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.