CRASS
- YES SIR I WILL
The whole question
regarding content over form was one that had hung over Punk from the
year dot - or rather the Year Zero. The Sex Pistols, for example, had
originally been criticised for being unable to play their instruments
and whilst this may have been true (but irrelevant) in the case of
Sid Vicious, it was very soon apparent that this particular criticism
was absolutely wrong. Though it did them no harm, being good
musicians wasn't actually the point of the Sex Pistols and nor was it
what Punk was about. And as Johnny Rotten added: "And it's
most certainly not about the clothes either. Get that one!"
The Clash had once been
criticised by respected music writer Charles Shaar Murray for being
'a garage band who should be speedily returned to their garage,
preferably with the motor running,' revealing a complete failure
at the time to recognise or understand that The Clash were
representing something much more than just traditional rock and roll.
Garry Bushell had always
insisted upon the importance of a good tune when delivering a message
in a song, dismissing the likes of Discharge as performing nothing
but pneumatic drill solos in which the words were unintelligible. The
dichotomy being, however, that the more tuneful Punk bands of the
kind that Bushell promoted seemed to have less to say for themselves
than a band like Discharge who for all their lack of melody were
conveying their anti-war message loudly and clearly. Many of
Bushell's Oi! bands on the other hand - for all their good tunes -
were unable to even shake off false allegations of racism -
particularly post-Southall riot - suggesting that a good tune was not
actually the most important factor when it came to communication.
According to Bushell, The
Feeding Of The 5,000 was 'tuneless drone' but of course, he
was wrong. Crass had never claimed to be expert musicians but most
certainly they were musically imaginative as evidenced by the quite
brilliant way they utilised Punk Rock to project absolute anger. With
every new record release, however, Crass were becoming more musically
adept and adventurous, culminating in their piece de resistance
Christ - The Album. The Falklands war, however, had thrown a spanner
in the works causing them to completely reconsider what they were
doing and where they were going. Not least, it caused them to
reconsider their whole musical approach.
Crass (along with
everyone else) were coming to fully understand just how utterly
uncompromising Thatcherism was and any belief that there could be
some kind of dialogue with State power was appearing to be quite a
naive notion. These were now perpetually scary times and any hope of
social or political change being achieved through peaceful means
seemed rapidly to be fading. Despite world-wide protests and
demonstrations there appeared to be no sign of any western government
wavering over the plan to site Cruise missiles throughout Europe. As
the numbers of anti-nuclear protesters grew so too did the
government's determination to forge ahead with the Cruise missile
plan become ever more entrenched.
In the UK, the mettle of
Thatcher had been tested and proved by her response to the H-Block
IRA hunger strikers then confirmed by the Falklands war. Without any
question, Thatcher was a formidable political opponent and the least
likely person to be swayed by any such thing as a demonstration let
alone a good argument. Intransigence was her forte.
As a subscriber to the
'trickle down' theory whereby increased prosperity through tax cuts
for the already wealthy at the top of society is meant to eventually
benefit those at the bottom of society, Thatcher again would not be
budged even when faced with blatant contradictions. Under her
government, the rich were indeed getting richer but the poor on the
other hand were getting decidedly poorer and in fact, through rising
unemployment were rapidly increasing in numbers.
Out on the council
estates, Thatcher's 'Right to Buy' policy - where council house
residents were being allowed to buy their homes - was wreaking almost
instant social havoc. For many, being allowed to buy and own their
homes was a dream come true that gained Thatcher many new supporters.
The flip-side to it, however, was the division of whole communities
between home-owners and home-renters or in more Thatcherite terms,
between the deserving and undeserving poor.
It went without saying
that in Thatcher's eyes, the deserving poor were socialist by nature
as was anyone who didn't fit into her vision of mainstream society.
Included among these would be the low-paid, the old unemployed, the
young unemployed, the homeless, lone parents, teachers, trade
unionists, public sector workers, homosexuals, peace campaigners,
even vegetarians. Anyone, in fact, who declined to subscribe to
Thatcher's 'traditional' and Victorian values.
The fact that half of
these people would also decline to subscribe to socialist values
revealed a lot about Thatcher's personal obsessions as did her
labelling of self-professed socialists and genuine Labour supporters
as being extremists and 'Loony Left'. The reality was that the Labour
Party as led by Michael Foot was weak, muddled, uninspiring and
decidedly unsexy; particularly when compared to the go-getting,
thrusting gay blades of the Conservatives.
Still high on victory in
the Falklands and still surfing the tabloid-led wave of jingoism, the
orders of the day were privatization, trade union reform, and Cruise
missiles. In short: inequality, repression, and war. This then, was
the backdrop against which Crass's fourth LP, Yes Sir I Will,
was released.
Following the double
album box set of Christ - The Album, this latest LP was a return to
basics, indicated immediately by the almost austere design of the
record's wraparound sleeve. Graced by nothing but a small,
black-and-white picture of a crucified man, the front cover was very
simple but strangely unsettling, whilst the whole of the back cover
was taken up by nothing but a short though slightly complex
statement: 'Be warned! The nature of your oppression is the
aesthetic of our anger.' The words 'of our anger' written large,
serving to accentuate the sentiment.
Following the
consideration and care applied to the making of Christ - The Album,
there was a sense of urgency about Yes Sir I Will, as though time was
of the essence and that what needed to be imparted was of utmost
importance. Rather than being an album in its own right, it seemed
also to be more of a continuation of the vitriol as expressed on How
Does It Feel?, triggered by the Falklands war and the ensuing
political fallout.
Audio-wise, Yes Sir I
Will was an almighty, drawn out scream of anguish and despair aimed
at the individual listener, the Crass audience and the whole
stinking, fucked-up world of Thatcher and her modern day Britain. It
was a return to first impressions of Crass when originally
encountering them, as in a genuine sense of total anger and a
spitting in the face of everything. It was a return to Feeding Of The
5,000 only without the tunes and containing just two actual songs;
the rest being a vast, sprawling tract pinned to what in effect was a
cacophonous, free-form jazz-Punk-Metal workout. Yes Sir I Will was
Crass's Year Zero.
After starting with the
same descriptive words that How Does It Feel began, as in "When
you woke this morning you looked so rocky-eyed" etc, an
assessment of the current position of Crass within the scheme of
things is delivered. Though still kicking and screaming, it was
apparent that a fundamental change had occurred within Crass. A
fundamental shift. Where before they had always shone with anger and
defiance, that same anger was now tempered with equal measures of
extreme desperation and frustration: "Words sometimes don't
seem to mean much, of anyone we've used more than most, feelings from
the heart that have been distorted and mocked... We didn't expect to
find ourselves playing this part, we were concerned with ideas, not
rock and roll... In attempts to moderate, they ask why we don't write
love songs? What is it that we sing then? Our love of life is total,
everything we do is an expression of that. Everything that we write
is a love song."
The extraordinary
popularity of Crass had been achieved entirely on their own terms
with very, very little support or backing from the mainstream music
press. The reason for their popularity was subsequently a subject for
much debate not only for the music industry but for Crass themselves.
Shortly after the release of Stations Of The Crass, journalist Dave
McCullough had written an article for Sounds (the same music paper
that Garry Bushell wrote for) accusing Crass of being 'tatty,
witless, doggedly dated and unbelievably conservative,' who
(along with the Adam And The Ants and Poison Girls) didn't have 'the
guts or the energy to do something that's original or startling or
new or real.' Musically, according to McCullough, Crass took 'the
blackest and the bleakest of The Clash and the Pistols and gave the
collective elements some kind of special Epping Forest/Japanese
torture until they squealed with pain.'
This was, essentially, a
typical example of the kind of criticism that was regularly being
thrown at Crass that always revealed far more about the critic and
their personal prejudices than it did about anything else. In the
same article, however, McCullough did manage to touch upon something
of some significance. After writing that he was left scratching his
head at the 'wall to wall bilge' and the 'depressing
horrors' of Stations he then asked 'why something as specious
as Crass finds itself able to reach a position approaching
prominence. It's worth thinking about.'
According to all their
critics, the music that Crass produced was absolutely atrocious so
this could in no way be the reason for their popularity, surely? It
must then have been for other reasons, one of the most logical being
that people liked Crass not for how they were expressing themselves
as in their chosen musical style but for what they were expressing.
This was what posed the biggest problem for most critics that very
few of them could ever get their heads round.
When criticising Crass
for their politics all it did was to expose the critic's own
political leanings, these usually being soft Leftist or sly
conservative. Most critics, however, particularly of the music
variety, seemed simply incapable of engaging with the kind of
subjects that Crass were dealing with and had no real comeback to
what Crass were saying. They were basically out of their depth.
Those who were
'political' (with a small 'p') were usually left blithering and
blathering hysterically, rather like tory MP Tim Eggar when
confronted by Crass members during the live radio debate over How
Does It Feel?. The inept fury and outright hostility that Crass
engendered in their critics was probably also a testimony to the
power of Crass's arguments though this didn't mean that the constant
barrage of such criticism wasn't wearisome due to if nothing other
than the fact that the criticism was being delivered from positions
of power and influence. And like it or not, both the NME and Sounds
(plus the other third major music newspaper at that time, Melody
Maker) were powerfully influential organs, both commanding the
attention of over half a million readers every week.
Crass were the equivalent
of a mirror being held up to rock'n'roll and reflecting a horrible
truth: that so-called rock'n'roll rebellion was just a pantomime and
a sham. Very ineffectual and very, very safe. Holding that mirror up
to music journalists, it reflected nothing but hawkers of illusion,
delusion and deceit who themselves were distracted by a rebellious
pose, vainly trying to convince themselves and their readers that it
all meant something when in reality it meant very little. When
confronted with this, all that these journalists could do - like
X-Ray Spex's Poly Styrene sang in Identity - was to smash the mirror
quick. Crass were that mirror.
"Lennon said
'They hate you if you're clever and they despise a fool,"
continued Crass, once again quoting from John Lennon; this time
(again, rather ironically for a band that always denied the
significance of class) from Lennon's Working Class Hero. "He
was right! Social intelligence merely requires agreement and
compromise."
Interestingly, this was a
point where both the Crass and Oi! camps had overlapped, a point not
ever really taken into account nor ever really explored by advocates
of either scene. Crass were obviously disliked intensely by most
critics not only for their music but for what they were saying and
for what they represented. That same dislike was also held for the
bands lumped together beneath the Oi! banner though for very
different reasons.
Crass were deemed
offensive, extreme and humourless whilst any typical Oi! band was
deemed moronic, violent and racist. Accusing Crass of being
offensive, however, was a question of sensibilities and of whose were
being offended. To accuse them of being extreme was a question of
semantics. To accuse them of being humourless was just plain wrong,
as anyone witnessing Phil Free's unique way of dancing on stage might
testify.
To accuse Cockney Rejects
(who, though by 1983 having taken a wrong turn into Heavy Metal were
once the epitome of an Oi! band) of being moronic was sheer cultural
snobbery as dictated by usually middle class, University-educated
critics. To accuse them of being violent was too easy and too
simplistic, particularly when considering their ex-boxing/London East
End/football backgrounds. To accuse them of being racist was simply
outrageous, as a number of genuine racists could confirm after having
the Rejects express solidarity with them by basically punching their
lights out.
In the near blanket
criticism of both Oi! and Anarcho Punk a weird conservatism was at
work, doing its best to disguise itself by hiding behind a mask of
liberalism. The energy of the original '77 Punk shock had charged
through the cultural zeitgeist kicking over all restrictions upon
freedom of expression, or as Sid Vicious put it: "We opened
all the doors - and the windows."
By 1979, however, Sid was
dead and the Punk explosion had been accommodated, contained and
diluted leaving only sparks and streamers descending from the skies
and seeds drifting through the breeze. The freedoms as offered by
Punk had been grabbed at, used and enjoyed though in the morning
after, like late night revellers nursing hangovers, there were
certain people left holding their heads and groaning "Never
again". Having used Punk as a stepping stone toward attaining
something for themselves, these people seemed now to want to draw up
the bridge and curtail Punk's freedoms and place conditions upon
them, especially when it came to expressing so-say 'extreme' views
and to giving a voice to the so-say 'uncultured' elements who simply
failed to understand the 'artisticness' of Punk.
For them, Punk had been a
party but an exclusive one with no gatecrashers allowed. In general,
they mocked and derided Oi! for being small-minded and
unsophisticated, and Crass for being godawful and wrong. Oi! and
Anarcho Punk, then, shared common detractors and common enemies
though rather sadly the two Punk factions were always too busy
arguing and fighting between themselves all the time to really
recognise this and to potentially exploit these common interests.
These were the politics of divide and rule, both wilfully and
unwittingly practised.
"Critics say that
it's just Punk Rock or that we're just naive anarchists. They hope to
discredit us with their labels and definitions," as Crass
put it. The advantage that Crass had over any Oi! band, however, was
the ability to translate their experience of the music business into
a much wider world view where power and control manifested itself in
much more potent forms: "How is it that the small and
mealy-minded have gained so much power? What perversion has taken
place that we are governed by fools? We've had problems from
self-appointed gods, from bishops to MPs. They've tried to ban our
records saying that we're a threat to decent society. Fuck them. I
hope we are."
Still crazy after all
these years. Still mad as hell and not willing to take it any more,
Crass were still ringing the sentiments of Banned From The Roxy as in
"Fuck 'em, I've chosen to make my stand". Four years
after the release of that record, however, where Steve Ignorant had
declared "I ain't quite ready with my gun but I've got my
fucking song," he was now asking "But how long do we
shout for?"
The faith that Crass held
in the power of the word and the potential influence of the art of
song had brought incredible achievements, impacting mightily upon a
generation willing to lend an ear. The usefulness of song though had
also brought Crass to an impasse of sorts and seemed now to be
wearing thin. Post-Falklands war/pre-thermonuclear war, a song now
seemed no longer enough, hence their abandoning of the form on Yes
Sir I Will to be replaced by discordant noise and floods of unrhymed,
screaming streams of consciousness: "What space is there for
self-expression and personal development when over half the world's
population is starving? There are so many things that might have been
done, but rooted on this spot in the desire to find solution, there's
little to see and feel but the sighing and dying of our world. But
for suffering we might have been a part of it rather than apart from
it."
