CRASS
elements have been used up – or where an external force (carbon rods inserted into a nuclear reactor) intervenes to absorb and contain the energy of the chain-reaction.” In 1980, there were still many kids dressing like punks (if you can pardon the inherent flaw in that sentence); there were many kids going to punk concerts and buying punk records.What was lacking was new punk bands coming up to fill the spaces left by the original bands as they split up, jumped ship or sold their souls.This is where Crass fitted a niche perfectly. Because of their overview that punk was part of a wider maelstrom, almost a direct descendent of the previous counter culture, they saw no reason whatsoever to abandon what they saw as the huge potential of punk just because it was being challenged in the fashion mags by the Mod and Two-Tone revivals. “Hates: Hippies, Crass. . .” That questionnaire by Adam Ant still rankles. Much of the evidence suggests that Crass was more correct than people admitted about the close relation between the seventies ‘hippy’ scene and punk rock. The popular image of punk as some kind of year zero wipe-the-slate-clean movement coming straight out of nowhere and impatient to get back there isn’t really born out by close inspection. Steve Jones, Sex Pistols guitarist, in their film The Filth And The Fury describes where the early fans – those who wouldn’t go on to make a career out of being such – really came from: “I remember in High Wycombe, opening for Screaming Lord Sutch, seeing some faces there with long hair, and then a week later we’d be playing at the Nashville and I’d see the same people with their hair cut short wearing a ripped up t-shirt. Every gig, you’d see a few more and a few more, people who just got converted.” The same people with hair cut short . . . indeed, when Johnny Rotten gave his first interview to the music paper Sounds, his sneer “I hate long hair. I hate hippies” gave the impression that he’d never had long hair or listened to Hawkwind, both palpably true with the luxury of hindsight. And if you want to deface a Pink Floyd tee-shirt with ‘I Hate. . .’, it follows that you’ve got to own a Pink Floyd tee-shirt in the first place. So, it can be pretty safely assumed that the schism between ‘hippies’ (or ‘freaks’, as Pete Stennett would have it) and ‘punks’ was a blind alley. In other words, Crass was right and Malcolm McLaren was wrong.
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