
Crass
CRASS 1979
A-side: ‘Reality Asylum’
Epping anarcho punks show avant-garde edge as they launch own label.
Crass’s radical, hard-line approach was epitomised by their first self-issued single. A-side ‘Reality Asylum’ – a mix of spoken word with Penny Rimbaud’s sinister musique concrete – was an outcast from their ‘Feeding Of The 5000 EP’ for Small Wonder, left in the cold when record plant workers refused to handle its blasphemous content. While Crass found another pressing plant willing to do the job, its impact on listeners – for many, the first time they’d heard an adult denouncing religion – would result in a police investigation that doubled as impromptu PR, alongside their extensive stencilling of London tube stations. Its impact was matched, pound for pound, by its thrillingly atonal B-side ‘Shaved Women’. Just as the A-side wasn’t punk as anyone knew it, nor was the flip’s twisted funk and machine-like industrial pulse, topped by an animated Eve Libertine screeching unfaltering repetitions of its title. A comment on how women were conditioned by capitalism to shave themselves to look attractive (not that long after French women who slept with Nazi occupiers were publicly shamed by the act), it remains musically discrete from much of Crass’s oeuvre, its angular guitar groove faded down midway to allow field recordings (shuffling trains?) to the fore. And although this single’s fold-out sleeve legend ‘Pay no more than 45p’ backfired when they forgot to factor VAT into the equation, its great Gee Vaucher collages remain indelible.