Lack Of Knowledge - Grey

LACK OF KNOWLEDGE - GREY

Sometimes it seemed that whatever a Crass-affiliated band did they just couldn't win, a case in point being Lack Of Knowledge who having played at the Zig Zag squat gig subsequently had a four-track EP released on the Crass label, called Grey.

Whilst The System were criticised for being 'Crass clones', Lack Of Knowledge were criticised for not being Crass enough, and labelled instead as Joy Division copyists. If the truth be told, they undoubtedly did sound a bit like Joy Division although this was exactly what made them all the more interesting. Lack Of Knowledge were Joy Division as engineered by John Loder and produced by Penny Rimbaud, inhabiting the DIY world of Anarcho Punk.

Outside of the London squat/independent venue scene very little was actually known about them as a band, making their Grey EP oddly enigmatic. Wrapped in a sleeve adorned with nothing but black and white photos of tower blocks and bleak city landscapes, the record conveyed a sense of bareness and indeed, greyness.

When it came to the songs, even though the lyrics were sung in a conventional manner rather than shouted (or screamed) the structure of them eschewed such things as verses, choruses and middle-eights, and instead were short pieces of prose or vignettes mostly dwelling on apocalyptic reveries and future nightmare visions.

Lack Of Knowledge were square pegs in round holes, not really sitting comfortably alongside the likes of Dirt or Flux but then just as equally not fitting in with any of the Factory label bands either. In short, they were a perfect Anarcho band.