided it the night before the protests,
Speaker 1: looking for weapons. There weren't any weapons, but the raid
Speaker 1: didn't stop the protest. To quote George Berger from the
Speaker 1: book The Story of Crass quote, normal demonstrations had leaders,
Speaker 1: stewards organization and an overload of Socialist Workers' Party placards.
Speaker 1: Stop the city had kids in colorful rags, breaking off
Speaker 1: from the main group on their own initiative to affect
Speaker 1: their own actions. Graffiti, street theater, free food bank, locks,
Speaker 1: glued patriot flags, burned leaf litting anti apartheid actions against
Speaker 1: Barkley's Bank, many arrests. By the virtue of about fifteen
Speaker 1: hundred leaderless young punks and a few older ones, the
Speaker 1: anarcho punk movement had arrived. It was no longer simply
Speaker 1: a bunch of kids who bought the same records. It
Speaker 1: was and is a people's culture, and so I like that.
Speaker 1: The thing that makes them real is like when they
Speaker 1: start doing stuff outside of just subcultural spheres. You know,
Speaker 1: a ton of people were arrested. Two hundred people caught
Speaker 1: charges at the first one. Between the first one and
Speaker 1: the second one, a thousand people were arrested, and the
Speaker 1: financial district was like all chewed up. They did a
Speaker 1: ton of financial damage, like by stopping the ability for
Speaker 1: business as usual to continue. And so they did it
Speaker 1: again the next year. But something even bigger happened the
Speaker 1: next year. And these are the like, this is the
Speaker 1: real coalition shit, this is the like I'm going to
Speaker 1: eventually be doing a lot of episodes about this shit.
Speaker 1: Have you heard about the miners strikes in the UK
Speaker 1: in nineteen eighty four. It's okay if you haven't, but
Speaker 1: I'm just curious.
Speaker 2: No I have, I'm not fully informed, but yeah, yeah, no, it.
Speaker 2: It was gigantic.
Speaker 1: Yeah, in nineteen eighty four, Thatcher had decided in March
Speaker 1: nineteen eighty four, Thatcher had decided to break the working
Speaker 1: class and unions for good. About twenty thousand miners were
Speaker 1: going to be laid off and so all of the
Speaker 1: miners went on strike. And this became a battle for
Speaker 1: the whole of the English working class because it was
Speaker 1: fairly heavily socialist and Thatcher wanted to shatter that wanted
Speaker 1: to just destroy class unity, you know, among the working class.
Speaker 1: And this was a massive showdown kind of beyond what's
Speaker 1: easy to imagine for an American. I think it was
Speaker 1: almost a civil war between the right, Thatcher and the left,
Speaker 1: which was working class miners and their supporters. And the
Speaker 1: reason is so hard is that like the US has
Speaker 1: had a strong ever since the Red Scare has had
Speaker 1: a pretty strong hold, the right wing has had a
Speaker 1: pretty stronghold on like rural culture, you know.
Speaker 2: Totally but not complete. But you know, you.
Speaker 3: Read your Robin DG.
Speaker 2: Kelly, and there was so much socialism coming from the
Speaker 2: ground up all throughout this rural South.
Speaker 1: Yeah, no, absolutely, like, and we have this idea that
Speaker 1: somehow rural poor people have always been right winging that
Speaker 1: this is a completely untrue, including in America, Like it
Speaker 1: just socialism, leftism and anarchism and communism were just so
Speaker 1: completely memory hold in the US, like starting in the
Speaker 1: nineteen forties and fifties, and when this minor strike happened,
Speaker 1: punks came out in droves to support the miners despite
Speaker 1: this massive cultural divide between the urban weirdo queer punks
Speaker 1: and the like normy you know, the miners who are
Speaker 1: much more culturally conservative. And one day I'm going to
Speaker 1: cover the strike in more detail because i want to
Speaker 1: talk about this group called lesbians and gay support the miners.
Speaker 1: But if you ever want to cry, watch the movie Pride.
Speaker 1: It was about this.
Speaker 2: Yeah cool, it's English movie.
Speaker 1: Yeah, it's an English movie about lesbians and gay support
Speaker 1: the miners. And it's about learning to find solidarity between
Speaker 1: these like urban gay punks and like weirdos showing up
Speaker 1: in these like you know, small towns of culturally conservative
Speaker 1: people and being like, well, we're here to support you
Speaker 1: and people you know, like reminds me a lot of
Speaker 1: like I've done a it's been a while, but I
Speaker 1: used to do a lot of like role organizing with
Speaker 1: like environmental campaign stuff, you know, and like queer punks
Speaker 1: and trans people would be like showing up and hanging
Speaker 1: out with people and like watching people like be like, well,
Speaker 1: all right, what's this pronoun thing? You know? And like
Speaker 1: and then like vice versa, like there's all kinds of
Speaker 1: shit that we have to learn too, and like it's
Speaker 1: just like, literally, this is what makes my heart move
Speaker 1: forward on a day to day basis is like solidarity.
