Two interviews with Penny Rimbaud (with Unterberger, & -2- by GEORGE BERGER) -1Penny Rimbaud interview by Richie Unterberger Q: Crass had to fight legal prosecution on a few occasions. What were the circum stances behind them? P: Really, there was two major situations. One was very early on. We were still with Small Wonder Records in those days, who were the people who had put out our first 12-inch record. We had difficulty getting the first track pressed, the fi rst track being called "Reality Asylum." It was being pressed in Ireland. The ac tual people on the shop floor objected to the content of the first track. So we left a three-minute silence, or the length of the track silence, at the beginnin g of the album. So that the management of Small Wonder weren't under any threat from it, we decided to press it ourselves as a single. We found someone who'd do it in England. Shortly after we released it, Small Wonder was raided by Scotlan d Yard's vice squad, whose normal job is to sort of raid porn shops in Central L ondon. They couldn't really understand quite why they'd been sent out to a cotta ge in the Essex countryside to investigate the record. They were completely out of their depth, basically. There had been a similar case several years earlier with the Gay News [which] wa s prosecuted under exactly the same thing they were writing up, which was crimin al blasphemy. Which I don't think exists in any other western country. So they w ere investigating us on a case of criminal blasphemy. Having interviewed us, the y then said they were going to put it before the director of public prosecutions . About six months later, we actually heard that they had decided to drop the ca se. But we were given a very stern warning not to release any similar material, which naturally encouraged us to release more. We then moved our material away from Small Wonder. When we released Feeding the 5000, we put the track back onto it. We did a new version for the single release , we did an extended version. Following that, obviously what the authorities had decided was that rather than prosecuting us and risking another sort of Pistols pantomime, we heard very soon after the case had been dropped that they were ha ssling shops, they were raiding shops throughout Britain, with no grounds whatso ever, they had no legal grounds to do so. But they were just harassing... mostly small shops, telling them that they were liable to prosecution if they sold our material. Which of course had no legal backup whatsoever, but it was sufficient to scare off a lot of the small shops from stocking our stuff. The authorities, rather than making a big newspaper case out of it, just decided to harass people individually throughout the country. It clearly was a form of policy, which would have the same effect, or a better effect, than making us pub lic names. That followed us right through, from that point on we were in constan t, sort of having problems, always at third hand, from the authorities. We were never raided, we were never directly harassed. But anyone who was arranging gigs , selling our material, etc., was very liable to harassment. Then basically we didn't get threatened with any sort of prosecution until after the Falklands War. We released "How Does It Feel To Be Mother of a Thousand Dea d," which referred to Thatcher obviously. She was actually asked, in the prime m inister's question time, whether she'd listened to the record by a sympathetic l eft-wing member of Parliament, sympathetic to us, that is. [Someone] was sort of

given the job of opening prosecution against us this time for obscenity. That c ompletely failed. The newspapers picked up on that very quickly. Because we were quite hot news at the time, because we'd actually divulged quite a bit of offic ial secrets about the Falklands War. We had a contact who was actually serving i n the Falklands, so we actually got a lot of classified information sent to us b y him, which we were able, one way or another, to sort of get out. We ended up on the radio being confronted by [conservative] Tim Eggar. Basically , he was completely flattened by our arguments. At that point, the Tories withdr ew proceedings, which hadn't gotten any further than the director of public pros ecutions looking at the case. That was the second near-skirmish. The third one was a prosecution, where a shop in Manchester was raided. A large amount of material, including Dead Kennedys material, was taken by the police. T hey put together, again, an obscenity case against us. We lost the first round, and then we took it to appeal. We decided to fight it in Manchester. Having foug ht it in London, then it would have set a precedent. Which would have meant had we lost, that we wouldn't have been allowed to sell our material anywhere in Bri tain. As it goes, we're still not able to officially sell our material in the Ch ester area of Manchester. We took it to appeal. We won the appeal, except on one count. They managed to [c lassify one] track obscene, which actually was a sort of feminist statement abou t Chinese foot binding, mostly. But obviously the magistrate sitting in the cour t probably reflected on his own sort of predilections. So he found us guilty of obscenity