FLUSHING THE SYSTEM
‘Your life’s reduced to nothing but an empty media game / Big Brother ain’t watching you, mate, you’re fucking watching him.’
Penny Rimbaud
In the immediate wake of Penis Envy’s release, Crass commenced work on what was to become Christ The Album, but by the late summer of 1981 the political stakes had – not for the last time – risen once again. As Margaret Thatcher upped the ‘Law-and-Order’ ante by enforcing a social crackdown predicated upon the application of subjective stop-and-search procedures, urban areas that had already felt the full force of her economic assault erupted in a summer of sporadic rioting. Aside from some minor cynical opportunism, these outbreaks of civil unrest represented a genuine attempt by communities to reclaim their environment, turning the previously academic concepts of ‘us’ and ‘them’ into a practical reality.
The conflict that played out across the desolate streets of places such as Brixton, Toxteth, and Handsworth was political – Thatcher increasingly viewed the police as a means of achieving her objectives (a tactic that would reach its vertex with the Miners’ Strike) and by physically opposing the agents of her ideology, those standing in opposition made clear their rejection of Thatcherism.
In addition to using the police as a political tool, the Prime Minister and her cabinet had become increasingly adept at manipulating a largely sycophantic media. In retrospect, the way in which the 1981 riots, or the H-Block hunger strikes were presented in the mainstream can be viewed as a significant point along a line that began with the media-friendly John F Kennedy overcoming a sweaty and unappealing Richard Nixon, and currently sees us beset by layers of state-sponsored ‘spin’, disinformation and scaremongering.
Back at Dial House, this dynamic did not go unnoticed and several of the tracks that would appear on Christ explored the manner in which the individual is subject to media coercion. Most self-evidently, Penny Rimbaud’s unwittingly prescient ‘Nineteen Eighty-Bore’ conflated advertising with apparent reportage to expose the media’s predilection for obfuscating facts and burying issues under layers of trivia; ‘And wasn’t the Holocaust terrible, good thing it wasn’t for real / Of course I’ve heard of H-Block, it’s the baccy with man appeal’. Similarly, the relentless pounding nature of the backing, not only served to demonstrate how far Crass were removed from the kind of punk orthodoxy that they hadn’t subscribed to in the first place, but also acted as a concrete metaphor for the insistent nature of the media.
‘Beg Your Pardon;’ covers similar territory, aiming disgust squarely at those responsible for peddling lies and false promises, whereas ‘Reality Whitewash’ explores the role played by the media in reinforcing established gender roles. ‘You Can Be Who?’ digs deeper, examining the theme of media influence into the individual and collective psyche and finding it to be an illusion – the track’s final verse being wholly indicative of Crass’ awareness of the increasingly desperate need for opposition and alternatives. Finally, Annie Anxiety’s ‘Buy Now Pay As You Go’ fixes Christ The Album at its historical point along the previously mentioned line by laying down a marker at the instant where state conditioned consumerism really kicked in; ‘Work thirty years with one foot in the grave, possession junkie, consumer slave / If money buys freedom it’s already spent, your object’s the subject of my contempt’.
In addition to addressing the way in which the media in general was manipulated by those on the political new right, Christ dealt with specific instances of the music press being used to further other agendas. The opening track, ‘Have A Nice Day’ opens with an impassioned reading of Tony Parsons’ hysterical attack on the band, taken from the NME. Although Rimbaud’s lyric sets out a rational response to Parsons’ hostility, the strategy of responding so directly to criticism from a journalist who few took seriously and subsequently became the subject of a Viz parody, was questionable as it could easily be interpreted as an unnecessary, reactionary response to subjective criticisms. ‘Of course it got up our noses,’ recalled Penny. ‘Had people like Tony Parsons been a little more concerned with radical ideology and a little less infatuated with themselves, perhaps the scale of protest would have been even larger than it was. Regrettably, in whatever form it comes, the media does play a role in (de)forming social attitudes. Dismissing us as ‘a joke’ was designed to have the same negating effect as claiming that all Greenham women were little more than ‘dangerous dykes’.
Similarly, ‘The Greatest Working Class Rip Off’ and ‘Rival Tribal Revel Rebel (Part Two)’ set their sights on the burgeoning ‘Oi’ and ‘street punk’ subgenres. Entirely predicated upon destructive negativity, these scenes attracted the kind of lagered-up boot boys canonised in Garry Bushell’s weekly Sounds pieces. As became evident in Southall on 4 July 1981, when a concert by three ‘Oi’ bands resulted in a pitched battle between skinheads and local Asian youths, nurturing such negativity quickly kicked open the doors marked ‘aggression’ and ‘violence’. The Exploited may have wanted to fuck the system (as well as ‘A Mod’ and Angela Rippon), but they didn’t have the first idea what they were going to do in the unlikely event that they did happen to somehow fuck it.
Conceived as potentially being the band’s final statement, Christ The Album clearly reinforces Crass’ genuine desire for revolutionary change. Broadsides aimed at the system, war, church, family and state may have been the ‘same old stuff’, but these institutions remained as pernicious as ever. The album serves to underline one of Crass’ core ideals – that there must be something better beyond the high walls and invasive searchlights of the system. What form this better life would take was left to the individual, with the original boxed set included a booklet that provided resources that would potentially assist this process. Although the booklet is not part of the remastered package, it will be made available to downloaded for free from crassarkive.com
Possibly because the group allowed themselves a far longer recording period than had previously been the case, the impact of Rimbaud and Harvey Birrell’s remastering is less noticeable than on the first three instalments of this series. However, the process again serves to highlight Penny’s sonic experimentalism, as subtleties that are buried within the original album’s mix are exposed by modern production methods. Previously unnoticed aspects of songs become evident; the taut, wiry picking on ‘Have A Nice Day’, the sheer depth of instrumental layering and interplay on ‘Nineteen Eighty-Bore’, and the pulsing, compressed fuzz of ‘Bumhooler’. Perhaps because they tend to have a subtler backing, the two tracks sung by Joy de Vivre are exposed as works of genuine poeticism and crystalline beauty. ‘Birth Control ’n’ Rock ’n’ Roll’ deliquesces from the speakers as an evocative slice of contemporary war poetry, made all the more redolent by its subdued vocal, while ‘Sentiment’ stands as a fragile monument signposting the unforgivable cruelties that mankind has wrought upon both animals and their own species.
As with previous Crassical Collection releases, the two disc set (disc two re-presents the mixture of live and early material, intercut with spoken word pieces that came in the original black box) includes some ‘extras’, this time in the form of some studio out-takes, stitched together with archive dialogue, statements from the group and avant-garde sonics. In addition to being indicative of the extended recording process, by revealing something about the development of the seven featured tracks, this material shows Rimbaud’s virtuoso talent for manipulating feedback – a skill he would employ to good effect while developing Flux’s Strive To Survive into something transcendent. The most noteworthy alternate version is that of ‘Birth Control…’ which has the vocal much higher in the mix, giving the track a new directness and immediacy.
By the time of its release, Christ The Album had been superseded by a continuation of the megalomaniac events that were unfolding throughout its conception and recording. In the gap between recording and release, Margaret Thatcher had initiated a war with Argentina over sovereignty of the Falkland Islands. Any notion of Christ being a valedictory statement was forgotten as Crass formulated their responses.
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