For Crass in general, and former frontman Steve Ignorant in particular, it’s been all go just recently. Aside from the re-mastering of the band’s landmark 1978 album Feeding of The Five Thousand, Steve had been on tour across the UK performing Crass’ songs for a final time. Not content with that, he has written a memoir titled The Rest Is Propaganda (published by Southern). I caught up with him to see how he’s bearing up amid this recent maelstrom of activity.
Dick: We should begin by talking about the Last Supper gigs – you’ve just completed the UK leg, from what I’ve read it’s all gone very well – what are your impressions of how they’ve gone over ?
Steve: Absolutely superb. I’ve just been overwhelmed by the response from the audiences. I didn’t think that it was going to be like that, I thought there might be a bit of applause, but people have really travelled from far and wide to come and see it and I haven’t seen a negative response yet on email, or Facebook, or whatever and the whole thing’s just been totally overwhelming.
Have these gigs been a different experience from the Shepherd’s Bush show a couple of years back?
Yeah, for a couple of reasons: When I did that, there was a whole load of controversy that popped up and stuff was being put on the Crass Forum that I made the mistake of reading and there was a bit of dissent from Penny Rimbaud as well, who didn’t want me to use his material because it was a commercial venue, and it really undermined my confidence. So even though Penny came round and said, ‘Of course you can do it with my blessing’, because there’d been such sort of spite and stuff, I was really tense and nervous the whole two days – even though the place was sold out. This time around I decided that people weren’t going to pay all that money just to come along and slag me off, so they must be coming because they want to come and see it and enjoy it, so why don’t I just relax a bit and enjoy it as well – which is what I’ve been doing. Obviously, I still get stage fright, but the whole experience has just been fun.
Which of the Crass material do you enjoy playing live the most these days?
All of it really, but ‘Reality Whitewash’ I like, and ‘How Does It Feel’ is a big favourite of mine, and of course ‘Big A, Little A’.
I always got the sense with Crass that because the message was so strong, it raised the question, ‘Am I supposed to be enjoying this’. Was that the same from a performance point of view?
Yeah, absolutely. When we did Edinburgh the last time, it suddenly hit me that was going to be the last time I performed Crass songs live in Edinburgh and I suddenly realised that all the gigs we’d done; Manchester, Birmingham, Bristol, it was the last time we’d ever be performing there. It hadn’t hit me until then. The audience were singing along up there in Edinburgh, and I couldn’t stop smiling. And I thought, ‘Well, why not, why shouldn’t I smile? Why not show the human face, because that’s what it’s meant to be about, and let’s still have the same feeling about the songs – of course the words remain the same and the attitudes behind them – but this is why we’re doing it, so why not?’
On the current tour, what’s the nature of the crowds been like, are you getting many youngsters in?
A few, but on the whole it seems to be people in their 40s up to 50s coming along. I don’t know what it’s going to be like in Europe, it might be different over there.
Do you find that there’s much of an appetite from the young for the kind of deeply political issues that Crass’ songs address?
I’m not so sure anymore, because back in the day when Crass were going, what we always saw ourselves as was like a little information bureau, and the difference now is that because of the internet you can just Google it. I’ve had this conversation with other people; just supposing that Crass started tomorrow, would we be able to exist. The way we did it in Crass was all sort of nailed together and held together with safety pins, but with this new technology it’d be like, ‘We’re going to do this song about nuclear war or CND – aw no, I Googled that last night you don’t need to tell me.’
For me, Crass represented the very epitome of the way in which music can be used to address issues, make people think, and drive protest. These days, there seems to be a complete absence of dissent among the music scene, to the extent that rebellion has been reduced to a series of stylised tropes – what are your thoughts about this?
I absolutely agree with you, because I always read the bloody paper – I think ‘why do I do it’ because I get really angry, I always read the pop pages – and I think the biggest form of rebellion I can see at the moment is wearing outrageous clothes, like Lady Gaga wearing a dress made out of meat. What’s that a statement about? I don’t get it. Maybe it’s because I’m in my 50s now, maybe I don’t understand the youth anymore.