on that. We were fined peanuts for it. But the case actually had cost us a phenomenal amount of money in terms of, if ever there was a time at which w e were very nearly buried by what we put money into, that probably was it. We'd been promised money and support from quite a few of the underground distrib utors and the alternative music biz. But when it actually came to it, we got ver y little support, and certainly very very little finance. So it cost us a phenom enal amount. It was probably the first time that we were actually encountered fi nancial difficulties, really. So maybe that story about the VAT thing stemmed fr om that. We certainly had a problem at that point with money, which we hadn't ha d up until then. Mounting the case had cost us a phenomenal amount, and taking i t to appeal had cost us a phenomenal amount. All the way through, there was sort of mild harassment. Those were the three sort of major situations, where the ha rassment was overt. Q: What were the most important ways Crass' music evolved over their career? P: I don't really think one can talk in those terms. I think after our first two albums, I think we responded. I don't think we were involved in sort of any evo lutionary process, in the sense that we weren't a band for musical or lyrical re asons. We were a band for political reasons, and therefore increasingly, as the years wore on, we were producing stuff out of response social situations. Theref ore, artistic or aesthetic considerations didn't really come into it. I think we became increasingly angry, increasingly aware of our impotence, which makes our work increasingly more desperate. But it was desperate in response to what was happening in the country, or globally, at the time. It's almost an irrelevant question, 'cause I don't think we were in the least bi t involved in developing as a band. I don't think that entered into the equation . I think we simply... our political analysis broadened, then narrowed, and broa dened, or whatever it did. And what we produced as a band was a reflection of wh ere we stood politically. Our response to things wasn't a musical or a lyrical r esponse, it was a political response. I think that we brought to our music a wid e range of influences. But then they weren't employed as musical influences, if you understand.

We weren't a band. We never were a band. I don't think we even saw ourselves as a band. I certainly never saw ourselves as a band. We certainly didn't belong in the sort of pantomime of rock'n'roll, and probably even less in the pantomime o f what became known as punk. It wasn't our interest. I mean, we weren't interest ed in making records. We were interested in making statements, and records happe ned to be a way of making statements. It would have been nice to have had that time to think, it would nice to use a C sharp there. But it wasn't like that. Maybe it was right at the beginning, wher e we were sort of consciously doing something. But as the sort of machinery sort of grew, it demanded this, or it demanded that. The machine demanded whatever r esponse was necessary, particularly during and after the Falklands, where probab ly we lost our rag as a band. I think we'd probably blown it by then. We were no longer being particularly rational. I don't think we ever were, particularly. B ut certain situations were just so appalling, it starts to become sort of absurd to try and deal with it through that medium. It's sort of absurd to compare the Falklands with Vietnam, for example. But protest songs, protest rock'n'roll, ca n just be a joke against the real situation. I think, certainly from the Falklan ds, I felt that. And I think probably other members of the band did too. It's to o serious to be dealing with in this possibly superficial way. That was a big qu estion for us over the last few years. Obviously, no musical consideration comes in. The considerations were, should we be doing this at all? Q: Can you see Crass' influence on contemporary music and culture? P: We're inseparable from the entire youth movement of the moment. What we contr ibuted was so broad, and so powerful, so invasive, that I think it's in everythi ng. And I don't think I'm being pompous in that. In everything alternative--from the road protest to class war to feminist cells, whatever, to the American hard core movement to the Polish, whatever. It's everywhere. I don't think there's an y single, individual influence. I think that would be irrelevant. Like the hippie movement. People say, oh, it was just people wandering around wi th sort of long hair. It wasn't. If you look at any health food shop or book sho p or la la la, you'll find the sort of effects of that movement. Likewise with C rass and the sort of movement that it spawned. I certainly think without Crass, none of what has now looked back as the effects of punk... it would have had no effect at all. I mean, the Pistols and that group, those commercial people, last ed for about two years. They were just an extension of the usual music business tactics. They had no sort of political overview whatsoever. It was us that introduced a meaningful overview into what was then called punk. And bands similar to us. It's an untold... I don't think you could