The authority has always brought me some serious problems. At first there was my father, an hysterical elementary school teacher and the neighborhood bully. I could not even look at their faces. Later in high school the Principal, the political leader, the employer, the policeman and the judge. I am still overwhelmed by insecurity when any form of authority is placed in front of me. On the other hand I believe that I have never been able to exercise it. Even now in this society, as well as it is organized, I feel sometimes a misfit. Twenty years if it were not for the lyrics of a musical and polical band like Crass I would probably collapse in a human hell of submission, fear and deception. I would have lived his whole life thinking that they were right, that without intending to at all costs I had to force myself to suffer and produce harassment. I abdicated to myself.
The Crass stimulated me to go into the off beaten track, in my original search for a path of growth, to deal with crisis and difficult choices to avoid unconditional surrender, over the years. However, the contradictions to which I referred are still consuming the nerves and an indescribable psychic heritage. "We should never look too closely at our idols. We notice that their art is out of the toilet bowl in a crisis of diarrhea." He told me once Pete Wright, bassist of Crass. I knew then that if I continue on that road I'd never had the support of an artist to shape up a map of my own survival. Accordingly, concluded also that I would never even have been an artist, unless I suffered from a strange and enduring form of dysentery.
After almost thirty years, here in the editorial offices of Agency X, we returned a few months to reflect on the history and ideas of libertarian punk band at that time had been a real time bomb ready to explode against the sharks the business who are capitalizing on youthful rebellion.
Along with an editorial collective in Madrid, other Italians friends and supporters we investigated their texts by choosing the most significant. We decided to translate and present them again in the form of a book anthology. While we were engaged to carry out the volume, we ended up on the blog of Penny Rimbaud, Crass drummer, and we happened to read his open letter in which he explains in fictionalized form as their experience turned out . If the tensions between a group of people you can not resolve, sooner or later burst. Dreams are dreams and end soon, the reality is quite another thing to live it all the way through nightmares need to develop new utopias.
Investigating the armpit is a private harrowing text, full of pain, sometimes too rancorous, yet reveals one of the main reasons for their imaginary anarchist dies hard. Penny Rimbaud seems to reiterate the structural concept of the Do It Yourself by adding a few unique opportunity. The struggle against power, he says, is the struggle of memory against forgetting. The weakness is the most humane thing there is. There are no leaders or idols blindly following artists on a pedestal. The musician, writer, an intellectual who naively be considered extraordinary, consistent and incorruptible, he lives in the middle of a hornet's nest of contradictions. There is no authority outside of yourself. The crisis of diarrhea are the same for everyone!
We propose the translation of investigating the private arm will not break the continuity of a radical message that can still serve as a catalyst for thousands of young activists of potential disagreement.
Before everything else I'll tell you in brief what was my relationship with Crass and their ideas.
Punk was the answer to years of crap for a way to say no, when we always said yes.
This was the inscription, taken from a text of Crass, who I had printed in large letters on the wall of my room in the Milan house occupied on Via Correggio 18, where there was a Virus. I was 20 years old, had become punk from four years in order to escape the ebb, repression, and especially the heroine who was mowing my peers in the late seventies. When I wake up every morning, I read the reasons for going over the memory and the various phases of my conviction that denial.
I had a haircut in 16 years after a hitchhiking trip to London, but in reality the seeds of punk I was threatened with God Save the Queen saw on TV a few months before, when the Pistols were arrested in a boat on the Thames. Perhaps it was then that I saw the exit of the tunnel. In September of 1978, my life in the technical institute for chemical was changed to a bang. With the abduction and killing of Aldo Moro, the run of history had taken a direction opposite to that which I had lived until then. Where once there was the self-management, the parades every two days, the six political and optional lessons, had returned to normal with school principals, teachers, teaching and meritocracy to do it one more time to master. From the extraordinary to ordinary in a few months. My companions, completely disoriented, had decided in the vast majority to get into drugs. On a class of 25 students were left out, yes and no heroin in ten. The lessons had become unbearable. In my neighborhood youth clubs and social centers of the proletariat had been recently cleared, there remained only a few young speakers and nine empty benches on the parquet in search of their daily dose. At home I could not stay longer, carried by almost revolutionary climate of the period '76 / 77, I had rebelled against everything that represented the family and its values. I did not want to go back, instead of being left with a tie to the neck, at this juncture I would have preferred the noose. I wearily dragged to the precipice every day: either fall into line or drug addiction. There was no escape.
