No, Adam and The Ants and Motörhead were not playing on the same bill as Crass, this was a joke…

If you have flickering, drug-impaired memories of a cultural event from eons ago that you were a witness to, or took place in, fear not because there are always going to be people on the Internet who were there also, and they are happy to provide their version of your shared experience, if not audio-visual records.

Kill Your Pet Puppy is the ultimate repository of information about England’s anarcho-punk movement (e.g. Crass punks, basically) of the late 1970s to about 1986. As these decidedly last century events begin to fade from the memory of many who might’ve been around at the time, Al Puppy, the site’s proprietor, is doing future historians of that scene an invaluable service by putting his enormous archives online as well as soliciting what others might’ve experienced at certain punk gigs, political protests or squat evictions.

The top post at Kill Your Pet Puppy currently is about a Crass gig at the squatted Islington Bingo Hall on March 4, 1984. Although I’m one of those infuriating people who has managed to find myself (often by accident) at some pretty legendary gigs, I’ve truly got one rock snob braggart’s trump card that wipes the smile off the face of any smartass: I saw Crass! Take that bitches!

Obviously, that’s not something many Americans can claim. Here’s my memory of the show:

Crass made no secret of the fact that they planned to disband in 1984, so this also had the air of it being an unmissable show, perhaps one of the last they might do. It was a fundraiser for the striking British miners, an anarcho punk mini-festival with Crass-associated acts like Flux of Pink Indians and Annie Anxiety (aka Little Annie, who stuck her hand right down the front of my friend’s pants) also on the bill. There was someone with video equipment and TV monitors set up and I’d brought along a video I’d made of particularly gruesome WWII footage cut to a soundtrack of Frank Sinatra’s jaunty “Polka Dots and Moonbeams” that I was hoping to get screened and it was.

The ceilings were very low. It was very dark (between the acts and during them, too) and it was very sweaty. The Islington Bingo Hall was a squat and it had the nastiest, most diseased dark green carpet I have ever stood on for hours upon end, with wads of old chewing gum stomped into it and the smell of stale beer and… worse.

Crass’s Penny Rimbaud recalled that same infernal, disgusting carpeting:

The only real memory I have of that evening was the near-violent argument outside which developed between the vegetarians and the vegans. I don’t think I’d ever seen such a stupid expression of bigotry. Apart from that, I seem to remember that the carpet inside was greasy, dark and stinking of the sort of things one doesn’t want to be thinking of. Love, blessings and joy.

 

 
Here’s what “Al” (I think this is the guy who gave Al Puppy a tape of the show, not Al Puppy himself) recalled:

As I remember it Flux (wearing beachwear & sunglasses) and Annie Anxiety also played great sets that night but we only had one tape so we got what we got. Forty five minutes of No Defences and D&V, then forty five minutes of Crass.

This was a great night, where you come away from it energised and restored, with the complex atmosphere that permeated the whole culture. Genuinely violent, angry, aggressive, edgy, confrontational, chaotic, but in equal measure, friendly, warm, calm, peaceful and life affirming. Fuck yeah!

“Fuck yeah,” is about right. Thinking about it today and sort of mentally placing myself in my 18-year-old body at the time, it did feel like I was in attendance at, and a minor participant in, something that quite honestly might someday be thought of as “culturally significant.” It was a very vivid thing to witness and I was just a few months out of West Virginia at the time, so it made a very big impression on me. This was also probably where I heard about the big Stop the City anti-capitalism demonstrations that were to come in just a few weeks time.

Sure, there might have been some vegan versus vegetarian bickering(!) and undoubtedly there were arguments over how fake leather is JUST AS BAD AS THE REAL THING, but this was an amazing, and very inspiring thing to experience as a young person.

If you click over to Kill Your Pet Puppy, there’s an MP3 download of the entire 45-minute Crass set and much more.

Previously on Dangerous Minds:
The original Occupy Wall Street: Stop the City, 1984

Below, CRASS: There Is No Authority But Yourself: