Honey Bane - You Can Be You

HONEY BANE - YOU CAN BE YOU

Even though £3.00 was a ridiculously cheap price for a double album, Crass were very soon in a position of being able to invest money made from the sales of Stations Of The Crass into releasing records by other artists on their label, the first of which being the You Can Be You EP by Honey Bane.

As was to be the standard on practically all other releases on the Crass label, the cover came as a circular design surrounded by stencilled lettering, borrowing heavily from the art of American pop artist Robert Indiana. On the back of the cover came a short written statement that in its design borrowed from the Jamie Reid/Sex Pistols cut-out ransom note style: "Do you know the difference between reality and fantasy?" it asked "No you don't coz you're still being influenced by Starsky and Hutch, you're still buying the Sex Pistols, you're still trying to be top dog. You say you're Anarchists when you're begging the System for help and standing on the dole lines. You want to be independent, you want to be happy, but you live a life of fantasy. You can be free, the real you. You can be you."

Though the subject matter of the songs on the EP had little in common with Crass, musically it had everything in common, particularly on the lead track Girl On The Run. Piercing lead guitar, fuzzbox-drenched rhythm guitar, galloping bass and snapping, militaristic drums; all put through a mincing machine of tortured, squealing Anarcho Pop Punk. It came as little surprise that The Kebabs - Honey's backing band on the record - was actually Crass themselves under a false name.

Girl On The Run was an ear-catching, innovative exercise in Punk attitude that immediately caught the attention of John Peel who would play it on his show, subsequently bringing it to the attention of a wide audience and doing the profile of Crass and their label no harm in the process either. The song's title itself was a very apt one as at the time Honey Bane was indeed on the run from a child care centre in Essex.

Honey was very much her own person and all that Crass were doing was lending her a helping hand in getting a record released and weren't exerting any kind of control over what she chose to do as a result of it. To their most probable bemusement what she chose to do was quickly disassociate herself from Crass and head off toward mainstream fame, fortune, EMI, Top Of The Pops, and the tutelage of Jimmy Pursey. However, for all her future artistic achievements be they in music, on stage, on television, in film, or even in modelling; Honey's most outstanding legacy would always be her first recordings, as in the You Can Be You EP and her début vinyl outing a year earlier on the Small Wonder/Xntrix label with a song entitled Violence Grows.

Honey had previously been lead vocalist with a band by the name of Fatal Microbes who had featured on a split 12" single with Poison Girls. Violence Grows was the stand-out track on the Fatal Microbes side of the record, being a slow, hypnotic, lullaby-like song in which Honey intones as almost a matter of fact that "Whilst you're being kicked to death in a London pedestrian subway, don't think passers-by will help, they'll just look the other way. They've seen too much, they don't wanna know..." Before going on to describe how "Children at home just come and go, their parents can't say 'No'. Now they know what's best. Now they know violence grows. This generation's changing fast, this generation glorifies in violence."

Honey's bid at capturing in song the zeitgeist of that time was pretty successful. Violence did indeed permeate throughout British society, erupting casually at football matches, in pubs, at discos, and in all kinds of other random public or private arenas: "People travel on the bus but they don't pay their way. It's so easy to say 'Push off' when the conductor asks you to pay. Now the conductor keeps it shut cos the conductor knows. Everybody keeps it shut cos everybody knows that violence grows." Violence and the anticipation of it was very much the norm and if Honey Bane's generation weren't quite glorifying it, they were certainly starting to view violence as a form of entertainment. At the time of recording Violence Grows, Honey was aged just 14.

Whilst pundits embedded within mainstream media were all too ready to condemn what they saw as mindless violence and raise their hands in shock horror, very little was being said by them when it came to an even greater form of violence that was on the horizon: that of State violence.

The political and economic policies of the Thatcher government in Britain and the incoming Reagan administration in America were about to usher in not only a consolidation of wealth for the already rich and mass unemployment for the poor but to also escalate the Cold War to a wholly unprecedented level, pushing the world dangerously close to nuclear annihilation. In the face of this upsurge in Right-wing conservatism and nuclear sabre-rattling the solution proffered from the Left in Britain was to vote for a return of a Labour government; or from the Far Left, to work for revolution.

Crass, on the other hand, had their own ideas....