Subversive activity
I was really in a tunnel. That's why when I heard a London street boy, half English and half Irish, sing praises to no future, I was convinced that I was already a punk. I had no future, I knew, but finally I realized that the illness was better to pull out rather than introjected.
I spent a lot of time behind a disguise to look murderess, my hair stuck up in the air with the soap, the straitjacket of the asylum held together by safety pins, swastikas and crosses destroyed by circle A. I felt good, I turned with clothes copied from punkzine pictures, passersby wondered if I was a Martian or an actor in a zombie movie, and apart from sniffing glue from plastic bag, more for staging the self-destruction that for another, I could almost magically to stay away from drugs. At the concert of the Clash in Bologna in June 1980, I proudly presented myself dressed as Sid Vicious: the white jacket, chains around my neck and arms with cuts and scars of cigarette burns. Just to be in tune with the concert I had also got a t-shirt of the Clash. Before the start of London Calling, a group of local punk took me around handing in their hands a leaflet in which it cited several times Crass.
When, in 1976, punk vomit splattered for the first time in the newspapers with the message "Do It Yourself", we, who in different ways and for several years that we had not done that, we naively believed that the various Johnny Rotten, Joe Strummer and company aims the same. But soon we realized that our fellow punks were nothing but puppets.
If I had read this sentence immediately after seeing the Pistols on TV, I cursed the Crass and their whole crew of ex-hippies and anarchists priests. How dare you call those puppets that had saved my life? However, it was already long past the first punk and the infatuation was clearly waning. While I was unleashed under the stage of the Clash, in some remote part of my nervous system I felt that these puppets made me feel good to a certain point. It was there that I began to ask me some questions. I listened long to Nagasaki Nightmare, I stayed hours to decipher their writing that climbed as hieroglyphs in the poster that contained the 45 laps record. It was just a nightmare around me? And most of all I would have been to wait until the end of the world and do nothing? That summer I went to London and I run to Kings Road to see a little clothes in Sex, the famous shop of the mating McLaren Westwood. I had so desired that does not bother me too much doubt where I was wrapped.
But at the concert of Poison Girl, I was an idiot. Knowledge of Crass, who were present in that kind of trade union center, I rolled over there and doubt became a certainty. "Subvert!" Zounds sang from the stage. What were they saying those kids my age about the same subversion? Why the Crass argued that music was only a pretext, a means to convey their subversive activities? My clothes clashed so much that I regret what I had in previous months for DIY to roam the streets of central Milan. The Do It Yourself was therefore not a ploy to use in the absence of another, but a clear indication for a radical and more aware lifestyle. The slogans against war and against capitalism, women wearing anti-sexist writing, collage and stencils for flyers, templates they used to spray the walls. Banners and black flags, the sound system marked by the two-headed snake that ate a cross, the symbol of Crass. I stood in silence to contemplate the famous collage of Pistols against the wall with their heads instead of those of Thatcher, the Statue of Liberty, the pope and the queen ... I seemed to have before my eyes the whole history of critical and rebellious thinking, the pieces that I messed up for years blending in the brain were placed on a scheme that I finally understood. The subculture of street anarchy, punk, hippies, the beats, the dada, the counterculture, the situation ... That night I decided to invest the last money I owned to buy all the discs and the punkzine of Crass and projects linked to them.