even quantify it. It's sort of like saying, well, what influence did Jean-Paul Sartre and Sim one de Beauvoir have? They wrote a few books that you might like or you might no t like, but their influence is global. I think it's likewise with us. I don't th ink that's pompous to compare ourselves with the sort of French existentialists. They were similarly sort of authentic movement who had this profound global eff ect in all sorts of untold ways, I think. I can see a bit of us in everything. In a funny way, those things almost didn't enter into the equation. As far as I was concerned, I was happiest about the fact that the young 'uns came up well th at year, or the cat wasn't sick, or I was making love nicely. As far as Crass wa s concerned, we sacrificed those sorts of pleasures and pains for the common goo d. I would almost go as far as saying, we didn't know what we felt on that sort of personal level. That wasn't part of the equation, that wasn't part of the agr eement. It was a machine, an incredibly efficient machine, in which we could and did act as human beings. But I don't think... I can't recall any day thinking, that was a wonderful day, any more than I can recall thinking, that was a terrib

le day. We made mistakes and we had successes, and they all seemed to be one and the same thing in a way. 'Cause we were what we were. I'm sure other members of the band would say, well, I remember such and such. Bu t I can't do that, 'cause I wasn't me, I was Crass. I think really we all were b y degrees. We had an incredible sense of omnipotence, in the sense that because we were Crass and we weren't individuals, there was this extraordinary sense we could take on anything. And we did. We were sort of relatively fearless in our a ttacks and our attempts to confront the authorities. I suppose an awful lot of what we did was to test the boundaries all the time. W e were constantly testing the boundaries-how fast can we go? It seemed we could go as far as we wanted. It seemed that we could do anything that we wanted to do , we were able to. The only limitation was our imagination, lack of political an alysis, or whatever. But ultimately, we could do just what we wanted to do. And no one seemed to get in the way. And if they did get in the way, it didn't matte r, because they were getting in the way of a name, Crass. They weren't getting i n the way of me at all. I was still looking after the young 'uns and stroking th e cats. Things only make you frustrated if you've got expectations. I don't think we had any expectations. We didn't start with any expectations, and we didn't finish w ith any expectations. So you can't really be frustrated if you haven't got any e xpectations. I couldn't now, and I didn't then, care whether or not a record was at #10 in the charts or nowhere at all in the charts. It didn't really interest me very much. I don't think it interested anyone particularly. It didn't mean a nything. What meant something was that people were expanding their own conscious ness. And if we were a part of that, that was all well and good. But again, we d idn't know that we were. We couldn't know that. We saw that people were happy to be at our gigs. You can't qualify all that, or quantify it. I think I was just happy to do it, 'cause it needed doing, I suppose, or I felt it needed doing. I don't think that we were a band in the conventional sense of the word. I don't think we saw ourselves as individuals within a band. We stripped ourselves of t hat. We were the band-we were Crass. I think that's why we were so strong, and w hy we were so impenetrable. That becomes an irrelevancy, because if you haven't got individuals, then you can't ask certain questions, they became meaningless. We've become individuals now, but we weren't then. I think our greatest achievem ent was to manage for however many long years it was, seven years, to sort of pu t aside our own individual passions and needs and desires, for what we believed was the common good. And which some of us might no longer believe was the common good, but we certainly did at the time. -2PENNY RIMBAUD INTERVIEW by GEORGE BERGER NB. This is a long interview - you may well want to print it out to save time, money & your eyesight! " I did everything I possibly could, but it wasn't enough. The same with Crass. It didn't have any effect. Crass was out there to destroy society as we know it. If I thought I'd done enough, I wouldn't do anything else." Penny Rimbaud is ruminating on the death of Wally Hope and Crass - the band form ed as a subsequent chain of reactions to that death. The year is 1999 and we're sat in a place as unnervingly near to paradise as I'v e experienced. And it's in Essex. How did I come to be here? There's a couple of