I was talking to my mate’s daughter a couple of weeks ago – she’s 15, and I said to her, ‘Look Alice, I do not understand young music anymore, can you explain it?’ And she said, ‘Well, we just like it because it sounds good.’ So I said, ‘Yeah, but there’s no revolutionary statement behind it, is there?’ And she went, ‘No, it’s just fun’, and I thought, ‘fair enough.’ I said, ‘What I don’t get is that when I was young, if you were into skinhead music, you dressed like a skinhead, if you was into punk, you dressed like a punk.’ So, you could tell what the person was into by looking at them and you don’t get that anymore. Actually wearing the uniform of the music you liked, that in itself was a statement.
I recently spoke to Mick Farren, and he observed that ‘rock’n’roll has run its course and that music has run its course as the major agent for change, the major medium for rebellion’ – is that something you would agree with?
Yeah, I would. But I would also hope that something is going to come along soon.
Could you tell us a little about the makeup of the band that you’ve put together for these dates?
We’ve got Beki Strong, she’s from Sunderland and she’s in a band called Loaded 44 – they’re not very well known. Originally I was hoping to get Sadie, who I used at Shepherd’s Bush, but she was unavailable, so originally we were planning to do the punk festival in Durham and I asked the promoters if they knew anyone local that could do it. They gave me a choice of three people and I watched Beki on YouTube and said, ‘she’s the one – she can do it.’ And not only has she learned all the words but she’s actually able to sound exactly like Eve Libertine.
That’s not easy to do…
It’s really uncanny, sometimes she’ll just pronounce something in a certain way and it’s like ‘ooh…my god!’ Then I’ve got Bob Butler, and I’ll always work with Bob – he’s just a rock steady bass player and he’s so depreciating of himself. I was in Schwarzenegger with him, so he’s an old, old friend. Giz Butt on lead guitar; he’s been in the Prodigy and stuff like that, he’s a demon bloody guitarist – he can be a little bit irritating, I’ll give him that [laughs], but he’s a spot on guitarist and he’s managed to make his one guitar sound like two – which is a pretty good feat.
Does he play guitar in that odd, ‘over the top of the neck’ way?
No… that was Andy Palmer on rhythm guitar just making a chundering noise. What Giz has done is taken aspects of that and weaved it into the actual guitar playing – it’s really clever, the way he’s done it. On drums I’ve got Spikey Smith, who’s been with Morrissey and Killing Joke – he’s mucked about by them and he was recommended to me by Von, who was the original drummer I had and Spike is just a really brilliant drummer. We’re working together really tight as a unit.
I noticed that the gig flier promises a few surprises in the set – what sort of things have you been dropping in?
I think really that the surprises were that nobody expected us to do so many Eve Libertine songs and also the visuals – which I don’t think anyone expected their own face to be flashed up on the wall while the band were playing.
After the European leg of the tour, will you be keeping the group together?
Yeah, we do Europe, we spend about ten days out there, then come back – I think we’ve got about seven days off, then we fly out to Finland for four nights. [Voice from the background sets Steve straight] Oh… I’ve got four weeks rest! Do that, then we come back and I’ve got a couple of weeks off and then we do Belfast and Dublin. And that’s it for this year.
Have you considered the possibility of new material?
No, because next year it looks like we’re going to America and we might be going to Australia, I’m not sure – there’s all this stuff being talked about. But at some point, I’m going to have to put a deadline to all of this, because the Last Supper can’t go on forever. So it’s going to end definitely next year at some point, but the last ever gig will be at Shepherd’s Bush Empire … I’d like to have done Wales, too – there’s so many places I’d like to have done and it was trying to find where people could possibly get to it. It’s always difficult, the thing is that I didn’t want to be doing this for ever and ever.
