Annie Anxiety - Barbed Wire Halo

ANNIE ANXIETY - BARBED WIRE HALO

Annie Anxiety, like Poison Girls and Flux Of Pink Indians was a staple part of the whole Crass live experience. Hailing originally from New York, she had forged a close relationship with Crass through having met them on their one and only short tour in America in the very early days of the band.

Annie was first and foremost a poetess and with the aid of backing tapes would regale a Crass audience with her poems but to say that Annie was a challenge is to put it lightly. A section of the audience attending a Crass gig, particularly those relatively new to Crass, would arrive expecting a Punk Rock blitzkrieg only to be met at first by a middle-aged woman fronting a weird, almost esoteric Punk band - in the form of Poison Girls - and then by a mad-eyed, pre-Goth chanteuse reciting strange poems full of cries and screams to the accompaniment of tuneless noises from a tape machine - Annie Anxiety.

The amount of times that Annie would suffer a hail of spit, beer and general abuse from an audience was almost tragic but by getting up on stage alone with just taped noise to accompany her, by staying true to her art and not courting popularity for the sake of it and for showing courage in the face of adversity, Annie would serve as an inspiration to others who wished also to go it alone.

Barbed Wire Halo was Annie's début record and was another beautifully designed release on the Crass label, the cover composed of very artistic, black and white photography by Eve Libertine. The actual two songs on the record, however, were 'difficult' to say the least and even though this may have meant they were simply ahead of their time, it still meant they failed to appeal to a good many people. Blitz or 4 Skins-type compositions they were most definitely not.

When appearing live, Annie was perplexing, beguiling, astounding and somewhat disturbing. Annie was different. She was a stranger in a strange land who instigated a confusion. She could scare, unsettle, disturb, entice, bewitch and bewilder all in the space of a single performance. There was no compromise. Dressed all in black, she certainly looked the part and fitted in perfectly with the whole Crass 'image', even having the slogans to match: 'Horror is a figment of our reality - Reality is a figment of our horror'. Musically, however, the sound collages she used as backing as created by Penny Rimbaud failed to do justice to her words and in a certain way did them an injustice. It was experimental but the experiment failed.

What she really needed was an entirely different musical collaborator and a different approach to presenting her poems.

In due course, however, this would come.

Blitz - All Out Attack

BLITZ -ALL OUT ATTACK

From a different corner of the country - New Mills, in Derbyshire - another even more stunning record appeared as if from nowhere that summer of '81 by a band called Blitz. Comprised of two skinheads and two Punk Rockers, Blitz were the living embodiment of unity between those two tribes; the only sartorial flaw in their make-up being that their lead guitarist sported a very un-Punk Rock moustache.

All Out Attack was the name given to their début EP, which was an extremely apt title considering the driving but very controlled wall of noise they were showcasing. Like a brilliant hybrid of all the best of the new Punk groups but with an added twist of a developed awareness of violence, Blitz were to have a relatively short lifespan but would prove to be a huge influence upon other Punk bands the world over.

Someone's Gonna Die was the song that in particular caught and captured the sense of mindless violence that at times seemed endemic throughout the country: "This is where the good times went, with his brains lying on the pavement. With a broken bottle in his hand and another in his back. Was it something that he said, or his football scarf now stained red? A broken bottle in his hand, he will never understand."

It's in the chorus, however, that the song is propelled from social observation to a rousing thing of simple but aggressively powerful and energised beauty: "Do you feel alright? Oi! Oi! Oi! Someone's gonna die tonight. Oi! Oi! Oi! Do you feel alright? Oi! Oi! Oi! The boys are out tonight."

Whether one liked it or not, this kind of music and this kind of subject matter was striking a chord at the time with a huge amount of young people, which (unfortunately?) is more that can be said about the next release on Crass Records...

4 Skins - One Law For Them

4 SKINS - ONE LAW FOR THEM

Charles and Di. "She is pure," said Di's father, implying a virgin was being supplied to the Royal Court. "Do you lover her?" asked a journalist of Charles. "Yes," he replied "Whatever that means."

The curious thing regarding the royal wedding celebration of 1981 was that there was really no visible objection to it from any quarter. In comparison, just the year previously in Amsterdam, in the Netherlands, violent protests had broken out on the day of the Dutch Queen's coronation between squatters and police. Under the slogan 'No house, no coronation', the squatters and their various supporters had attempted to disrupt the proceedings, resulting in full-blown rioting.

At the time of the last major royal event in Britain (the Queen's silver jubilee in '77) the Sex Pistols had, of course, released God Save The Queen and famously sailed down the river Thames past Parliament on Jubilee night, playing said song. For their efforts, they could have (and should have, according to some people) been tried for treason.

Years later it would emerge from officially released government records that Thatcher had been under the impression that riots could indeed seriously disrupt the royal wedding, particularly following the riots in Toxteth, Moss Side, and Brixton. So great was her fears that she had seriously contemplated arming the police and making available army camps for the detention of the anticipated large numbers of arrested rioters.

The reality, however, was that as the country buckled under a media barrage of royal romance and patriotism, all was quiet - even on the Punk front. In fact, the best Punk broadsides that summer were emerging not from the politically conscious Crass camp but from the supposedly apolitical Oi! scene. One Law For Them, the début single from the 4 Skins, for example, being a record that can only be described as an utter classic.

Benefiting hugely from the patronage of Garry Bushell, the 4 Skins were one of the most prominent of Oi! bands, revelling in the imagery of skinhead menace. Though no strangers to accusations of condoning mindless violence, it was their involvement with the gig at the centre of the Southall riot that sealed their reputation and ultimately became their undoing.

Built on a bubbling bass line and chugging guitar chords, One Law For Them was a howl of objection to the unfairness within society: "One law for them - another law for us!" Judging by the picture on the cover of the record depicting a crowd of gentlemen in top hats and ladies in summer head wear at (what is probably) Royal Ascot, the "them" in question is obviously the rich, upper class.

This was one of the first times that class division and inequality had been presented so well on a Punk Rock record. However, whilst the "us" was obviously the (probably white) working class, on close listening to the lyrics, the "them" could just as easily be interpreted to mean the rioters of Brixton and Southall - black and Asian youth, in other words.

This ambiguity was quite typical of Oi! and was the very thing that put paid to it being in any way progressive. For all that, One Law For Them was still a very good record and should be acknowledged (if only for the record's sleeve itself) for putting forward class as an issue within British society.