Speaker 2: Yeah, I love that scene in mate Wan where where
Speaker 2: they're all playing music together, all the different all the
Speaker 2: different factions of that the I'm.
Speaker 3: Getting teary eyed, I know.
Speaker 2: Yeah, like all the the bosses are trying to you know,
Speaker 2: divide everybody and.
Speaker 1: Yeah, white versus Italian versus black, Yeah, I think.
Speaker 2: Was that one and then they just all like end
Speaker 2: up playing music together.
Speaker 1: Yeah.
Speaker 2: I got to see Will Oldham play the other night
Speaker 2: here in Los Angeles. My partner used to be in
Speaker 2: his band, and uh he he plays the child's preacher
Speaker 2: in mate Wan.
Speaker 1: Oh shit, Oh cool.
Speaker 3: Oh you didn't know that.
Speaker 2: Yeah, that's that's a baby Will Oldham. Fuck.
Speaker 1: Yeah.
Speaker 3: Yeah.
Speaker 1: So during this strike in the UK, everything became very serious,
Speaker 1: like it was just a really dire time spoiler alert them. Well, no,
Speaker 1: I'll get to it. The miners are gonna lose. But meanwhile,
Speaker 1: Crass started like, in order to get through police checkpoints
Speaker 1: and play benefit shows, they would dress not as cops
Speaker 1: but like cops and then drive the same kind of
Speaker 1: car that cops drove. But like not, it wasn't like
Speaker 1: they were like, hello, officer, I am officer. You know,
Speaker 1: they were like they did it like legally. They just
Speaker 1: wore the same outfits and shit, I think it's really clever.
Speaker 1: And they hung a huge banner over the Thames, which
Speaker 1: is the river that goes through England that if you
Speaker 1: ever see something in writing and you're like the Fames,
Speaker 1: well it's the Thames. And they hung this banner where
Speaker 1: Parliament could see it. And this is probably my favorite
Speaker 1: slogan I've ever seen from Krass. It read you picked
Speaker 1: the scabs, Now the wounds will fester.
Speaker 2: Oh yeah, that's come on. There are such gorgeous lyricists.
Speaker 2: I'm so moved by their writing.
Speaker 1: Yeah, and I think a lot of them because it
Speaker 1: wasn't just like oh, it wasn't like Penny wrote it
Speaker 1: or Steve wrote it, or Eve wrote it. You know,
Speaker 1: it was like they all I don't know if I
Speaker 1: think they each wrote different songs, but like they clearly
Speaker 1: were challenging each other to write poetically and well, you know.
Speaker 2: Yeah, I love I love that. Just yeah, seeing people
Speaker 2: that all keep each other on their toes.
Speaker 1: Yeah. Crass played their final show in nineteen eighty four,
Speaker 1: in July nineteen eighty four, and it was a benefit
Speaker 1: for Welsh miners. And then basically it was nineteen eighty
Speaker 1: four and they sort of promised to break up in
Speaker 1: nineteen eighty four and then they started to Andy Palmer
Speaker 1: went first. They were all just kind of burned out.
Speaker 1: In nineteen eighty five, the miners called off the strike
Speaker 1: Thatcher one she was fighting the enemy within and soon
Speaker 1: she attacked the Stonehenge Festival and other like leftist and
Speaker 1: free culture and whatever stuff. After the band broke up,
Speaker 1: a song on their old album Penis Envy was banned
Speaker 1: for obscenity, and slowly folks started drifting away from the
Speaker 1: band and from the well from Dialhouse. After Crass, Steve
Speaker 1: Ignorant said, quote, the bands that came after Crass outcrassed
Speaker 1: Crass by being even more scruffy and dirty and being
Speaker 1: even more square and even more miserable than we were
Speaker 1: meant to be. They became even more politically correct, which
Speaker 1: is to say Steve Ignorant was not a fan of
Speaker 1: the or a copunk culture that Krass created. He didn't
Speaker 1: like that people called him comrade. Oh yeah, and to
Speaker 1: be fair, a lot of people don't like when you
Speaker 1: call him comrade.