"In your decadence people die, " cried Eve Libertine in our heads when we started thinking of moving mass inside a house occupied by ex-hippies, to lay the foundations for a community project focused on a punk attitude. It had been almost two years after the London concert and it was time to try to achieve something like that in Milan. Some time before I had talked to Pete Wright, bassist Crass who came to Italy for a series of conferences. He must have been at least 12 years older than me and was a surprise for me I can listen to his speeches so clear, direct, as with my older brothers had sporadic reports in the city and their language was usually packed with too much politics at that time it just seemed boring ideology, among other things overtaken by events in spite of myself that I had crossed disconnected. Pete explained the overall plan for their lives instead. The self, the libertarian choice, complaints and repression to which they were subjected. I could tell him the situation of Milan punk, the heroin still in great quantities. He asked if there were relations with the anarchists and if we had never thought of doing a punkzine. "Yes, indeed," I said why not have them see it was almost exclusively devoted to music. "No matter how many read what you print," he said, "Just write something important for yourself, the music is good, but we live not only for that. And then a magazine, any publication, create a Community principle. And a community, although small, is always stronger than an isolated individual." I do not know if he said these words exactly, but I understood the concept for sure. In fact, not to suffer more attacks of the police who took us there every Saturday and brought to the police station, we decided to do a leaflet with a text that looked a bit to one of the Crass and mimeographed in the anarchist historic building in Viale Monza. From there went the idea of working with young militants of that forum in order to publish a magazine. The first issue of "Black" was replete with proclamations of insults to politicians, a collage of songs and translations of Crass and the meetings we had in a cold room in the house occupied in Via Correggio 18. We liked that place to the point that we began to frequent it often, until one day we lit a fire to warm provoking the wrath of the occupants. We had to introduce the day after at their meeting and, despite initial misunderstandings, we realized that the relationship would be useful for both components. Via Correggio hippies needed to be a bit more youthful, we had punk urgency to find a place to build a common front a little larger than the usual band.
The role of the virus
That house was not occupied the town of the English countryside where the Crass lived, but there looked like there were more and abandoned industrial buildings in order to organize concerts, as we saw do the punks in Berlin. The virus was born shortly afterwards, and many became pacifists, anti-sexist and vegetarians. It was a wonderful experience for all those who participated, there was a group of about a hundred boys and girls that no one had yet twenty. The model of the virus, that is, self-management based on the political base, supported by weekly concerts offered at very low cost, was then taken over by hundreds of social centers in Italy over the years to come. In 1982, with a dozen other virusiani, we went to find the Crass at their home in Epping, 50 miles from London. We arrived late at night, hungry and cold. We looked like religious fanatics arrived well after closing time at the gates of Lourdes. Despite their approach annoyed - "Too Many People" - received us rather well, for us to stay refreshed and gave us the children's home, a small building outside in the garden. The next morning we woke up finding in the world of realized utopia. The house was beautiful, completely built by them with wood and recyclable materials. The environment was clean and airy, very odd for British homes. Men, women and children were cultivating the gardens, dogs, cats, goats and chickens hopped everywhere. Bicycles and electric cars. Attend the meeting for the preparation of a piece of an emerging group that later would end the collection Bullshit Detector, accompanied us in a kind of tour, the first in the store with the distribution of the discs and magazines, then in the room with all the graphic collage Gee Vaucher. I remember a great one hanging on the wall depicting the Thatcher with the deformed face and stole her wallet from the purse of a home. Pete took us down into the recording studios and made us listen to their latest work, Christ - The Album, which had not yet arrived in Italy.
As he explained his Antistar theories and how Crass Records was organized, we made arrangements to distribute their records at the Virus. We were really gassed, we were flying high on another possible world, but Pete seemed sad, darkened. It was just after the Falklands War and the Crass had failed to intervene as they would wish to do. "We have spent too much to make the record and we have not said anything against the war," he said. We did not know but probably were already preparing their final display.