For all that,
paradoxically and very unexpectedly from amidst the noise and the
haste a sudden patch of clear calm is revealed in the shape of the
most gentle and most tuneful song Crass would ever perform. Not
screamed or shouted but actually sung very tenderly by Penny Rimbaud
- for the first time taking on lead vocal - accompanied by nothing
but piano. From the swirl of anger and desperation, here was a song
as though born in the depths of night exposing a man alone with his
thoughts, stirring embers of doubt and despair: "Making the
compromises. Brave fronts, deceitful disguises. Turning a blind eye
to the lies just to keep it all together, but sometimes when I'm
alone like this I wonder whether it's worth it? What did you know?
What did you care? Surface agreements, statements of fact, trying to
prove we can do it... Holding the vision but losing our sight,
endlessly searching solution. But sometimes when I'm alone like
this..."
From day one, the whole
Crass canon of songs had been a litany of anger and outrage but here
suddenly was a song wrought from and conveying sadness and
depression. As a collective, Crass could easily have vetoed the
release of it into the public domain on the grounds of it being too
negative but the fact that they chose to let such feelings be known
spoke volumes as to their present state. It was a valid decision that
revealed them as being all too human and not the supercharged
anarchist leaders they had been elevated into being. At the same
time, it underlined also their seriousness regarding their whole
raison d'etre.
Almost single-handedly,
Crass had turned Punk from being "just another cheap product
for the consumer's head" into a genuinely anarchist-fuelled
movement for potential social change. Thatcher's war in the
Falklands, however, had not only laid bare the cracks and the flaws
in the movement but had magnified them ten-fold to the extent of
practically eclipsing the positives: "Anarchy's become
another word for 'got 10p to spare?'. Another way of saying 'I'm OK,
sod you out there'." And indeed there was a lot of truth to
this.
For some, Punk and
Anarcho Punk in particular had become if only temporarily a refuge
from the world. A retreat, a shelter from the storm. At a time of
increasing disparity between rich and poor, poverty was being adopted
by some as a lifestyle choice and dressing like a tramp was becoming
a kind of anti-fashion statement. Subsequently, dressing like a tramp
quickly led to acting like one. At every gig, at every place that
Punks might gather there came an incessant chorus of the new tramp
Punk mantra: "Oi, mate! Have you got 10p?" Begging
had become as synonymous with Punk as spitting once was.
The year previously,
Dagenham-based Punk band The Ejected had released their début EP on
the Riot City label, entitled Have You Got 10p?, striking a chord
with anyone attending Punk gigs at that time. Though delivered with
tongues firmly in cheeks, they had nailed a subject that actually
wasn't very amusing: Punks scrounging from fellow Punks, not out of
necessity but because it was deemed the thing to do. Like a fashion.
Like Pavlovian dogs.
So successfully had Crass
woven the idea of anarchy into Punk and vice versa that the state of
one could now be measured against the state of the other. So, if Punk
(and specifically Anarcho Punk) was becoming problematic then so too
was anarchy: "Anarchy's become... another token tantrum to
cover up the fear. Another institution, another cross to bear."
Were things really that
bad as viewed from The House Of Crass? It appeared so. Clouds were
gathering and hanging over it. Black ones, naturally. Where once Punk
had been "an answer to years of crap, a way of saying 'No'
where we'd always said 'Yep'," it was now being viewed by
Crass as being pretty much ineffectual. It was the course that
Britain and subsequently the course that the world was taking that
was important and at stake, not allegiance to a sub-cult. According
to Crass, Punk was now an irrelevance. It had served its purpose but
now was a formulae, an institution: "Anything and everything
can be so easily institutionalised, a poor parody of itself, itself
contained by itself. Punk has spawned another rock and roll elite,
cheap Rotten Vicious imitations thinking they'll change their world
with dyed hair and predictable gestures. Nouveau wankers."
And in as much as Steve
Ignorant could be bitterly scathing regarding the matters of war,
politics and the system, so too could he turn his bile upon the
current devotees of that which had once changed his life: "Go
on, go and pogo out the fucking window you spiky-haired little ponce.
Fucking pervert. Go and suck a safety pin. Shove it up your arse."
But were Crass right to
be so bitter toward Punk? After all, was it not they who from the
very start had declared Punk to be dead? So where now was the
problem? Punk had always been flawed and riven with contradictions
but the fact remained that the Sex Pistols et al was precisely what
Britain in 1977 had needed, no matter that it was all too quickly
appropriated. When Crass came along and essentially divided Punk up
between those in it for the right reasons and those in it for the
wrong, they performed what was at the time an absolutely necessary
task. Anarcho Punk was the result.
Like any band, the
success of Crass and their brand of Punk could be measured against
record sales and gig attendance which in light of the totally
independent way they were operating was genuinely phenomenal. Crass
themselves, however, were measuring their success more against their
effective impact upon culture and politics, or as they put it: "We're
tired of living up to other people's expectations when our own are so
much higher." It must have been gratifying therefore, for
them to see their audience swell to such huge numbers and to see this
reflected in the subsequent creative activity going on as in zine
production and band formation, as well as the rising participation of
Punks in demonstrations and protests.
The real litmus test of
their actual impact and subsequently Punk's effectiveness, however,
had come with the advent of the Falklands war which had found Anarcho
Punk somewhat lacking in its response. Yes Sir I Will was the
signifier that Crass had learnt a very hard lesson from this and from
now on were only going to focus on that which was important. Any hint
of a nice tune, for example, would now be jettisoned, and no longer
were they going to be a Punk band be it Anarcho or otherwise. From
now on Crass were going to be an anarchist band only: "How
many times must we hear rehashed versions of Feeding Of The 5,000 by
jerks whose only fuck off to the system has been one off the
wrist?... Actionless sloganeering is just another Punch and Judy
show."
Having turned their guns
upon themselves and that which had once inspired them to form a band
in the first place, Crass were now free to focus purely on what in
their eyes were meaningful matters such as the state of the world and
the roles that people were playing in maintaining that state. And
generally, from Crass's vantage point, things weren't looking too
good: "Are we so dumb, so cowered into submission that not
only are we prepared to eat shit, we're also prepared to say thanks
for the privilege?"
Identifying one of the
major problems as being passive acceptance brought about by various
forms of conditioning, the influence and power of television is
rightly pinpointed: "Television has so dampened people's
anger... and the streets, where the politics of reality were once
created, are deserted at night and the rulers sleep secure."
Even though there were
only four terrestrial British television channels at this time, their
capacity to enthral the nation was unsettling. In the scheme of
things, television was still a relatively new technological
phenomenon but having become the foremost form of home entertainment,
its sociological impact was massive. Television held an audience
captured within their own homes.
The government was fully
aware of the importance of television as a conduit of news, hence the
constant tussles with the BBC and even the famous 'make-over' of
Thatcher where her appearance and voice were altered so as to make
her more televisually appealing. Even though the BBC was very much
part of the Establishment, it was viewed rather inexplicably by
Thatcher and her Conservatives as being overly liberal and even
somewhat socialist.
These sentiments were
brought to a head during the 1981 inner-city riots when Thatcher
accused the BBC of influencing copycat rioting through its coverage
of the events of that summer. When the Falklands war happened, for
reasons of 'national security' Thatcher severely restricted access to
and and the reporting of it but even this was not enough for her. The
BBC, she believed, should at times of crisis by default align itself
with the government but in trying to maintain impartiality by
describing Argentine forces as 'Argentine forces' instead of
Thatcher's preferred term of 'the enemy', the BBC succeeded only in
further stoking Thatcher's ire.
Having awarded
knighthoods to the editors of The Sun, the Sunday Express, and the
Daily Mail, Thatcher knew that most of the national press was in her
pocket but she knew also - like Crass - that television was
something altogether different; potentially much more powerful than a
newspaper and potentially far more influential. According to Crass:
"Television is today's Nuremberg." Would Thatcher
have agreed with this? And if so, would she have also agreed that "We
are allowed to see endless theatrical deaths but when the real deaths
started on the Falklands, government censors prevented us from seeing
them"?
How could this be denied?
Is that not what had happened? And how could Crass's next assertion
be also denied: "At home, we were fed fabrications of
Britain's 'glorious war'. The truth that is now filtering out paints
a very different picture"?
With the sinking of the
Argentine cruiser General Belgrano and the loss of 321 lives, the
Falklands crisis became the Falklands war. The circumstances of the
sinking whilst coming as a shock to all but the most belligerent of
armchair warriors seemed at the time to be pretty straightforward:
the Belgrano was within the exclusion zone that had been thrown
around the island and was deemed to be a threat to British forces.
From a decision taken on the spot by the captain of the British
submarine HMS Conqueror, the Belgrano was therefore torpedoed.
Apparently, however, this
wasn't quite the truth of the matter. Slowly but surely, suggestions
were being made that differed drastically from the official version
of events. Apparently, the decision to sink the Belgrano had come not
from the captain of the Conqueror but from Thatcher herself.
Apparently, the Conqueror had been tracking the Belgrano for some
days and the decision to attack her was made suddenly and
coincidentally on the very same day that a peace plan tabled by the
President of Peru had been delivered to London. And last but not
least, apparently the Belgrano was in actual fact outside of the
exclusion zone and heading away from the Falklands when it was
struck.
According to Labour MP
and major thorn in Thatcher's side, Tam Dalyell, the Falklands war
was only ever about military victory and to this end the Belgrano was
sunk. Military victory meant government victory meant Conservative
victory meant Thatcher's victory. Anything that might take the shine
off the military victory would take the shine also off Thatcher. The
circumstances surrounding the sinking of the Belgrano was the
Achilles heel not only of the official British version of the war but
also of Thatcher. No wonder then, that she wished to gloss over the
whole issue.