Speaker 3: No, it's cosplaying a bit.
Speaker 2: Yeah yeah. Also, politically correct started out as a leftist joke,
Speaker 2: and then the right, oh yeah, and then the right
Speaker 2: used it against the left. I'll just I'll take this
Speaker 2: moment to say one of the I learned this phrase
Speaker 2: from Eduardo Galiano's he was quoting Argentinian organizers at the time.
Speaker 2: Power they say is like a violin. You grab it
Speaker 2: with the left and you play it with the right.
Speaker 1: Fuck. Fuck that is I mean that's what Mussolini did right, like,
Speaker 1: but I.
Speaker 2: Mean that's what Biden did, like recently, with like just
Speaker 2: taking all the like George Floyd energy and then turning
Speaker 2: it into whatever the hell he was doing.
Speaker 1: Yeah. The By the end of nineteen eighty nine, everyone
Speaker 1: from Krass who was still at Dial House had a
Speaker 1: big blow up fight if you listen to more critical
Speaker 1: takes about Crass. Basically all the puritanical arguing about what
Speaker 1: was the right political line like came to a head
Speaker 1: without the band to keep them focused. I think their
Speaker 1: like last fight that they had was about whether or
Speaker 1: not like smoking was politically correct or whatever, you know,
Speaker 1: And you know, they would argue about like can you
Speaker 1: have milk in your tea? Like everyone in Crass's vegetarian
Speaker 1: is to my understanding, but like people used to use
Speaker 1: the word vegetarian where we might use were vegan now
Speaker 1: and they were like a little bit more interchangeable and
Speaker 1: you know whatever, people'd argu about that shit. After the
Speaker 1: band broke up, Steve Ignorant started playing with the narco
Speaker 1: punk band Conflict, who was one of the main bands
Speaker 1: in the scene, and they were a little bit less
Speaker 1: than the passifist tip and more on the animal rights tip.
Speaker 1: Steve also became a puppeteer, doing punch and judy shows
Speaker 1: for kids, and Penny and Eve and g started doing
Speaker 1: free jazz and poetry as we all knew they would
Speaker 1: do without Crass.
Speaker 2: I love I love seeing the end of bands, like
Speaker 2: where everyone goes off and does their own thing and
Speaker 2: everyone shows their colors, like like the one guy from
Speaker 2: the Velvet Underground who like became a steamboat operator and
Speaker 2: oh shit really yeah, and like I think like got
Speaker 2: some kind of amazing degree and something very obscure, like.
Speaker 3: It's just it's it's it's sweet.
Speaker 2: People are yeah, yeah, okay, all right, I love this
Speaker 2: part of the story.
Speaker 1: Yeah, like and then it actually as a happy ending
Speaker 1: on some ways too. The land Dial houses on was
Speaker 1: sold to basically become a golf course, but Dial House
Speaker 1: sued and won, and so the landlords were like, fine,
Speaker 1: when we're selling the house then, and they sold it
Speaker 1: at auction. So all the friends of Dial House showed
Speaker 1: up at the auction and bought it.
Speaker 3: Is it?
Speaker 2: Is it like one of the Is it like cob
Speaker 2: or something like When I think of an old old
Speaker 2: English house, I think like that ancient construction, you know.
Speaker 1: So I've looked at pictures of it. It's it was
Speaker 1: first built in like the fourteen hundreds or the oldest
Speaker 1: houses from the fourteen hundreds, and it's been added on
Speaker 1: to room after room over time, and so I but
Speaker 1: I couldn't tell you exactly the types of construction. Whenever
Speaker 1: I leave the US I'm always like, wow, everything's built
Speaker 1: different with like plaster and stuff, you know. But I
Speaker 1: but I couldn't tell you it's cute. You can, there's
Speaker 1: plenty of pictures of it, and so dial House, as
Speaker 1: far as I can tell, still there. And I think, well,
Speaker 1: I don't want to docks. I think that the people
Speaker 1: still just live there, you know, and are still doing
Speaker 1: their thing. Like fifty years later and along the way,
Speaker 1: Krass sold about two million records in the seven years
Speaker 1: that they were around, the population of the UK was
Speaker 1: only fifty six million people at the time, and I
Speaker 1: know it wasn't like one record for every you know,
Speaker 1: couple being whatever. I can't do math in my head,
Speaker 1: but like, selling two million records at any time is
Speaker 1: a big deal, but selling it in a smallish country.
