Britain’s bleakest punk record, according to Henry Rollins

(Credits: Far Out / YouTube Still)
One of the leading forces of Washington DC’s hardcore scene in the early 1980s along with Minor Threat and Bad Brains before the latter’s decamp to New York, Henry Rollins‘ recruitment as Black Flag frontman has become the stuff of punk lore.
Already intoxicated with Ramones and The Clash since a teenager and performing with early band SOA, Rollins took guitarist Dez Cadena’s invitation to climb on stage in earnest, handling vocal and shared lyrical duties from 1981’s debut Damaged through to 85’s In My Head and their subsequent dissolution the following year.
Jumping into alternative metal with Rollins Band in the ’90s and scoring heavy rotation on MTV with ‘Liar’s memorable video, Rollins carved a media presence for himself he enjoys to this day, flexing his creative and entrepreneurial muscles as an actor, poet, public speaker, columnist, voice-over artist, and highly sought after punk expert on numerous music documentaries and features.
Speaking to Yahoo in 2017, Rollins selected several of his favourite political albums, highlighting records from Stiff Little Fingers, Public Enemy, and Dead Kennedys, but singled out Essex anarchists Crass’ debut album as starkly capturing Britain’s malaise at the time of its recording.
“My best friend, Ian MacKaye (Minor Threat singer and Dischord Records founder) and his younger brother Alec MacKaye had this record and played it all the time,” Rollins told Yahoo. “By hanging out with Alec, because I was homeless for a while, I was living in his room, and he always played it. I read that massive, football-field-sized foldout book thing, and I started to understand where these anarchists are coming from. They’re into a Thatcher-Reagan anger, really speaking to what’s going on in Britain, which was very bleak. It’s enough punk rock and enough anger and futility expressed in it where I saw myself in it.”
Released in 1978 on the electoral cusp of the Conservative Party’s ruthless class war that dominated the ’80s, The Feeding of the 5000 established the Crass sound and ethos with blistering immediacy: stringy, scratchy punk fury that countered their crude, repetitive songcraft with subject matter seriously committed to pacifism, feminism, and direct action toward state oppression. While anarchy had been introduced to the punk lexicon by Sex Pistols’ debut single two years prior, it was Crass who explored the political philosophy with serious intellectual rigour, instrumental in birthing the anarcho-punk movement.
“It’s a record where I was proud of myself, because I kind of earned my affection for it,” Rollins confessed. “I played it a lot of times, and it grew on me because I toughed it out. It’s a tough record to get, a tough nut to crack, because it’s not very musical. It’s a news broadcast with an angry band kind of scraping away behind it. It’s so reactionary, where I must say — maybe I’m old and have lapsed into conformity — but I was reading the lyrics and I don’t necessarily disagree with some of it, but a lot of it I read back now and it’s a bit kind of thick-skulled and not completely thought through. As a guy who’s almost 60, I can see that now, but I admire the anger and the fact that they made the records themselves”.
Accusations of political naivety had been made during their heyday, too, Trotskyist soul punks Redskins frequently lambasting Crass for the perceived practical and theoretical dead end of anarchism over socialist organising. But no one could take away their fierce independence and fervent idealism amid UK punk’s often nihilistic wallow, and successfully operated on society’s fringes in a way difficult to envisage in today’s economic climate.
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