"The Falklands
war... was not a glorious victory for the British spirit, nor an
heroic defeat of a fascist dictator," continued Crass "It
was a callous and savage piece of electioneering designed to cover up
horrific domestic problems." Apparently, an accusation that
Thatcher was not entirely in agreement with.
Throughout Yes Sir I
Will, what was by now the usual suspects along with some new
additions are all lined up and as per usual demolished one by one:
"Puppet figurehead Queen Elizabeth the Second, Regina
Virgina... the inheritor of her ancestors greed and theft."
"Still we lay
prostrate before a stylised figure on a crucifix, as if the stone
fool might be resurrected. Fuck his loaded deity."
"Governments pay
no heed to the cries of suffering... because to ensure control the
superpowers need to maintain the imbalance."
"Politicians...
how can anyone be so distorted?"
"Who is this
Heseltine with his corrupt lies? Who is this Thatcher with her
arrogant deceit? These hideous mutants cast their shadows across all
that is worthwhile and good."
What was more noticeable
within the album's tract was the increased attention given to the
fact that "the rows of grey robots who control our lives"
are all rich, no better summed up as by the description "The
wealthy obscene with their obscene wealth."
An early Crass slogan
stencilled on billboards on the London Underground had declared that
'Wealth is a ghetto', and whilst this might be the truth, it
was still a privileged ghetto to be in none the less. Under Thatcher,
the rich and the subsequently privileged were getting ever more
richer but according to Crass the poor were now not only getting
poorer but they were also getting killed, or at the very least their
lives being made a complete misery: "In a world where there
are people who can't afford a crust of bread, these arrogant scabs
drive around in Bentleys and Rolls Royces. Perhaps it amuses them to
rub shit into the faces of the poor? But there'll come a time when
such overt displays of wealth will not be tolerated by the people in
the street. In a sane society wealth and possession would not be an
asset."
This was Crass edging
very close to the same direct-action advocating point that The
Apostles were making in their song Pigs For Slaughter, as in: "Spray
a message of hate across a Bentley or smash it up... Put sugar in the
petrol tank, deflate the tyres with six-inch nails. That's the way to
wreck a Rolls, so get stuck in, it never fails."
When it came to an issue
such as Cruise missiles, though being as Crass put it "an
existing reality", it was a reality that only physically
manifested itself at the bases such as Greenham Common and Molesworth
where the silos could actually be seen being prepared. In the main,
then, apart from those campaigners putting themselves on the front
line at these bases, for most people that particular battle was an
ideological one. The disparity between the rich and the poor,
however, was something much easier to see on a day-to-day basis
whether it be on television, in advertising, or even by a simple trip
into any city. It was something that there was no need to seek out as
it was always there in full view, the wealth side of it being
flaunted as if it was some kind of virtue. Poverty, on the other
hand, whilst also being clearly visible was something to almost be
ashamed of.
Here then was "an
existing reality" that was in your face. Here then lay a
future battlefield not so much for an ideological war but for a more
physical one. A class war, perhaps? From wrecking a Rolls Royce it
was only a hop, skip and a jump away to a full-blown riot, something
that those in power seemed to be quite conscious of although as Crass
were pointing out: "Rather than analysing the seriousness of
the problem, they simply strengthen the army and police to combat
it."
The St Paul's riot in
Bristol in 1980 and likewise the country-wide riots the following
year may have taken everyone by surprise but now civil unrest was not
only being anticipated but was being prepared for. Those in any
position of power be it economically or politically knew that
something was now 'out there' waiting. Something brooding, seething,
discontented and dangerous: "It happened in Brixton, Toxteth
and Moss Side. It happens daily in Northern Ireland."
Whilst on the one hand
dismissed as being pure criminality or even as the politics of envy,
on the other hand it was apparent that it was also being taken
seriously enough to warrant a war being waged against it: "Under
Thatcher's regime there have been massive increases in police
brutality," and in a
reference to the shooting of Steven Waldorf: "In London,
police shot down a man only to find it was the wrong person."
The question being, however, who exactly was on the attack and who
was on the defensive? The rich or the poor? Was it the ruling elite
who were running scared or was it the dispossessed?
Yes Sir I Will was Crass
weighing up the odds, despairing, taking stock, taking a deep breath
and then urging themselves and their listeners onwards: "Why
should we accept servility as a bargain for dignity? Why should we
passively accept death as a bargain for living? Why accept this
robbery of life? Why accept this pillage... Take up your eyes and
see. Take up your ears and hear. Take up your mind and think. Take up
your life and act."
