CRASS
restrictions can be a fruitful path. One of Penny’s best lines was, ‘Big Brother ain’t watching you, chum, you’re fucking watching him.’ It should be said that all socialisation is based on prohibition, which is mainly self imposed. It is an easy option to think that most prohibitions are redundant, while living safe within one’s own insulated environment.” Tony D:“Bands like The Derelicts and The 101ers were anti-dropouts and layabouts. The dropouts and layabouts called themselves hippies as an excuse for doing nothing. Then there were the others who were hippies because they were political activists, still living in squats. They were all tarred with the same brush – the ‘never trust a hippy’ thing was probably a slogan from the early ’70s from the activist types.” Whether or not Crass were ‘hippies’, Steve Ignorant is adamant they never thought of Dial House as a commune. “That’s one of the worst things . . . Pete Stennett (Small Wonder) said to Graham Lock (NME) that we all lived together in a commune. We didn’t, we lived in this house. Because the minute you say ‘commune’, my instant vision is of a pregnant bra-less woman slopping about in fucking Jesus sandals – dog on a rope, tepees and what have you.” Steve warms to the theme:“Beds in a row in a dormitory, Grey blankets with those red lines on them.All getting up to do the washing up and rinse out the soya beans for the daily tofu. . . . So, no. We did not live in a fucking commune! It was a house where we all lived together and ate meals at the same time.” That said, everybody did share money, perhaps one of the technical definitions of communal living. Steve Ignorant: “The only person who had a bank account was Penny Rimbaud, so all the money that we got from Crass used to go into his bank account, and then it would get doled out.When it started, we really didn’t know what to do with it. In those days, it was bad form to have money. So, it was, like, how do we get rid of this stuff?! We had an allowance each of £500 a year – I remember having that and thinking I was rich! That’s £10 a week!” Steve Ignorant:“What we’d tend to do is put the money in the kitty, cos it tended to turn out cheaper that way. It was commun-al, I’ll give you that, but it wasn’t a ‘commune’. I take the piss out of it, but it made sense for what that place was, and it did work. It worked pretty good.And still does actually.There weren’t any rules or regulations, but the washing up
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