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crib sheets – and a bad time was had by all, as Steve remembers:“We did Yes Sir as a complete set one day and I hated it! I looked like a lemon with that fucking bit of paper! I didn’t know how to move, I didn’t know where to stand. People said,‘Oh but the lyrics are great’ – well, they are, but. . . I just really don’t like it” Andy Palmer, talking to Radio Free France in the eighties, was more optimistic:“I don’t know of anyone who has listened to Yes Sir I Will and said they actually enjoyed it. Whereas I think most people now enjoy Feeding Of The Five Thousand, but when we put it out to begin with, nobody enjoyed that either.You can latch onto a way of doing something which is initially effective and flog it to death – which is what punk has become. Punk has become a standard – it was initially a rejection of standards – to which bands conform in the way they present themselves, the way they present their music, in the way they write their lyrics.” Penny Rimbaud, in 1984, ruminated to Radio Free France: “The boundaries increasingly ceased to have any relevance – prior to the Falklands War, one naively believed that there were separations between ‘this’ and ‘that’ and that if you dealt with ‘this’ then you could do ‘that’ . . . like songs – each song had its little separate thing to deal with and Yes Sir I Will is a statement about the fact that there isn’t any separation – that its all one and the same thing, that there is no single cause or single idea – there’s no-one else to blame but yourself.That you can’t say,‘Well let’s now concentrate on the Northern Ireland problem, let’s now concentrate on the problem of sexual relationships . . . you can’t do that – everything is now one major problem and that major problem stems from yourself.” When asked about the apparent disparity between the aggression of their music and the peacefulness of their message, Crass always responded that the anger was derived from passion rather than aggression. Yes Sir I Will often seemed to cross that line. Gee told Radio Free France: “If you’re going to rant and rave or be angry about anything, one does it because you have a vision of the opposite. We’ve worked the way we have done for the last seven years because it seemed that people weren’t informed about what was happening in the world on a simple basis, especially a lot of young people.
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