Above everything else,
however, it was the problem of the passive observer and passive
acceptance that was drawing the most fire: "Passive observers
do nothing but passively observe... Passive observers offer nothing
but decay... In your refusal to act you are guilty of being the
gutless, passive observer... War can only exist through passive
acceptance... In your passive acceptance you have already allowed the
(nuclear) holocaust to happen. The future is ended."
In presenting all these
various problems as one major problem conveyed in one single block of
words rather than separate problems conveyed in separate songs, there
now came the danger of being snowed under by it all. To avoid,
therefore, being immobilised by the combined weight of all the
problems being made into one, the tract that was Yes Sir I Will
demanded a suitable ending. Some kind of summing up needed to be
reached.
Though having declared at
the start of the album that their love of life was total, come the
end Crass had once again made it clear that life was also a horrible
mess. So what to do? In their final reckoning, Crass were teetering
on the edge of making a declaration of outright war: "It is
up to us all as responsible citizens of Earth to work towards the
downfall of the powerful elite. Their rule has created dreadful
suffering. Their insanity precludes all reason and compassion. They
lie, trick and manipulate... They must be stopped. Why should people
die for their insanity? Why should people starve for their insanity?
Why should people suffer the spitefulness of their greed? We must not
be intimidated by the authority that they appear to have. We must be
prepared to oppose them on every level, to fight back in the
knowledge that if we don't we will have failed in our responsibility
to life itself."
Given that an acute sense
of desperation had been conveyed throughout the album, it seemed
however as though Crass were still holding back or rather they were
being held back - paradoxically - by some of the very ideas they were
espousing. If it was a war that was being waged, as pacifists could
they allow themselves to actually partake in that war? As pacifists
could they actually declare a war? Such was the frighteningly violent
dangerousness of the "existing reality" that Crass
had depicted, it was now a matter of the utmost urgency to deal with
it. That much they had made abundantly clear. Nothing now could be
afforded to get in the way and any unnecessary obstacles needed to be
avoided or overturned be it the cloak of Punk Rock, the sugar coating
of a nice tune, the shackle of fear, the prison cell of passivity, or
the hand-brake of pacifism.
Having always been firm
exponents of both Punk Rock and pacifism there was now the distinct
impression that Crass were throwing off those particular yokes (or
crosses, as Penny Rimbaud would put it) so as to allow themselves
more freedom and be more relaxed in the way that others might choose
to express themselves artistically, socially, and politically: "Ours
is a just cause; it is up to each one of us, alone, to do our best.
We must learn to overcome our fears. We must realise that the
strength that they have is the strength that we give them. It is you,
the passive observer, who has given them this power. You are being
used and abused and will be discarded as soon as they've bled what
they want from you."
Essentially, the message
was now 'each to one's own', this being basically the same message
that EP Thompson had given when he implored the CND masses to sense
their own strength. The same message, fundamentally, that Crass had
always given, from "It's up to you to change your life and my
life's up to me," as delivered in Big A Little A, right down
to 'The dawn is in us' as scratched into the run-off groove of
Christ - The Album. A message that was actually very simple but so
huge that Crass were only now starting to fully heed it themselves.
Having criticised and to
all intent and purpose jettisoned Punk, they now seemed to be
teetering on the edge of denouncing pacifism. Almost. What was being
accentuated instead was that there was no one single path to take and
that it was now almost a case of by any means necessary. Almost. No
longer were they going to condone or condemn any others' choice or
way of doing things. Now was not the time for arguments over tactics.
Now was not the time for self-imposed divisions. Now, rather, was the
time for action. Now was the time to get out on the streets.
"You must learn to
live with your own conscience,
your own morality,
your own decision,
your own self.
You alone can do it.
There is no authority
but yourself"
Spoken by Eve Libertine
over the sound of feedback fading to silence, those last words
brought Yes Sir I Will to a conclusion but even more than that they
brought to a conclusion all that Crass had ever spoken, written,
shouted, screamed or indeed, sung. Those last six words - "There
is no authority but yourself" - was perhaps the ultimate
Crass statement, directed squarely not at the Crass audience as a
whole but at every single solitary individual within that audience.
The only authority that
mattered, the only authority to recognise was that which was to be
found within every single one of those individuals. Any other
authority - be it political or institutional - was false and fit only
for challenging. 'There is no authority but yourself' was nothing
less than an ultimate truth. Plainly simple, blatantly obvious and
ultimately undeniable. Limitless in its connotations, profound in its
implications. This one statement was what Crass were all about. It
was their meaning, their beginning and their end.
"There is no
authority but yourself." Could anything more possibly be
said?
As with all Crass albums,
the sleeve of Yes Sir I Will folded out into a huge poster, this time
containing an enlargement of a photograph taken from The Sun
newspaper showing Prince Charles standing face-to-face with a
Falklands war veteran who has been horrifically burnt and mutilated.