answers to that, depending on how you take the question. Back when they were going, there used to be a sleepy 'Oh Dr. Beaching' tube stop (North Weald) near Crass' house. At the stop, it was rumoured there was a man e mployed purely to dissuade many young visiting punks from bunking the fair, as w as their inevitable want. However, the tube station is now gone and the line end s a few miles up the road at Epping. Therefore it's a cab ride for us decadent o nes. The cab driver treats me to the claims-to fame of North Weald: the aerodrome hos ts the biggest market in the world and was the set for the 'Battle Of Britain' f ilm - both reasonably ironic in this setting. Though the farm track up to Dial H ouse is a good mile long, I decide to stop at the local pub for a pint before go ing up there, and walk the rest. The reasons for this are two-fold: it's a nice walk and it will stir some most pleasant memories; and I'm about to enter an 'ot herworld': the old Crass HQ is like nothing I've ever experienced, as I will det ail shortly. But first a pint to prepare myself in the ridiculously olde cting my thoughts along with my change, I remember the days he forefront of the 'battle'. Singularly the most important eration at least. This lot left the Pistols at the starting to '4 Real', and the Manics too, for that matter. and poshe pub. Colle when Crass were at t band ever, for a gen blocks when it came

The walk is as I remember it, only this time I do remember it and save myself a good half-hour in the process. I'm nervous. I don't know why. I've met Penny man y times, and not just here, but Crass always gave me a sense of insecurity. Late r, Penny was to sum up the feeling when he talked about the effect John Lennon h ad on him: precious few peoples' music pokes you in the side to remind yourself that 'morally' (for want of a better word) you could be trying harder, doing bet ter. For many music journalists, this is a reminder of the 'See Me' days at scho ol and they react with according hostility. To suggest music might have some syn ergy with life beyond it is, it seems, a heresy. Up to Dial House. No door bell. A couple of doors (if you know where to look), b ut no discernible front door. Plants, flowers and vegetable patches everywhere, all immaculately cared for like the house belongs in some posh property magazine . Which it has, but more of that later. Stroppy cats eye you and reject all atte mpts at friendliness. And then Penny. Penny, real name Jeremy John Ratter, greets me and makes what I can only presume with hindsight is an inordinately strong cup of coffee. Fair trade coffee, orga nic milk. We go out into what looks from the outside to be a garden shed, but what inside is a beautiful study-cum-bedroom and commence the interview. When Penny speaks, his replies are so considered that he barely makes eye contac t, staring instead out of the window that looks across a field of contented, gra zing sheep. This, you feel, is more to do with him being sure to give a carefull y considered answer than any shyness, though that too may play its bit-part. Usu ally when interviewing somebody who has made his or her name through music, you' re pushed to find the quotable quote. Mainly because popstars are devoid of pers onality. But with Penny, you're at a loss as to what leave out. You want to writ e a book, you feel it deserves that much time and space. Luckily for me/us, then , that he just has. 'Shibboleth' is his autobiography. "Shibboleth was going to be a Last of The Hippies re-write, but I felt now it sh ould be put in a context, so I made it basically autobiographical."

It will be read across the world by people whose lives he has changed, via Crass - the vehicle. He'd kill me for saying that. He'd insist that Crass were a band and all had the ir input. And in a way, he'd be right. Crass could be ridiculously crass, not to mention inaccessible and sometimes downright shite. A lot of idiots got into th at side - a sort of anarchist Sham 69 cum Harry Enfield's Old Gits on speed. But Crass were never crass when Penny was behind the words. Some of things they wro te and sang - generally his in my opinion - were amongst the most inspiring and well thought-out ideas I've come across from an individual. Like Lennon's 'Imagi ne' brought to life and down to the earthly realms of possibility. Penny met Lennon by the way, when he won a competition organised by old TOTP pre decessor 'Ready Steady Go' with a painting he'd done representing what was then their latest single 'I Wanna Hold Your Hand': "I really got into the Beatles when they first happened. But by the time that ac tually happened (two years in), I'd gone through that, because they seemed to ha ve sold out..I knew I'd win it if I went in for it, because I was adept at pop-ar t. Now they've put out the Ready Steady Go videos, and it's included in those. I was at a friends house, about fifteen years ago and they showed them. For some strange reason, they'd left in my bit. "I turned up at the programme. I was meant to do a rehearsal. I didn't want to. I didn't want them to able to make some smart-arsed remark about me, but equally I didn't want to be in the position where I'd make a smart-arsed remark myself. I wanted to go in 'pure'. I was meant to go and meet 'the lads' after the progr amme and have a cup of coffee in the dressing room. I was so pissed off with it by then that the moment I got my prize I pissed off home. "Iconically, it was amazing. Peter Blake had done a picture of the Beatles and t he only thing left to go on it was their signatures, and he never got them. I th ink that paintings in the Tate Gallery now, minus the signature. In the shot, th e three of them were standing in front of