Back in 1969, an art student who called himself Penny Rimbaud was walking through the English countryside and discovered a 16th Century farm house.
Where most would have continued walking, Rimbaud saw infinite possibilities. “This could be an anarchist collective art center” he immediately thought, “where people from all over the world would come to exchange ideas.” “Then they’d go back home and start their own!” he yelled aloud.
Over the next few years he pieced together a band of other art school kids and they called themselves EXIT. Things were slow at first and Penny’s dreams looked like they may not make it much farther than Epping Forest where the house was located. Then a truant teenager named Steve Ignorant walked up the driveway and shortly after, the anarchist punk band Crass was formed. Unlike EXIT, Crass didn’t ostracize their audience by playing avant-garde noise. They played songs. And they weren’t just songs, they were empowering anthems about going your own way and never letting anyone tell you what to do. By the late 70s the momentum was overwhelming. Pen’s best friend from art school Gee Vaucher moved back from New York and began to give the band a visual identity. Now Crass were a “thing” and Dial House was their headquarters. Their pranks garnered the global media and had Margaret Thatcher denouncing them in parliament. Smart punks around the world who felt bored by fashionistas like the Sex Pistols and the Exploited latched on to Crass’ intellectual revolution. I was one of those kids and we duplicated the Crass stencils from the records so we could cover our own streets with the words “THERE IS NO AUTHORITY BUT YOURSELF.” They weren’t just a band. They were the brains of the punk movement and provided the foundation for the modern anarchist movement. It’s hard to imagine the Occupy movement without Crass. In fact, it’s hard to imaging a lot of teenage rebellion without Crass.
It’s been a quarter of a century since the band disbanded but Dial House is still regularly attended by anarchists and outcasts seeking to change their own environments. It’s been 40 years since Penny had his epiphany on that hill in Epping Forest and despite it all, it’s still happening. That’s because, no matter what you say about Penny and Gee (yes, she still lives there) they walk the walk. The band has come and gone but the ethos of Dial House has never faltered. That’s why, at 70-years-old Rimbaud is finalizing a plan to continue the culture of Dial House after he’s gone. He recently had an art show at New York’s Boo Hooray to sell a collection of his drawings in order to pay off the remaining debt on the home and convert the entire estate into a trust that will continue to do what it’s been doing since it started. It will remain a place where people come to exchange ideas, forever. I’ve gotten to know Penny quite well over the years and visit Dial House with my kids regularly. I always come back feeling refreshed and inspired. The kids say, “It’s magic there.”
[Penny Rimbaud: I’d like to point out that the above ‘history’ is fairly inaccurate on several levels, but as it seems to be a rather nicely put together little piece, I’m not going to spend time correcting it. Everyone has their own version of events, and the above one is most decidedly Gavins, which is fine by me.]
Gavin McInnes: How did that bike accident you had a couple of years ago change you? Did it make you realize your own mortality?
The bike accident happened something like ten years ago, and there are those who believe that it wasn’t a simple accident. I’d just spent something in the region of twenty years retired from public life, writing and painting. ‘Shibboleth’, my autobiography, had just been published. Included in the book were a good few ‘facts’ that the authorities would have preferred not to have been made public, and if those authorities had hoped that my retirement was to be everlasting, ‘Shibboleth’ certainly went a long way in reasserting my role as an agent provocateur and cultural terrorist. Of the accident itself, I recall nothing more than turning into the street where it occurred. The next thing I knew was coming out of concussion, laid out on the sidewalk, surrounded by a group of local cops who were totally pissed off that the Special Branch (the SWAT-like drugs and terrorism division of the UK police force) had been operating in their hood unannounced. It was the Specials who had, they later claimed, accidentally knocked me off my bike whilst, they claimed, in pursuit of a drug dealer. But that didn’t explain why when I had a full body scan to ascertain the degree of my injuries. I was informed that rather than a bike accident, it looked more as if I’d been severely ‘done over’. So, yes, I’d just come out of twenty years isolation, and it was obvious that I was still as angry as ever and ready for action, so maybe it wasn’t an accident. Maybe it was an attempt to ‘put me out’ of action. Maybe, maybe. There are those who have said I should take hypnosis to reclaim the moments lost in concussion, but, d’you know what?, I really don’t want to know.
Is that what led you to re-release the Crass lyrics with everybody’s name on them? I always assumed “Reality Asylum” was written by Eve Libertine.
After the accident I was hospitalized. I had a broken collar bone which put an end to any future serious climbing (which was a quite a loss), and there was concern that I might have a hairline crack in my skull and could suffer further concussive attacks. On top of that, just about every bone on my body seemed on screech out in pain, not helped by the fact that I refused to take ‘blocker’ pain killers, and that the coffee in the hospital was crap. After one night on the ward, I was rescued by Eve Libertine who arrived, double espresso in hand, and helped me sign myself out (despite being barely able to walk). For the next two to three months I lay in bed, nursing my wounds, and wondering where the hell I went next. Having had a near brush with death, I began to consider what might have happened if I had died. One thing I realized was that whereas I had already written a will leaving much of my past to work to friends, in the case of my work with Crass I was unable to do so because we had almost from the beginning operated a joint ownership on all of our material. This had been done not as a philosophical statement, but as a piece of circumspection when ‘Reality Asylum’, which I wrote, was up for prosecution under laws of criminal blasphemy. We knew that the state would be far less likely to follow through a prosecution against the whole band than against one person. As it happens, we were right, and the case was dropped, while, at the same time, we never went back to named authorship of our songs. Twenty years down the line, and following my accident, I felt it was time for us to be able to claim our songs as our own so that they might be able to belong to the ‘body of work’ of the individual band members responsible for them. Having written something in the region of seventy percent of Crass’ material, this was particularly pertinent to me. Several members of the band, led by Pete Wright the bassist, thoroughly objected to my suggestion, but after several months of thoroughly negative communications with him and the others, I quoted my own tenet, ‘There is no authority but yourself’, and gave Pamono Books (who were about to publish our entire cannon as a paperback volume) the go ahead to individually name the author of each song. It was the first in a series of disputes between Pete and myself concerning Crass and whatever past it was that any one of us recalled.
ARTICLE CONTINUES HERE.
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