CRASS
general thick conformity – back in 1980 there was a brief but real sense that a second wave of punk could make a more creative and lasting contribution than the first.The first two Discharge records – ‘Realities Of War’ and ‘Fight Back’ – were powerful slabs of pure punk; fast, hard, dark walls of sound that would have frightened the life out of Phil Spector, with song titles that suggested both intelligence and a similar antiwar/religion/system line to Crass. Any suggestion of a genuine alliance, however, was shattered when members of Discharge ridiculed Crass in interviews (“I’m going to boot the bald bastard up the arse”), and any suggestion of a genuinely invigorating band started to lapse as further releases – despite the use of John Heartfield’s ‘Niemals Wieder!’ imagery of a dove impaled on a bayonet – showed the band up as a one-trick pony, writing the same song over and over again. Given the extraordinary popularity of Crass, it was inevitable that big business would show an interest, and so it proved when they were approached by Tony Gordon, manager of Angelic Upstarts and future manager of Boy George. At the time, Gordon was organising ‘Pursey’s Package’, a proposed punk tour to feature Crass and Angelic Upstarts. Penny Rimbaud: “There was nothing he could offer, but we were very interested to see how it worked – an insight into the music business.We went up to his Mayfair offices. It was a basement office and he’d got sewage problems – the whole place stank of shit, not just music business shit, but real shit! There was a ghastly desk covered in Laura Ashley fabrics. He was trying to be impressive but it was all so cheap and shoddy. It was so transparent and corny: the classic ‘I can market revolution’ line.And when we told him to piss off, his line was that he’d see to it we’d never play London again.All the ‘I can make you and I can break you’ bollocks.” Still, perhaps unwittingly, making Crass in a big way was Sounds journalist Gary Bushell.An undoubtedly talented writer, Bushell was probably the most influential music journo in the UK at the time. His apparent dislike of Crass seemed to border on the obsessive, which paradoxically did the band no harm whatsoever. Penny Rimbaud: “He served us very well. There’s no better way of building up a name and a reputation than the sort of stuff he was slinging
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