Apart from Penny, have you had any feedback from the other former members of Crass about the Last Supper?
Yeah, from Gee – she’s sent me a message saying ‘well done’ and ‘I see it’s all going well’ and that sort of stuff, Eve Libertine sent her love, but the others, I’ve not heard anything from.
Which brings us round to the remastering of Feeding of the Five Thousand – Did you have much to do with that?
I wrote a bit for it, and I just gave it my full support, because I thought that it was well worth doing – the music needed updating and I think it’s got a bit more oomph in it now and the artwork, I think is just great.
I was very surprised by the cover…
I’ll let you into a little secret – because all the albums we did are going to be re-released – that’s the plan… so that when you’ve got all of the Crassical Collection as it’s called, you put all the covers together and it forms the Crass symbol that used to be on Penny Rimbaud’s bass drum. Originally it was going to be this shit brown colour, which looked awful – I went, ‘No – It’s got to be black and white.’ I had to compromise and now it’s a dirty grey [laughs].
With Crass, I always felt slightly guilty about enjoying the music as much as I did – given that, by and large, it’s role was as a vehicle to convey the lyrical content. Do you think that the primacy of the lyrics in those songs has served to obscure their impact as pieces of music?
Yeah, I would absolutely agree with that, because I didn’t realise until we started playing them again, just how intricate the music – if I can call it that – was. Certainly in the songs that Beki sings, they are incredible songs, and the band really enjoy playing those – I can see that in their faces. Things like ‘Reality Whitewash’, or even ‘Mother Earth’, it’s such a frightening bit of music that a lot of it got obscured.
Are you doing ‘Nagasaki Nightmare’? I bet that’d be hard to do.
No, we tried that in the studio, but for some reason, it wouldn’t play live.
Parts of it are almost like gamelan in places…
Yeah, and it gets very jazzy and all that sort of stuff, and Beki wasn’t comfortable with doing it, and neither was the band. So I was like, ‘OK then, leave it out, because I don’t want any discomfort or anything.’ But no, for some reason it just wouldn’t have it – very strange – and we tried all different ways of doing it, but we just couldn’t do it.
You have a memoir, The Rest Is Propaganda, due for publication in just over a week, could you tell us a little about how the book came together and what made you decide to write it?
I’d been trying to write it for about twenty years, but I kept getting bogged down. Firstly, I always find it very hard to write about myself, then I got bogged down in things like; is this making too much of this? Or am I bigging myself up too much? And in the end I gave up. Then I met this guy called Steve Pottinger, ‘Spot’ as he’s known, and he gave me a book of prose that he’d written and his writing was very similar to the way that I write. So I just said to him, ‘Would you be interested in ghost writing this book with me?’ And he said, ‘Yeah.’ The way we did it was that he would basically interview me, and he would ask me questions about childhood and stuff which would then make me go off on a memory. He’d just transcribe it all, email it to me, I’d go through it, he’d pick out the bits that he thought were best – and he was really good, because there were bits that I wanted to put in that would have been too boring – and he’s done a fantastic job on it.
What made you decide to sit down and begin the process?
I think really, I wanted to give the inside story on what I felt – my take on it – because for years, all through Crass and after Crass, I went to do Crass interviews, but I still had to – not tow the Crass party line – but I just wanted to give what my opinion of it all was and to let people know what I was up to before Crass and what I was up to after Crass and again, wanting to show the human side of it. I think that I was always the joker of the pack and I think that the public view was always this austere, serious thing.
Did you find that revisiting your past offered you a fresh perspective?
Yes, it did. In a funny way it was a bit like a therapy session. Now what’s really odd about it is that, obviously I was signing books at the gigs, and every so often the pages would flip open and there’d be a photograph of my Mum, and I was suddenly like, ‘Bloody hell! Everybody’s going to know everything there is to know about me, including those personal family photographs.’ Really, really weird feeling.
