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little idea of how we were. He (Bushell) took offence at that, probably quite rightly. . .” Shortly afterwards, Feeding Of The 5000 hit the shops, and it was a revelation in all sorts of ways: the price was revolutionary – 12 tracks for £1.99, at a time when the average album would set you back £3.99.At a time when many punk records were sold via mail order, and advertised by the specialist shops in columns in the back of the music press, this kind of a deal leapt out at you. It suggested, above all else, an integrity that many had been searching for but few, if any, had been offering. Penny Rimbaud: “We wanted to do stuff as cheaply as we could because we knew people couldn’t afford to be buying records all the time.What I was always trying to do was to share whatever gains we had with as many people as possible.And that’s how the house has operated. Wherever we became advantaged, we used that to help as broad a part of the radical community of which we were a part, to expand it.The ‘pay no more than’ was because we knew well that if we sold stuff cheaply, places like HMV would sell them at their regular price.” Penny rejects any idea that this handily doubled up as good marketing technique: “Absolutely not. It was all designed to ensure that the purchaser got the best deal that they possibly could. We wanted to give people real value, and part of the reason we could do that was because we lived here – we grew our own food, we didn’t pay much rent or develop expensive drug habits or want swimming pools. So we were effectively passing on the advantages of us living cheaply. It’s the complete opposite to how most marketing is done.” Steve Ignorant:“I didn’t care what fucking price it went out at – all I was interested in was getting a record out. But it was ‘keep it cheap, then people can afford it and still have enough for a packet of fags and a pint of beer’ type of thing. It was also because Dial House always tried to run itself self-sufficiently and so we didn’t really need any money from it. I can’t stress it enough – there was no idea of us making loads.We called it Feeding Of The 5000 because we didn’t think it would sell that many – we thought Pete was taking a big risk. But it turned out he wasn’t. . .” Pete Wright:“If we’d sold our records at full price, they wouldn’t have sold.” The first thing that stood out about the record was how much swear-
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