Crass

History

Crass formed from the anarchist commune at Dial House, a 16th-century cottage near Epping, Essex. The band started when commune founder Penny Rimbaud, who had been involved in avant-garde performance art groups like EXIT and Ceres Confusion and was writing his book Reality Asylum, began jamming with Steve Ignorant, a houseguest. Ignorant had been inspired to start a band after seeing the Clash perform at Colston Hall in Bristol. As a drum-and-vocal duo, they recorded "So What?" and "Do They Owe Us a Living?" under the temporary name Stormtrooper, before settling on Crass, taken from the David Bowie lyric "The kids were just crass."

Other friends and household members—Gee Vaucher, Pete Wright, N. A. Palmer, and Steve Herman—joined. Their first live show was at a squatters' street festival in Huntley Street, North London, where a neighbour cut the power after three songs. Herman soon left and was replaced by Phil Clancey, known as Phil Free. Joy De Vivre and Eve Libertine also joined around this time.

Early gigs included a four-date New York City tour, a festival in Covent Garden, and regular shows with the U.K. Subs at The White Lion in Putney and Action Space in central London, which were often poorly attended. After two performances at the Roxy Club in Covent Garden—where the band showed up drunk for the second and were thrown off stage—Crass became more disciplined. They stopped drinking and using cannabis before shows and adopted black, military-surplus-style clothing both on and off stage.

Influences

For Rimbaud, the initial inspiration for founding Crass was the death of his friend Phil 'Wally Hope' Russell, who had been placed in a psychiatric hospital after helping to set up the first Stonehenge free festival and died shortly afterward; Rimbaud believed Russell was murdered by the State for political reasons. Co-founder Ignorant cited The Clash and David Bowie as major personal influences. Band members also cited influences ranging from existentialism and Zen to situationism, the poetry of Baudelaire, British working class 'kitchen sink' literature, and films such as Kes and the works of Anthony McCall. Musically, Crass said their influences were seldom drawn from rock, but more from classical music (particularly Benjamin Britten), free jazz, European atonality, and avant-garde composers such as John Cage and Karlheinz Stockhausen.

Legacy

Crass influenced the anarchist movement in the UK, the US, and beyond, with the growth of anarcho-punk spurring interest in anarchist ideas. The band also claimed credit for revitalising the peace movement and the UK Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament during the late 1970s and early 1980s, though others contend they overestimated their influence. Researcher Richard Cross stated that Crass's philosophical and aesthetic influences on 1980s punk bands were far-reaching, with a notable example being Washington, D.C.'s Dischord Records co-founder Ian MacKaye, who followed some of their anti-consumerist and DIY principles in his own label and projects, particularly with Fugazi.

Their painted and collage black-and-white record sleeves by Gee Vaucher may have influenced later artists such as Banksy and the subvertising movement. Anti-folk artist Jeffrey Lewis released an album of acoustic covers of Crass material, and Brett Anderson cited the band as having first made him want to get on stage as a singer. In a 2016 interview, the band was cited along with other British anarcho-punk bands as an influence on the American avant-garde metal group Neurosis.