my picture! That to me was puerile. Th ey were going round scribbling on all the other entries, writing funny things. T hey were getting round to mine - I didn't want them writing on top of my art! I prevented them from signing mine." Penny unfortunately lost the painting when Rank took it on a tour round the ball rooms of the time, and it got lost/stolen. WALLY HOPE 'He was a heady mix of cultures, from kibbutz to the Native American Indians. Ma ster and servant. Dancer and the dance. The son and the father. The seeker and t he sought.. The peyote warlord, yiddish assassin, redskin warrior of the golden beard. He was the synthesiser of experience, hunter of the great white whale, bh oddisatva of the broken nose, writer of the Great Book, prophet of the Koran, Me her Baba's tongue, source of the Ghanges, bhikku, guru, shaman, priest. He was t he yogi of the great purple mountain, carrier of the holy lingam, new age medici ne man, yin and yang, light and dark, at least that's what he told me.' - Rimbaud on Hope, 'Shibboleth' The true scope of Rimbaud's talent for writing both moving and politically inspi ring work came in the shape of the Last Of The Hippies booklet that was initiall y released with Crass' 'Christ-The Album'. Though he shows a genuine talent for bringing in a range of disparate issues, it's mainly the story of Wally Hope. "The most important bit of that book (Shibboleth) to me was 'Last Of The Hippies

. I wrote Last Of The Hippies and Shibboleth mainly for Wally Hope. He was a vis ionary in the way that he had some sense of seeing beyond the everyday world in a very positive and active way." Shibboleth sheds new light on Penny's life-changing friendship with fellow Stone henge Festival founder Wally Hope. Wally paid the ultimate price for starting th e fun when he was found dead in mysterious circumstances, and has become somewha t of a folk-hero-myth with certain groups ever since. Shortly before the second festival, Hope had been arrested, sectioned and fed dangerously-high doses of th e mind-numbing drug Largactil, before being released without warning upon the fe stival's ending. He died shortly afterwards. In Shibboleth, Rimbaud claims that despite his previous writings citing the official inquest verdict of suicide, Wa lly was murdered. Indeed, Hope's corpse haunts him throughout the book. So you think it was murder "Sometimes I do and sometimes I don't. When I first wrote LOTH I didn't take tha t line at all. When I first wrote Homage To Catatonia, I certainly thought he'd been done in. I felt I had conclusive documented proof. Most of that got burned. ' It got burned because Penny feared for his life. "It changed my life in that res pect. Prior to that I was very relaxed about everything. I used to sleep in the garden. We never locked our doors, but I started feeling I wanted to lock them. "When I was investigating Wally's death, the police turned up. Police I didn't k now - we were quite used to the local bobby coming down and looking through the herb rack etc. Basically they'd come to say 'fucking lay off'. There was a sense of discomfort and ill-ease. That's when I burnt the evidence - all except that which was owned by other people, which was what I then used to write Shibboleth. "Ultimately, as I said in Shibboleth, it doesn't matter a fuck whether he was de liberately murdered or not, he was murdered. He was existentially murdered - he certainly died as a result of his treatment, no question of that. Call it what y ou like - that's doing someone in, isn't it?" "When I was writing Homage To Catatonia, I went through all the evidence and all the dates and times to do with when Wally's body was being shifted around, didn 't add up. I used to go through it all everyday and then all of a sudden I saw i t - it was like a jigsaw. I went through the roof - I knew I'd got them, I'd sol ved it. It categorically showed he'd been murdered." If so, he wasn't the only Wally from Stonehenge to meet his fate in such a way. THE OTHER DEAD WALLY Penny is reticent when I bring this up and seems to take a snap decision to talk about it, leaving me with the strong impression that he'd rather not. His first reaction possibly explains why: "That was an area that almost lead to my death. Another Wally - Wally (surname c ensored - we'll call him NoName) was found in Epping Forest tied to a tree with a joint in his hand. I can't remember the time sequences but it was when I was w orking on Wally's death. I got a letter from some 'Wallies' in Brighton saying ' look into this'. So I started looking into that & it turned out that there it wa s a sort of connection between Brighton gangland and the Essex police, and that Wally NoName was a small-time dealer who'd probably been working on someone else 's patch and had subsequently been fixed up. Certainly all the evidence suggeste d that he couldn't have committed suicide. I got some fairly substantial evidenc

