33 Revolutions Per Minute by Dorian Lynskey

Author:Dorian Lynskey [Lynskey, Dorian]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Music, Genres & Styles, Pop Vocal, History, Social History, General
ISBN: 9780571277209
Google: S7Ko9Yd7lXsC
Amazon: B004QGY410
Publisher: Faber & Faber
Published: 2011-03-02T11:00:00+00:00

“How does it feel to be the mother of one thousand dead?”

21

Crass / “How Does It Feel?” / 1982

The Thatcher Problem

IN THE OUTHOUSE-CUM-OFFICE OF HIS HOME in the Essex countryside, Penny Rimbaud walks over to his stereo and inserts a twenty-seven-year-old cassette. It is a partial recording of Prime Minister’s Question Time sometime in 1982 and the questioner is Ray Powell, Labour MP for Ogmore in Wales. He opens with a pointed inquiry about Margaret Thatcher’s relationship with the unions but then takes an unexpected detour into punk rock. “Will she take time off today,” he asks in his thick Welsh accent, “to listen to the new record of ‘How Does It Feel to Be the Mother of the Death of One Thousand Lives’?”

Unfortunately, he makes rather a hash of it. The real lyric, by Rimbaud’s group Crass, is the somewhat snappier, “How does it feel to be the mother of one thousand dead?” a reference to the approximate death toll of the recently concluded Falklands War, and his multipart question is too convoluted. “Mr Speaker sir,” replies Thatcher with condescending amusement, “I think there were rather a lot of questions there.” She proceeds to address the union issue, but her thoughts on the work of Crass go unrecorded.

Rimbaud allows a wintry smile and winds to a different portion of the cassette. It is a radio debate from the same year, in which Conservative MP Tim Eggar plummily describes “How Does It Feel?” as “the most vicious, scurrilous and obscene record that has ever been produced” and calls for prosecution under the Obscene Publications Act. So many years later, the idea that a protest song might have been the subject of such discussion, inside and outside Parliament, seems too impossibly distant.

Rimbaud walks outside to a garden table, where he sits in the spring sunshine, chain-smoking roll-up cigarettes. With his long, gray-blonde hair, loose-fitting clothes, and skin tanned and toughened from working in the garden, he might be mistaken for a hippie, but his voice is flinty and brutally direct. “I’m an absolute elitist,” he admits. “Nietzschean in that way. Basically, there is no authority but yourself.” He moved to this place, Dial House, then a semiderelict red-brick farmhouse, in 1965 and threw open the doors to all comers three years later. “I remember removing all the locks and imagining what might happen. My dream, and it’s one of the biggest disappointments of my life, was that by now there would be fifty or sixty similar places across the country. And there isn’t one place that has been inspired to operate in this way. And I know why, because it’s fucking difficult.”

Difficulty and disappointment were two of the enduring themes of Crass’ tenure as the most radical band of their era. Between 1977 and 1984, its nine members would crowd around Dial House’s small kitchen table, talking late into the night about music and politics, fuelled by tea, toast, and roll-ups. “I’ve got one friend who won’t sit there anymore because he’s banged his fist down in anger so many times,” says Rimbaud.

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