I think it might make me feel tremendously vulnerable…
Well, yeah – but I think I’m a bit used to that by now.
What are your thoughts on some of the other books that have been written around the subject of Crass – Penny’s memoir, the George Berger book, Ian Glasper’s overview of the anarcho scene?
The Ian Glasper ones, I flicked through. And I flick thorough them now and again just to sort of read, and I think they’re well written. The George Berger one – I know certain people out of Crass weren’t too impressed by it, but actually I thought that was a pretty good attempt and for anybody who didn’t know who or what Crass were, I thought that gave a pretty good in-depth insight into the whole origins of it. I mean, there were bits that I didn’t know about Penny Rimbaud in there.
Looking at some of the feedback that you have been getting on your Facebook pages, it must be interesting to see just how many people – myself included – have been profoundly influenced by Crass’ ideas. Is this something that you can now look back on with a degree of satisfaction?
It’s something I look back on, not with satisfaction… I’m just knocked out by it. So many people had all these positive things to say _ I don’t get a big head or anything, but it’s really moving. What it brings to me is [to ask] why don’t those members of Crass who have threatened to take us to court and who didn’t want the re-releases to go ahead and still don’t, why can’t they just go out and meet people like I am, or read things that they’re writing and then you’ll see what Crass was about. What it really, really meant to people. Because what annoys me about certain ex-members of Crass is that they all pooh-pooh it, and it’s like ‘oh, well, you know, it was just a thing’. No – it actually did change people’s lives, including mine, and I feel really sort of quite precious about it.
As one of those who visited Dial House back in the day, I was struck by how patient everyone was with us. At times, you must have felt like there was a never ending stream of well-intentioned, but naive people inviting themselves around. How did you cope with this, day in day out?
We used to do it in rotation [laughs], I’d go through and do an hour, or something like that and then someone else would come through and take over, but it certainly was an endless thing and I think when Crass finally finished, I think one of the things that went on for a little while was still that endless stream of people. I mean, I didn’t mind it – that’s why it was an open house and we were going out there putting ourselves out in public and the least you could do is give people time.
You also suffered from a great deal of pernicious attention from the state, phone tapping and so forth –this must have been an ongoing siege for you – how did you deal with that?
We just assumed that’s what it was, we were very careful when we spoke on the phone. When I used to walk home late at night, if a car came up the lane, I’d jump in a hedge – just in case. I dunno why, just maybe being paranoid or whatever, but it did feel like big brother was really watching us.
That would foster a siege mentality…
Yeah, we knew… when the local bobby would come down for his weekly cup of tea, that he was looking under cushions discreetly and things like that. For me, I just thought this is just part of the job – what goes with it.
My reading of much of the content of Crass’ lyrics is that they wholly promoted the idea of the individual thinking for themselves – however, there was often an element at gigs who had assumed the role of fundamentalist followers of the band – was this something that you found problematic?
Yeah, I got really disappointed and disheartened when we got really political and you had all these different anarchist factions and stuff. And I used to get really pissed off with people telling me how I should or shouldn’t portray anarchism, or what I should or shouldn’t say, or what I should or shouldn’t read, or drink, or eat and all this sort of stuff. And there was quite a few times where [it went] ‘Steve – are you a vegetarian?’ ‘Yeah.’ ‘Do you drink milk?’ ‘Yeah.’ ‘Bastard.’ ‘Ah right, OK.’ ‘Steve – you wearing leather’ ‘Yeah, I think so.’ ‘Bastard’ – y’know it’s all this sort of stuff.
I sometimes encountered groups of people who appeared to have grasped the wrong end of the stick, in the sense that they had almost codified their own mental counter-intuitive anarcho ‘rulebook’, packed with dos and don’ts
I know… isn’t it funny – you remember that anarchist centre that Crass were involved in down in Wapping? We’d donated a load of money from ‘Bloody Revolutions’, I believe, to go towards it. I think they’d bought a load of plastic chairs, or something like that. I went down there a couple of times and I just fucked off out of it, because again, that bloody ‘rulebook’ came out and they were sort of looking down their noses at me and almost dissing me because I’d actually had the nerve to be in Crass and donate money to the anarchist centre.
