CRASS
our cover policy were The Poison Girls and The Cravats, and their sales suffered as a result . . . it was their choice, but sales did suffer, they halved. Because people like collecting. “There was a diversity within the music on the label because we were trying to say ‘punk’s a way of life, not a way of music, not a style.’ Someone like Annie Anxiety is every bit as much a worthwhile statement within the genre as Conflict are. “When we toured with Dirt, the audience enjoyed that a lot more than when we toured with The Poison Girls, who were actually a far better band. But people didn’t want that – they weren’t dealing with the issues that kids on the street wanted to know about.They didn’t want to see their mum singing – that was their attitude. And that was the very reason we toured with them; to expose the audience to a different set of ideas.” More to the point, perhaps, The Poison Girls weren’t making thrash music almost exclusively for young white men. In 1985 Penny Rimbaud told Mucilage fanzine:“I think that our anger is our passion and on a superficial level people may not be able to recognise the anger, a lot of people who have parodied us have effectively come across with an aggressive stance and have really, in my view, been exposing their emptiness. I don’t think we’ve ever been aggressive, we have been extremely angry and extremely passionate and we still are.” A perfect example of how tightened up the whole situation had become came when Crass Records released a compilation album of ‘artists’ that had sent them demo tapes. Bullshit Detector was a very, ahem, challenging record indeed. Depending on your viewpoint, Crass released a compilation album that was either a) the worst record in the world ever, or b) the most illustrative of the DIY scene, or c) both. Bullshit Detector was so far beyond bad that it’s difficult to do justice to a description of its incompetence. It was certainly full of ‘straight punks’, whichever way you choose to interpret that description, and featured an assortment of bands that – with a couple of notable exceptions – had recorded their offerings on tape recorders without proper instruments. This can be seen as a noble DIY crusade, a fart in the face of prog rock, or an extension of Dada, but it’s difficult to believe that many people listened to it more than once.
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