CRASS
soundtrack. Because by now, punk is far more than a bunch of alternative music fans. Indeed, it always has been. It starts as a fashion statement screamed out of a shop called Sex (latterly Seditionaries) in the Kings Road and evolves into a lifestyle screaming danger gear and rebellion. Nature abhors a vacuum.As does capitalism, naming it the ‘gap in the market’. Enter Crass.The rest is, or should be, history. But it is a history so far shamefully under-recorded. Here, then, is the history of Crass. As an early Crass poster cried, hanging tattered and torn outside the corpse of the Roxy Club in Covent Garden: ‘Germany got Baader-Meinhoff, England got punk. But they can’t kill it.’ They say the past is a different country, but the UK in the mid-seventies was a different continent. Or should that be incontinent – England was a mess when punk exploded into its avenues and alleyways. In 1974, the miners had gone on strike and brought down the Conservative government. But subsequently the economy, under a Labour Government, had fallen to pieces.They were forced to go cap in hand to the International Monetary Fund to request an emergency loan. By 1976, inflation was running at over 23%, and unemployment had doubled in just three years from just over 2% to almost 6%, the worst since the recession of the thirties.The temporary blip of post war economic boom that peaked in the sixties seemed been replaced by a wider post colonial-exploitation bust that saw Great Britain being put back in her economic post-Empire place by colonies sick of being sucked dry to feed their mother country. Factor in the long oppressively hot summer of 1976 and you’re getting a recipe for anger. A minister for drought – Denis Howell – was appointed and announced everyone had to reduce their water consumption by half or face water rationing. As the heat wave roared on, increasing numbers were admitted to hospital suffering from sunstroke and heart attacks. Motorways had problems with tarmac melting. The drought hardly helped the economy either, as thousands threw ‘sickies’ from work in order to enjoy the sunshine. Factor in the mass acceptance of racial bigotry to all this and you’re running a serious risk of the anger exploding in a dangerous direction.
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