It became very cliquey and Balkanized…
I hated it, that’s why I started telling sexist jokes, and all that sort of thing. Sod it. ‘Steve… Coming down the anarchist centre?’ ‘No,’ I used to go down the local pub and look at the barmaid’s arse [laughs].
Was there a feeling that Crass had, to an extent, raised an army that they actually didn’t want?
I remember an enormous feeling of responsibility – we were taken aback by how seriously people took it. What made it difficult for us was that we knew that we were being scrutinized, and so when we wrote songs we had to make bloody sure that every word was defendable. Really, really odd – and it wasn’t because of the press or anything like that, it was because of the fundamentalists, or the lunatic fringe – those anarchist types that would be waiting with baited breath to dive on us.
One of the core concepts that runs through Crass’ lyrics is the idea of non-violent resistance to oppression – which is perhaps easier said than done when you’re confronted by a mob of meatheads. However, right at the very end of Crass’ time, on ‘Don’t Get Caught’ the lyric, ‘if we can’t go round them then we’ll have to go through’ appears – was this indicative of the realisation that such passivity was not always ideal.
Yeah, absolutely. I’d been saying for years, ‘Look – we should just get fucking baseball bats and do their heads in.’ ‘No, no, no…’ you know. And I knew I was right – we should’ve, and I’ll still say that to this day. Pen agrees with me now, that right at the very beginning, we should have bashed those bastards and not one gig should have been ruined by meatheads. But, still, we were trying it [passive resistance] and, bless the audiences that came along, they did stand up to them, but a lot of people got hurt there as well and I’d always remorse for that. But, if people say, ‘Do you have a regret?’ I’m like, ‘Yeah, we should have… I dunno… got shotguns or something’ [laughs].
Certainly, I know that Conflict could be inclined to meet violence on its own terms, and you subsequently hooked up with them after Crass split. Was that a strange time for you?
Yeah, very – and I had to leave in the end. Part of the reason I was leaving was because Conflict had a rep and people did go to their gigs to sort of take them on, but also there were a couple of people involved in Conflict who used to use that as like a promotion thing. What used to upset me about it was that a lot of people who went to Conflict gigs and the only fight that they’d seen had been a scrap in the local playground, or the only copper that they’d seen had been the local bobby on a bike, and suddenly being involved in a full scale riot like what happened at Brixton…
Oh, that went on for hours…
I know… and I felt really sorry for those kids – not being funny – who came from Norwich, or from Norfolk, or little country places – they must have been terrified, and I found that Conflict always courted that sort of disaster. In the end, I thought ‘I can’t really deal with this anymore’, because at certain times when I’d have to do an interview after the gig, certain behaviour would go on as I was doing the interview – and then I would have to justify that. I think looking back, it might have been a little bit of a mistake for me, but there you go.
What did you think of the other groups who comprised the scene that sprung up around Crass?
Mostly, I liked ‘em! But by ‘83/84, I was fed up with the whole bloody thing, but still doing it. I actually got tired of bands all dressed in raggerty black and singing about nuclear bombs and stuff.
That was what made Rubella Ballet stand out…
That’s why I used to quite like going to their gigs. Then I found myself – and this is going to sound funny – but I was going out with a girl for a while and she introduced me to Michael Jackson’s Off The Wall album, which I sort of got into, and then a band called Imagination. And I really got into that soul/funk stuff.
It must have been rewarding to have helped so many groups get a start?