The soldier was Welsh Guardsman Simon Weston, one of the survivors
from the sinking of landing ship the Sir Galahad. The caption beneath
the picture read: '"Get well soon," the Prince said. And
the heroic soldier replied: "Yes, sir, I will."' This
then was where the title of the album had come from. An almost
innocuous photograph plucked from a tabloid newspaper encapsulated
and underlined all that Crass were saying.
Going by his relationship
with Lady Di - his own wife - Prince Charles was a peculiarly
emotionally stunted individual, whilst Simon Weston was simply a
soldier being dutiful. On coming together, the inadequacy of the
exchange between the two was glaring. In all likelihood, Charles
meant well when wishing that Weston "get well soon"
although to say this to someone horrifically mutilated for life was
particularly woeful just as Weston's reply was equally pitiful. Both
were figures trapped in roles that were helping to maintain the
whole, sorry state of the world. Charles, the modern day master,
inheritor of his ancestors greed and theft; Weston, the modern day
servant, not only prepared to eat shit but prepared also to say
thanks for the privilege. One a representative of obscene wealth and
privilege, the other a representative of supreme sacrifice to Queen
and country - and Thatcher.
Ultimately, Yes Sir I
Will was an experiment that both failed and succeeded in its aims. If
the whole point of the album was to communicate a message then it
succeeded although the message wasn't quite as straightforward as
Crass might have intended.
The main point of 'There
is no authority but yourself' came over loud and clear but this was
arrived at right at the end of the record after an exhausting and at
times gruelling slog through a mass of tangled words. The fact that
those words had been nailed to a sprawling, tuneless, free-form noise
workout resulted in a lot of the actual content being eclipsed by the
form rather than Crass's desire of it being the other way round. The
words subsequently ending up as a kind of subtext to what was really
being communicated; that being a near-hysterical, absolute sense of
desperation and frustration. There was a distinction between the
intellectual and the emotional and between the head and the heart, so
more so than conveying what Crass were thinking, Yes Sir I Will had
actually ended up conveying what Crass were feeling.
Just over a year
previously it seemed that Crass were riding the crest of a wave and
that change on all kinds of levels was absolutely possible. The
Falklands war had put paid to that particular notion with a vengeance
and had shown that both the peace movement and the Punk movement just
weren't good enough. CND might well have been capable of getting
thousands of people out on the street, marching from A to B and
congregating in Trafalgar Square or where ever but they had done
nothing to prevent the conventional war in the Falklands. Given the
fact that Cruise missiles were still very much on the way to England
and the rest of Europe, there was good reason to believe that
continuing to pursue these same methods of protest there was even
less chance of CND preventing a nuclear war.
Crass may well have
spawned a legion of Anarcho Punk bands all screaming blue murder
about The Bomb but when it came to an actual war, albeit a
conventional one, Thatcher had left them all standing in muted
impotency. The question that needed to be asked was that if Crass had
recognised this then why hadn't others? Furthermore, if Crass had
reached a near state of emergency regarding the need for action,
again, why hadn't others?
By this time, of course,
Crass had their own hardcore audience, the demographic of which
closely reflected the composition of Crass themselves; that being a
mixture of working, middle and upper-middle classes; white, mainly
male but with a respectable female representation. What percentage of
that audience were actually active in some way and how many were just
passively consuming Crass as a form of Punk product was difficult to
gauge but it was fair to say that if any were still failing to hear
what was being said then it was through no fault of Crass.
On a political level, one
of the problems was that inactivity and silence from anyone - not
from just the Crass audience - was translated as giving consent to
the status quo. The great, violent, silent majority as Penny Rimbaud
had once wrote. It was all well and good saying that all government
is the same so therefore why bother voting but if nothing
constructive was being done in place of voting then everybody might
just as well get themselves down to the polling station every few
years and just go with the flow.
It didn't bother Thatcher
none if people chose not to vote at all because essentially it meant
just one less potential vote for the opposition. It didn't even
really bother her if people went on a demonstration against Cruise
missiles or whatever, especially if all they did at the end of it was
to go quietly back to their homes and subsequently back to being
silent again.
What did bother her,
however - apart from the odd inner city riot - was sustained and
constant demonstrating because this showed a spirit and determination
that she herself saw as being essential to creating change. Or as
Noam Chomsky would put it: "If you go to one demonstration
and then go home, that's something, but the people in power can live
with that. What they can't live with is sustained pressure that keeps
building, organisations that keep doing things, people that keep
learning lessons from the last time and doing better the next time."
Crass were clearly
learning lessons as were a significant number of Anarcho Punks and
fellow travellers of different stripes but would they be doing it
better the next time? And if so, what might it involve? What next
after Yes Sir I Will? What next after the latest protest march? These
were revolutionary times and revolutionary ideas and tactics were
being demanded.
As Joe Strummer had once
asked: Were we taking over or were we taking orders? Were we going
backwards - or were we going forwards?