e. Then I started thinking 'fucking hell, what are you supposed to do with this? " Then one day a taxi pulled up outside Penny's house. Out-stepped Mrs. NoName - W ally's mum - and he got an immediate instinct that "something seriously wrong wa s going to happen". Penny asked somebody else to go down to the door. "She put h er bag on the side and put her hand into it andI just knewshe said later that she' d come to do me in. Not only had she lost her son, she'd then been given false h opes through my looking into all this stuff. I hadn't got back to her when I sai d I would, because I was trying to muddle through all this crap. Net result, I w as going to get it." In the end, she was pacified and left happily. "So all that stuff happened with Mrs. NoName and I just freaked - I couldn't dea l with it. I was living here on my own and I just felt frightened. Frightened on every level - I felt lonely, scared of what I was doing, so I just went into th e garden and burnt it. In this book (Shibboleth), I thought I'd try and set the record straight." incredible adj. (inkrdibl) 1. Not to be, incapable of being, believed. 2. (colloq .) Marvellous, extraordinary, remarkable. In-credible. No street cred. Hard to lend credibility to. HEALING Some of Penny's more extravagent claims have been to do with what could be terme d paranormal reality. From his claims of Wally Hope's weather-miracles to his co ntroversial views on madness. Particularly, in Last Of The Hippies, Rimbaud asse rts: 'By allowing people to learn from the experience of their so-called "madness", r ather than punishing them for it, new radical ways of thought could be realised, new perspectives created and new horizons reached. How else has the human mind grown and developed?' I've asked Penny previously about the Hope incidents, which he insists were obje ctive reality and not subjective hallucination. Mental illness was always someth ing I wanted to press him further on, being a universe away from the lyrical Cra ss rhetoric: "The whole idea of mental illness is essentially (not totally) a psychological i nvention. Likewise medicine - straight allopathic medicine. It's been taken over by a particular body of people with a particular interest. The high priests of a particular attitude, like the psychiatrists are - high priests of a particular dogma. That dogma has been forced, more often than not through class interest, to become the dominant dogma. That happened in Russia very obviously, where ther e was a fantastic tradition of healing and herbal medicine, which was free. The state systematically destroyed that and it was replaced by similar dogmas that w e have in the capitalist society. Those holistic traditions have been systematic ally destroyed in the Western world. "I feel much the same about cancer. I think cancer is as much an invention as sc hizophrenia is (cancer isn't a disease, it's a way of describing a vast myriad o f diseases); it's like talking to someone and calling them 'people', because eve ryone's a person. The whole idea of 'cancer' is an attempt to define something w hich is indefinable, by giving it a name. It's stupid because it's all so extrao rdinarily individual."

MADNESS "Most of the people I've known, quite a large number of people, who are supposed ly 'mad' are people who are just going down a very different avenue. Those avenu es, basically, are tabooed. I've met quite a few 'Christ-nutters' - the irony of that is that if you try to imitate the very essence of Christianity, to adopt a Christ-like attitude, it wouldn't be very long before you were sectioned. Yet w e live in a Christian society" Which suggests that those people who are 'round-th e-twist' on God, they've just gone off down a tabooed avenue. The thing I'm afra id of is that those avenues become more and more defined in the last twenty year s. Since Crass broke up, I think the arteries have hardened considerably. I thin k they're hardening even more now, under New Labour. Under the in-yer-face Thatc herism, your anger bulged, your passion was drawn. Whereas now there's this drea dful sense of impotency - if people feel cheated, they think it's their own faul t just for existing. There's something sick and horrible about it. And it throws you back into your own disillusion." PUNK "There were very few punk bands I enjoyed listening to. I went to see the Clash and The Slits in Chelmsford. I thought the Clash were very exciting, but when I started looking at what they were doing, I couldn't continue my interest. It was another piece of pantomime. I thought they were taking the piss. I found the Sl its more inspiring because the Clash were actually a very talented rock n roll b and. But the Slits were bloody awful! I though, well if they can do itso we did. "I used to go down the Roxy a lot as well, because I really liked the atmosphere . I liked the live vibe of it, but the idea of listening to that on a record. " I remember the first time I went to the Roxy, with Eve. We were both pissed pu t of our brains and she was running along the street with a rose hanging out of her mouth which she'd picked up off the street. I was 33 or 34 then. I remember the youthfulness and the charm and the gorgeousness of it. Rushing down into the Roxy and getting more pissed. There was a band called The Bears on (Ed - I may or may not be right in thinking this was Jimmy Nail's old band. Yeah, that Jimmy Nail). They were absolutely awful, but it didn't matter. Then we went home and fucked like hyenas. It was all wild. "And then it all grew and became an