CRASS
Exit (being, according to Rimbaud, the direction he expected the audience to head in droves when they appeared) was almost a musical extension of the open house policy.To call the line-up fluid would be an understatement – people were free to come and go as they pleased, even during performances. Given the improvised nature of the sounds – ‘music’ might be stretching it, and it certainly bore no truck with rock – the end product of an Exit performance would be totally reliant on the sum of whichever parts had turned up and / or decided to join in that particular day. A listen to their performance at the ICES ’72 festival confirms that this is a band concerned with sound and atmosphere rather than music (and therefore not really a band at all). But there are no new-age soundscapes, no swirling keyboards or whale songs – it’s way too avant-garde and ‘out there’ for that. And it wasn’t just the music that was out there, but the whole concept. Penny Rimbaud: “In Exit, we actually gave up names – there wasn’t such a thing as our individual identity. That was another way of saying that anyone belongs here. If anyone wanted to come up and play whilst we were playing, they did. Invariably, you’d start off with a ten-piece playing and end up with a fifteen-piece”. “It seemed like anyone could come and join in,” remembers Eve, at that point still choosing not to enlist herself. Penny Rimbaud: “A lot of what Crass was about was actually developed in the days of Exit.We used to do handouts at Exit gigs, but they were artworks.There might be a little card – a beautiful print that Gee had done, or a packet of seeds.There would always be a gift.The whole idea of the gift was very much a principle of the house, and of Exit.” Also, somewhat remarkably, Exit not only didn’t charge an appearance fee, but refused even to take expenses:“We didn’t charge, ever,” confirms Rimbaud. This wasn’t the only unusual aspect of Exit in their musical incarnation. As Penny Rimbaud explained to Christopher Eamon in the book Anthony McCall, The Solid Light Films And Related Works: “We had a policy of starting at least an hour earlier than billed, this being so that the audience would walk into a musical environment which had not been conditioned by their presence. Likewise, finishing times were random,
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