CRASS
the new Crass flexi, which they simply took off a pile on the counter and gave you. Steve Ignorant:“Would I sing that now? I don’t know. Even as a joke, I just didn’t find it funny. Penny’s sense of humour has always been different to mine. I remember thinking at the time that I didn’t mind taking the piss out of skinheads or whatever (Rival Tribal Rebel Revel), but with soldiers – those people have got cars and could drive and do someone.And I don’t think it’s very clever to take the piss out of people who are going to war. How do you justify that? You can’t. In hindsight, I should have refused to do it.” Mick Duffield: “Britain was involved in war again . . . all jingoistic inter-nation-state, with potential for escalating into something more widespread and dangerous. It cannot not be overstated that with two world wars already this century here we were limbering up for a third with another exercise in mass-jingoism – it was horrendous.” Having had a bit more time to consider their response, Crass released another single: ‘How Does It Feel To Be The Mother Of A Thousand Dead?’ A direct attack on Thatcher, it came in a black sleeve decorated with white graveyard crosses. When, during Prime Ministers Question Time,Thatcher was asked if she’d heard the record, things were getting serious. The Conservative Party attempted to fight back, as the Guardian reported: “The Attorney General, Sir Michael Havers, has been asked by the Conservative MP for Enfield North, Mr. Tim Eggar, to prosecute an Anti-Falklands war record under the Obscene Publications Act. The record ‘How Does It Feel To Be The Mother of 1,000 Dead?’, by the group Crass, which also owns the record company Crass Records, which released it, is said to have sold 20,000 copies since it was issued last Saturday. It refers to Mrs. Thatcher and the decision to send the Task Force. ‘You never wanted peace or solution, from the start you lusted after war and destruction . . . Iron Lady, with your stone heart so, eager that the lesson be taught that you inflicted, you determined, you created, you ordered . . . It was your decision to have those young boys slaughtered.” Tim Eggar was the brother of Robin Eggar, a Daily Mirror columnist
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