CRASS
of years, you don’t have to be married or related to be living as a family. So they couldn’t split us up, which meant we could stay there. Plus the organic garden, which takes nine years to do and all that doo-dah. “So Peer Group said they were going to sell the house. And the only way they could do it, with us as sitting tenants, was send it to auction. And who the fuck is going to buy that place with us sitting in it? So we got a load of friends to sit in the auction room and buy the place for us. . .” They also went to the Guardian, where they issued a plea for help via a sympathetic article entitled ‘Country House Anarchy’: “The Grade 2 listed 16th-century cottage on the outskirts of North Weald was set up as a commune by artists, and later Crass mainstays, Penny Rimbaud and Gee Vaucher in 1967, and it has since become a punk equivalent of the Bloomsbury set’s Charleston House. The similarity is not lost on Rimbaud, who managed to persuade the courts of the cottage’s significance as a cultural outpost. The house was the birthplace of the Stonehenge festival and the base from which Crass rejuvenated the peace movement and created the blueprint for the kind of antiglobalisation protests seen in London and Seattle in recent years. It was also a temporary home to many of the bands who recorded for Crass’ eponymous record label. One such visitor was Bjork, who stayed in 1984 when she was recording an LP for the label with Sugarcubes predecessors, Kukl. “The appeal for funds is an ideological struggle as much as a financial one. After all, the four, Rimbaud, Vaucher, Eve Libertine and Steve Ignorant (to give them their ‘punk names;), have breached the old anarchist ‘all property is theft’ maxim.‘It was very, very difficult indeed for us to decide to go ahead with the appeal, because in a way even that is contradictory to our ethos,’ says the commune’s founder, Rimbaud. ‘If it hadn’t been for the fact that that idea was so wholeheartedly supported and even to some extent initiated by people outside of here, then I don’t think it could be tolerable.’” Around the same time as the court case, Steve Ignorant finally left Dial House to move in to a house nearby with his girlfriend Jona. “It just wasn’t for me anymore,” he says. “The thing I found difficult about moving out was that I’d made a commitment to the place, through thick
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