institution and that wasn't little moments, which actually would have been the same if you liday in Crete. The whole thing just becomes a big headache - I oleth, I wanted to share my headache and confusion and doubt. I ople have got such a mythological concept of Crass". No old punk connections then? "I think Andy managed to nick his guitar from one of those original punk bands, but that was the only connection. I wasn't interested." Penny also recalls that when Gee was living in New York, she bumped into Johhny Rotten, who was in a par ticularly bad way following the Pistols USA debacle, and looked after him for th e evening. Penny isn't impressed at all. I am. Penny is 56 years old and speaks with a public school accent. In some ways, this lends a much-welcome credibility to a much-stereotyped anarchist scene. In othe rs, it lends ammunition to the cynical. You couldn't tar Crass singer Steve Igno rant with either brush, but how else are we to break down the (particularly Brit ish) barriers but to establish common ground by virtue of common ideas. Indeed, in this day and age, an interest in ideas at all is a decidedly minority sport. CRASS wild.you pick out were having a ho suppose in Shibb think so many pe

And so onto Crass, the old megalith itself. A few random reflections, the though ts of Chairman Penny: On their dour image: "All of us individually were lighter than the sum total of the band.we were alway s seen as dour-faced. Bloody Revolutions has a lot of ironic humour that people didn't understand." On their anonymity: "Crass were by and large as anonymous as we could make ourselves - I've chosen t o break that for myself" "I probably respect (certain ex-members') anonymity more than their personalitie s" On stories left out of Shibboleth: "I didn't want to write Crass-go-Archers. I thought of writing a book on the cla ss aspect of Crass - I felt the expectations of the band members were very relat ed to their class. If I was offered a million pounds to write Crass-go-Archers.. ." On cheap records: (Though still cheaper than most records accompanying them on the shop shelves, t he records aren't as cheap as they were back in the days of vinyl, indeed they c ould little afford to be. For the single 'Reality Asylum', Crass were actually l osing p on each sale) "I felt it was an extension of our fortune - we were being fortunate in selling stuff, fortunate in not paying much rent and living very cheaply. It was a way o f extending that, sharing it with people. I used to feel we were the prow of a s hip cutting through a sea of turd. On the end of Crass: "I remember that miners gig. My general impression of it was 'this is a fucking pantomime'. There's all these people leaping up and down; meanwhile there's all these people having their entire lives stripped from them. Thatcher's army destr oying a complete lifestyle. "One of the band had just stopped smoking. They were saying that statistically s moking is the biggestand he was trying to persuade his partner to give up smoking . I just rather innocently said "well, statistics don't mean anything. More peop le are killed on the road every year than die of smoking-related diseases etc et c I was bullshitting as much as he was. It was some stupid little thing. There w as a terrific difference at the end between the direct violent action and the di rect non-violent action. We'd managed to hold that one at bay for seven years. I couldn't go on pretending that I still believed in the ethic that we'd been pro moting for all those years. I was a profound pacifist and I'd still like to be" OTHER CRASS DUDES Look up the Crass website and you'll be dissappointed to not find out what most of the others are up to. Penny harps on about their anonymity when this comes up , but he talks about the people he's still in touch with:

Eve Libertine is learning jazz singing and doing stained-glass windows. She's al so very involved in the healing arts. Gee Sus is strongly back into painting. Peter Kennard (old urer) had been showing slides of Gee's work as examples of and Gee met two or three years back and he showed him her ly staggered that what he thought was collage was actually a T'ai Chi instructor. CND artist & RCA lect wonderful collage. He work. He was absolute painting. She's also

Steve Ignorant has got a new band together (Stratford Mercanaries) and is writin g a lot and learning piano. From alternative research, I also gather Andy Palmer left the band to attend the Royal College Of Art, and Pete Wright has started a new band called Judas II. THE HOUSE Far and away the most inspiring thing from a personal point of view was the hous e that Crass lived in. It made the all-important diference between talkin' 'bout a revolution and living one. It's what set Crass apart. 