Speaker 1: As for what they accomplished, At one point, an interviewer
Speaker 1: was talking to Steve Ignorant about how he and others
Speaker 1: had basically destroyed the legacy of Margaret Thatcher that when
Speaker 1: she died in twenty thirteen, it couldn't be said that
Speaker 1: like people had a harder time whitewashing Margaret Thatcher, right,
Speaker 1: because history also remembers that people fucking hated her too,
Speaker 1: and Steve said, in response to the interviewer, that's my
Speaker 1: proudest thing that a spotty little oike from Dagenham actually
Speaker 1: stood up knees trembling as he avoided the ash trays
Speaker 1: being thrown at him and still fucking did it. And like, yeah,
Speaker 1: here's the standing up knees trembling, dodging ash trays and
Speaker 1: fucking doing it.
Speaker 3: You're making me cry again.
Speaker 1: Yeah.
Speaker 3: Yeah, I love their immediacy.
Speaker 2: I love their you know, talking shit to power at
Speaker 2: every turn.
Speaker 1: Yeah. It's interesting because the main critique that comes up
Speaker 1: over and over again is about like PC culture, uh,
Speaker 1: kind of creating a puritanical space where like we figure
Speaker 1: out more and more things that are bad without figuring
Speaker 1: out more and more like ways of being good.
Speaker 2: You know. Well, yeah, but people are we're such intelligent
Speaker 2: animals and uh, you know, people are just complicated and
Speaker 2: we were we're so dogged to grab another animal metaphor
Speaker 2: and we just we just go for stuff. And it's
Speaker 2: like that was part of their you know, their artistic
Speaker 2: vision is that they were being critical and that they
Speaker 2: were empowering people to be critical. So yeah, they yeah, sure,
Speaker 2: of course they overdid it. They're they're people.
Speaker 1: Yeah, no, totally, and it it was necessary to to
Speaker 1: break a lot of things by saying like, no, we're
Speaker 1: just gonna do this shit. And I fucking love that.
Speaker 1: It came from the combination of avant garden punk, which
Speaker 1: are like actually go together me if you listen Acrass,
Speaker 1: they go together very well, right, But like you wouldn't
Speaker 1: know it thinking about it. You know, you wouldn't when
Speaker 1: you're like thinking about, like, oh, would this work really
Speaker 1: well to create this thing? And but they both like
Speaker 1: were just like, oh no, fuck the rules, you know.
Speaker 2: Right, if you don't know any avant garde people, you
Speaker 2: might you might be able to kind of fool yourself
Speaker 2: into seeing those things as separate worlds. But in my experience,
Speaker 2: they are all the same people.
Speaker 1: Yeah, totally, especially the ones who like take music seriously,
Speaker 1: you know, yeah, like the people making the music.
Speaker 2: Yeah.
Speaker 1: I was like trying to explain at some point when
Speaker 1: I was like, you know, ten fifteen years ago or something,
Speaker 1: I was like talking to someone, I was like, oh no,
Speaker 1: like when I say punk now, like you know, I
Speaker 1: was like walking somewhere with like my friend who like
Speaker 1: wears clean clothes, and color, and I'm like, oh yeah, no,
Speaker 1: like us punk's right, and it was just like it
Speaker 1: was a much broader word and concept and like and
Speaker 1: when I think about like not just like folk punk
Speaker 1: as a genre, but literally like the fact that punk
Speaker 1: culture also makes pop music, makes noise music, makes country music,
Speaker 1: makes folk music, like you know, it's like it's all
Speaker 1: gotten beautifully complicated instead of getting more and more obsessive
Speaker 1: about I mean, sometimes people get more and more obsessive
Speaker 1: about niche subgenres and that's actually fine, but like instead
Speaker 1: just this like big mess of I don't know, just
Speaker 1: because sometimes people are like, oh my, my ethos is
Speaker 1: punk and it's not. It's not SLC punk, you know,
Speaker 1: it's not the like cartoonish punk. I don't know where
Speaker 1: I'm going with this.
Speaker 2: Well, genre genre is I'm I don't have a strong
Speaker 2: relationship with genre and.
Speaker 1: Personally the singer songwriter, right.
Speaker 2: Because I you know, when I put up my last record,
Speaker 2: Haunted Mountain, there's a dance song on it. Because I
Speaker 2: don't know, I would assume partly because of the misogyny
Speaker 2: inherent in the culture, but you know, maybe that has
Speaker 2: to do with like pigeonholing me. I'm just like it
Speaker 2: was so funny se all these reviewers look at this
Speaker 2: dance track and the whole record and try to say
Speaker 2: that it was folk. I really don't know what they're
Speaker 2: talking about.