Already in September Virus Spread was born in Milan and the publisher Antiutopia creations, so the relationship with Crass became more concrete. We write often, letters and records that were put there at least 15 days to arrive, and it was a super joy when we received those packages. We were told that in England the anti-war dissent was silenced, and therefore had decided to release a single with the song How Does It Feel to Be the Mother of a Thousand Dead? The song was a direct attack on Margaret Thatcher and then were defined by the media as traitors and persecuted by the police and the government.
The next summer, after a year to strengthen the DIY circuit in our country, invited Crass to participate in demonstrations against the American missile base at Comiso in distant southeastern Sicily. Pete and Phil Free, Crass guitarist, came to our great surprise at the camp, already surrounded by cops and the NOCs with the ski mask to disguise their face. Prior to the beatings and arrests, they told us what had happened in recent months. They had made a secret tape then sent anonymously to the major news agencies worldwide. The tape contained some scoop on the Falklands War collected by the direct testimony of a sailor on the battlefield and so had caused a true case journalism defined thatchergate. It was a false registration of a hypothetical conversation between Reagan and Thatcher in which, among other sarcastic phrases artfully reconstructed, was considered the idea of a nuclear conflict in Europe. In those days, in the hot Sicily, a journalist had discovered the responsibility of Crass in the production of that tape. After arguing a priori heavily on the anti-pacifism of insurrectionary anarchists who organized the mobilization, the two components of Crass quickly returned to London to undergo a series of impressive interviews by reporters from around the world.
We had finally reached a kind of political power, we were treated with consideration and respect. But it was really what we wanted? After seven years of activity we had become exactly what we wanted to fight at start. We are a solid basis for our ideas, but something was lost as the streets. We become paranoid where we were once joyful, pessimistic just as he was optimism for our cause.
All of this said Penny Rimbaud years after leaving their followers unaware for a long time. They continued to get together a few months, then when we hosted at he Virus a band of San Francisco, the MDC which published for the Crass Record, we received a final letter. It was January 1984 and their story seemed really over, as shown on the records where there was the time to climb that ended in 1984, as was the materialization of the Orwellian prophecy. Unfortunately I never managed to trace the letter, but I remember that the Virus was a kind of drama. Signed by various bands of the crassiana, focused on the repression suffered after the discovery of the authors of thatchergate, but otherwise it was the swan song of their experience. After a month the Virus was suddenly evicted by the police.
During more than 25 years, I happened to meet again some time former members of Crass, Pete in a room near Bergamo which presented a series of libertarian history books for children, Penny Rimbaud in a conference in Naples on the counterculture, the singer Steve Ignorant in a concert at the Anarchist Laboratorio di Milano.
I tried to follow what they were doing on the net and I bought English books that spoke about it. A very important part of my life and that of many other people who fought and still enrich the galaxy of DIY, could not bear the absence of a book dedicated to publishing a banquet on Crass punk militant or the shelves of a some library of quality. I have long waited for a publisher, with finances a little best of Agency X, who decided to buy the rights to the books of Crass and managed to translate into Italian. By partnering with friends publishers of The Felguera Ediciones Madrid and some Italian friends and associates, we finally managed to publish it ourselves. Crass Bomb is a book anthology that collects the evidence, texts, political and artistic intent of a historic anarchist collective that has managed to criticize the society of the spectacle without ever falling into the stereotypical rebellious or ideological cages. Precisely for this reason, and well above their melting around them has developed an extensive international movement which has managed to impose, despite the numerous attacks of the dominant culture, the same idea and attitude of the Do It Yourself, a lifestyle that still represents a valuable tool in the fight for equality.
With the economic crisis, Crass ideas and practices now appear to back suddenly topical. Realizing this book, we realized even more than you can even give directions, as if the memory of the Crass was a true act of love, the cry of their last exciting leave before the termination. An act of love to future generations who still have the courage to say no!
anno
41 n. 360
Marco Philopat