Yeah, absolutely amazing – I think when you look back at the catalogue that Crass had, love it or hate it, we always tried to put out diverse things and even other labels were doing it as well. When you look back at that, you think ‘bloody hell’ – you go from Annie Anxiety, to the Mob, from Captain Sensible to the Epileptics, or Flux, the Cravats… all that kind of thing. Then, one day this horrible noise from America turned up called ‘skate punk’ and the whole movement took three steps backwards.
How did you feel in 1984 when Crass finally dissolved? Did you have a sense that things had been taken as far as they could?
Yeah, really – really truly – because, I think secretly, every one of us involved in that band were thinking, ‘how long can we do this for?’ And I think if it hadn’t had been Andy Palmer being the first one to say, ‘I want to leave the band now’, a couple of weeks later it would have been either me, or Eve Libertine, or someone would have done it, and that’s why when Andy Palmer said ‘I want to pack it in’, there was the usual chorus of ‘Why’ and ‘What a shame’, but a couple of miles down the road, I think it was me and Eve Libertine that said, ‘Well, actually Andy, if you hadn’t had said it first, I was thinking of jacking it in and all, mate.’ I think we had outstayed our welcome a little bit.
There was a sense of predetermination about the band splitting in 1984 – with the record numbers counting down to 1984 and I think someone stated that the band would dissolve that year.
Yeah, but I don’t remember that you see, and that’s where I disagree with Penny Rimbaud, because he said recently in interviews that there was a definite countdown – I don’t remember it being like that. All we used that 1984 thing for was just as a countdown to 1984. I remember saying to him, ‘What are we going to do if the band’s still going when we go past 1984?’
In terms of punk’s connection to anarchism, my feeling is that the initial wave of 1976 bands used the idea of anarchy as little more than a fashion accessory, but this paved the way for a far more considered reading of the ideology, in harder times, by bands under the Crass umbrella. Do you think this is fair comment?
Yeah, I think that’s absolutely right. I think that with ‘I am an anti-Christ/I am an anarchist’, I’d never heard the word before and I had to ask Penny Rimbaud what it meant. The funny thing is, I think that Crass could be accused of the same thing, because I don’t think that we were particularly anarchist, but because we were being courted by the left wing – by the SWP, and by the NF at that time, people were saying, ‘Well, you dress in black and you wear sort of Nazi-looking things’ and we thought that the only way that we could be unpolitical was to be anarchists, and put an ‘A’ in a circle and it sort of built up from there, really. It used to get a bit embarrassing at times … well, no, not embarrassing – I used to enjoy it; again, the anarchists down at Wapping at the Anarchy Centre, ‘have you read Bakunin?’ and all that, ‘No, I haven’t.’ ‘What books do you read?’ ‘Oh, you know, The Beano and Tintin’ [laughs]. It’d really do their heads in!
Did I read that you’ve joined a lifeboat rescue team?
Yes.
How are you finding that?
It’s going very well, we’re independent – we’re not part of the RNLI – we depend entirely on donations, actually I’ve got training this evening and it’s pretty calm out there, so we might be out on the sea tonight. Every Thursday and every Sunday, we’re out on the sea training.
So have you always been a good swimmer?
I’ve been a pretty good swimmer, the thing is that we wear a thing called a ‘dry suit’ and we wear a life jacket with that, so it’s pretty impossible to sink – so it’s not really necessary, although it does help.
In a way, I think that’s very much in keeping with the spirit of Crass…
It’s very odd – If you’d have said to me ten years ago, ‘Steve, in ten years time you’ll be out in the middle of the North Sea and that’ll be in the middle of the night on a lifeboat looking for someone’ I wouldn’t have believed you, but here I am doing it and sometimes it is really terrifying.
It’s back in the realm of ‘making a difference’…
Yeah, it’s funny how it leads on, isn’t it? Of all the things I end up doing! I could be working in a bakers, or in a brewery, or something like that, but no.
Steve’s blog/book details: http://steveignorant.co.uk/
Steve on Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/home.php?sk=lf#!/ignorant.steve
© Dick Porter, 2010