Speaker 3: I mean, especially listening to.
Speaker 2: Do They Owe Us a Living for the first time
Speaker 2: a few days ago, was like this is oh yeah,
Speaker 2: this is definitively punk. This is like this is classic punk.
Speaker 2: And I remember like coming up in scenes where all
Speaker 2: these Americans, all these Houstonians had British accents, like like
Speaker 2: they needed all of it, you know, they took they
Speaker 2: took the entire palette of of that that expression of
Speaker 2: the genre of punk.
Speaker 1: Yeah, I like punk. I is that My closing thought
Speaker 1: is I like punk. I was even like a punk
Speaker 1: as a teenager is a weird goth kid, but like
Speaker 1: once it became a squadron traveler and really kind of
Speaker 1: fell in with the punks and the more political punks
Speaker 1: and just it just felt it felt like home in
Speaker 1: a way that like nothing ever had even if it,
Speaker 1: you know, I would listen to Crass sometimes, but it
Speaker 1: wasn't like it's not the thing I put on. I
Speaker 1: would actually actually the same scene listen to a lot
Speaker 1: of Julie Holland.
Speaker 2: So that makes me feel so good.
Speaker 3: That's lovely.
Speaker 2: Thank you.
Speaker 1: Yeah. Well, if you're listening to this, if you want
Speaker 1: to know more about an archo punk. Almost a sequel
Speaker 1: to this is an episode about the the anarchist punk
Speaker 1: band Trumba Wamba with that I did with the guy
Speaker 1: from Eve six is the main way that you might
Speaker 1: know him. Also, you can start a band, you can
Speaker 1: make music, you can do whatever. You can start a podcast.
Speaker 1: You can do these things and you should because why
Speaker 1: not you only live once? Or whatever makes me want
Speaker 1: to start a band, You just start a band. Yeah,
Speaker 1: like another band, like two other bands. Oh, I'd have
Speaker 1: to get better at electric guitar if I wanted to
Speaker 1: play in a punk.
Speaker 3: Band, or learn as you go.
Speaker 1: That's true, that is the more classic way to do it. Well,
Speaker 1: that's the end of this, And thank you Jolie for
Speaker 1: coming on. And people should check out your music everywhere
Speaker 1: that music is music.
Speaker 2: And yeah, Margaret, thank you so very much for having me.
Speaker 2: Everyone should check out your podcast wherever podcasts are podcasted,
Speaker 2: and read your books and listen to your audio books
Speaker 2: and just enjoy your music.
Speaker 1: Oh thanks, Oh I guess I should say I probably
Speaker 1: do talk about a fair amount. My music is. I
Speaker 1: have a bunch of bands on band camp. If you
Speaker 1: want to hear a black metal band that actually is
Speaker 1: kind of avant garde, it's called Femino's School and that's
Speaker 1: I also have a dark, gothy pop music project called
Speaker 1: the medic War Machine that used to be more noisy.
Speaker 1: And I have a one woman do metal EP but
Speaker 1: I put it out but I never did follow up
Speaker 1: called Vulgarite. But if you're like, I want to listen
Speaker 1: to a one woman do metal band that is themed
Speaker 1: after the works of William Blake, you can listen to Vulgarite.
Speaker 1: And my newest album is years old and it's called
Speaker 1: The Lathe and it is post punk and is with
Speaker 1: one of my friends is an amazing songwriter, and that's
Speaker 1: also on band camp. There that's my weird music shout
Speaker 1: outs before podcasting consume my life.
Speaker 2: Is Yeah, well it's you know, it's good to figure
Speaker 2: out how to get paid.
Speaker 1: Yeah.
Speaker 2: I you know when I was when I just started
Speaker 2: listening to Krass a few days ago, I felt that
Speaker 2: they were Blakian.
Speaker 1: Yeah, I could totally see that.
Speaker 2: Yeah, it's like they're so English, and they're like, hey,
Speaker 2: what if this was a better place?
Speaker 1: And they even like come from graphic design, like William
Speaker 1: Blake was a did etchings for a living.
Speaker 2: That's incredible exactly. And then they and also like they
Speaker 2: have their own idiosyncratic theology theology exactly.
Speaker 1: Yeah, Well we had ended there and I'll talk to
Speaker 1: you soon and all you listeners, I'll talk to you
Speaker 1: next week.
Speaker 2: Adios.
Speaker 1: Cool People Who Did Cool Stuff is a production of
Speaker 1: cool Zone Media.
Speaker 2: More podcasts on cool Zone Media, visit our website Coolzonemedia
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