CRASS
So Gee went to live in New York, and Penny was once again on his own at Dial House. Some are of the opinion that this split hurt Penny considerably more than he lets on, which may add an extra dimension to the pain he felt when Wally Hope died. The crowded house from the Exit days had slowly dwindled. Rimbaud:“It was the time I started on the Wally Hope book, so I was getting darker and darker, and bleaker, and I don’t think people particularly wanted to be around me, quite understandably.” After the demise of Exit, a new band started taking shape in the Dial House rehearsal room. Ceres Confusion1 were an exceedingly experimental traditional outfit, owing far more to avant-garde traditions than rock’n’roll. Indeed, listening to their tape ‘Doses Of Neuroses’, they owe nothing whatsoever to rock’n’roll. This time around, however, there was a concession to normality in that there was at least a stable line-up which consisted of Peter LeBeau on guitars, Bernhardt Rebours on keyboards and Penny Rimbaud on ‘percussion’, though the percussion was a far cry from the drums and bongos most people would associate with the word. “Peter Le Beau had played with Exit, and his brother – Dick Le Beau – was one of the founder members of Dial House,” says Penny. “We described the music as psycho-rock. We took the Exit style and added jazz-rock fusion into it so it was more rocky and driving.And out of that grew that urgency, which is something I think we introduced to punk. Whilst the Pistols played pretty fast, they didn’t play urgently. Ceres Confusion carried on a lot of the freeform experimental approaches that Exit had but on a more funky level.” Penny sees them operating in the same musical area as John McLaughlin’s Mahavishnu Orchestra, on the jazzy side and Jimi Hendrix in the rock corner. “There was a lot of feathery avant-garde sound, but also a rocky beat.” Bernhardt Rebours remembers his introduction to the Dial House scene:“A guy who I was at school with came up to Dial House with me
1
Pronounced See-rees Confusion, hence a play on words.
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