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example. They were another extreme aspect of punk. There was room for quite a broad idea.” God forbid that broad was ever that narrow. Just before the second wave of punk really took off with big-booted ‘real punk’ and Oi music, most punks had a broader taste – from Crass to the Ants via Killing Joke, Stiff Little Fingers,The Pack,The Wall, Bauhaus, Joy Division, UK Subs, The Au Pairs, The Cure and Gang Of Four, and lots of others too, of course – too many unknown soldiers to mention, too many to know. What really set Crass apart from many of these bands in the eyes of all the young punks was Dial House. It was the ace up their sleeve inasmuch as people were gradually realising that here was a band who weren’t just talking about it. In Dial House, they were living the dream, both as an everyday pseudo-utopian reality and as an example to others that it was possible. Anarchy in action, as the press once vividly called it. As Penny Rimbaud muses:“The very fact that we were living proof – even if only to ourselves – that you could live in a certain way, that you could produce your own food, you could live for very very little, was why we thought as we did. “This place was, and is, key and central to Crass. I don’t think Crass would have had the physical environment in which to be created, it wouldn’t have had the background on which it based its creation. But not only that, the very fact that it was a very secure environment which had minimal upkeep and costs, which had sufficient room for a large number of people to live for bugger-all made it central. It was, and remains, a central facility. It offers space, and now we own it, a very secure and very cheap place to be. “You can’t possibly divorce Crass from Dial House. Because Crass without the fact that we were living proof of what we were talking about – I mean the way in which we talked about was very aggressive, it wasn’t very listenable – who the fuck would have picked up on that? Anyone who came here was always quite devastated by the degree to which this place rounded the edges.They were devastated, in a very positive way, by the sheer beauty of the place, being so much in contradiction to the manner in which we publicly appeared. We were the most angry band of the time, because it was genuine, we weren’t trying to entertain.”
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