'Crass were the best pu nk band because they lived the lifestyle' remarked ATV's Mark Perry once, hittin g the nail on the head. It made their words more than rhetoric, which was the ca talyst for a lot of punks disillusioned with the theatrical revolutionary poses of the first wavers. "I found it having spent the best part of a year driving round a radius of about sixty miles from my home, just looking for places. Oddly enough this one was ad vertised in an Estate Agents. It might have been a mistake, because several year s later I saw the other house I was due to look at, which was fantastic!" DEFENDING THE EMPIRE It is now under threat, however, from property developers who seek to turn Rimba ud's shangri-la into a country theme-park. For the last year, Penny has been tie d up wading through mountains of legal documents in an attempt to keep the wolve s from the door, almost literally. Thirty years down the line, it would be nothi ng short of a piece of history disappearing if it went. Penny always was a fight er though: "Maybe like all empires, it's going to crumble into dust. But it's not going to crumble into fucking gold dust. If I'm going to close down thirty years commitme nt, it's not going to be because some yuppie bastard has decided to make my hous e into a gold mine. What they'll get is a burned-down ruin." "It's been a home to over a hundred people. It's been saving hundreds of lives, not just through what goes out of the place, but also what goes on within it. It would be a total tragedy. It will always be what it is if I've got anything to do with it, which is the op en house it always has been. But whether I've got the strength to still be behin d the open door, I don't know." (Since this interview, Crass have won the court case and kept the house) STOP PR ESS - at least I thought it was all over - it's not - see the Dial House Appeal for details) The last time I interviewed Penny, for an article that anarchist Schnews-letter were understandably too scared to publish, on legal grounds. I played the tape t o a flatmate of the time. A scouser, with a big interest in dope and dub-reggae and none in anarchism, punk, or Crass. For a solid C90 we both sat there smoking

the breeze in total silence. At the end, my flatmate just said, 'God, he's inte lligent, isn't he?' And he is. Penny is the nearest thing we've got to a philoso pher these days. Which isn't to say that you've got to agree with him. But most similar peoples' ideas are intellectual/theoretical (Noam Chomsky) or pseudo sta nd-up comedy (Jello Biafra). Only Mark Thomas comes close, but Penny makes no co ncessions to dumbing down for the masses. There's clearly space for both; it's j ust that Rimbaud, unlike Thomas, isn't afforded his rightful share. After the interview, Penny calls me a cab. (Hey, you're a cab!) With no front do orbell or surrounding lights for miles, he has to keep going to the door to chec k it's arrived. Eventually, it has. I go out to meet an old East-End wide-boy dr iver made good to the delights of suburban Essex. He's freaked. "I'll tell you, I was going to give it another minute then I was out of here!" I know what he means, but I also know that we're both suffering from a serious la ck of reality - so dependent on the props that make us cold but convince us we'r e warm. Reality has been too much for me too though. I instruct him to drop me at the ne arest pub to the station and go in and order a pint. I'm physically shaking, lik e a junkie hanging out. I can't stop myself; self-conscious but unable to do any thing about it. For a while I think Penny must have dropped some acid into my co ffee. There's a scene in the film 'Flashback' where Dennis hopper persuades Keif er Sutherland that he's spiked his mineral water, and then just lets Keifer's im agination take over, effectively opening up a mental Pandora's Box. Though I love and trust Penny, I can't think of any other reason I feel so weird . All the locals stare at me. I still can't stop shaking, though I desperately w ant to and fear I might be in for a seriously hard time off them. The pub jukebo x sings 'I've Never Been To Me' and the words seem to have a new resonance. I ca n't help feeling I'm quite happy with that little arrangement - something to do with mental health. Penny confronts you with the enormity of everything, as you suspect he confronts himself every day. 'Too much fucking perspective', as Tap o ne philosophised. Four pints later, I feel sane enough to get on the tube and I'm transported back to Central London. Back to 'reality', but certainly not back to life. Life was out there. With all it's difficulties, with all it's imperfections, all its hard ships and all its deep and manifold meanings. With the hindsight of writing all this down a couple of weeks later, I'm incline d to take the opinion that what freaked me out and made me shake was the fact th at I'd opened Pandora's Box and seen too much beauty. Conversations like the one I'd just had are usually carried out with the benefit of copious alcohol, conse quently incoherent and forgotten in the morning. I've seen the cutting edge and it cuts you. The last time I'd made this journey back, I'd got back to Liverpool St station and been unable to get on the tube. Too crowded. Too desperate. I'd gone in search of my usual solution - the pub - and found the same feelings keep ing me out on the pavement. There was too much of a paradox between what I knew was real and what I saw arou nd me - my eyelids had been forced up - much the same as Crass records did for m e back when I was seventeen. Much the same as 'Shibboleth' will do for you if you've got the guts to buy it. 'Shibboleth' is out on AK Press now.