Do They Owe Us a Living?

Of Course They
Do! Crass, Throbbing Gristle, and Anarchy
and Radicalism in Early English Punk Rock
Brian Cogan, Molloy College

lthough many books and articles have been written in the popular and
academic press about the punk movements of the 1970s in England
and the United States, few have gone beyond examining the canonical
bands and movements. Works such as Legs McNeils and Gillian McCains
Please Kill Me: The Uncensored Oral History of Punk and Clinton Heylins From
The Velvets to the Voidoids: A Pre-Punk History for a Post-Punk World offer
valuable insights into the motivations of the American and British punk movements pioneers. 1 However, they do not adequately examine several important
aspects of the punk movement, namely the political and social motivations of
many of the major bands involved. The two bands I examine here, Crass and
Throbbing Gristle, did have to work with distribution systems to which they
were opposed on principle, but they did so more in the spirit of subversion
than in acquiescence to the dominant hierarchy. They attempted to make a
radical statement within the confines of a commodified musical distribution
system. Many other more popular bands were simply posturing, but Crass and
Throbbing Gristle were the true fathers of radical politics and anarchy in the
British punk movement.

Punk, Anarchy, and Radicalism

Numerous contradictory issues of authenticity and perceived commitment to
anarchy and outsider ideals exist in any theoretical discussion of punk music.
Most of the major bands, while espousing a do-it-yourself (DIY) philosophy,
Journal for the Study of Radicalism, Vol. 1, No. 2, 2007, pp. 7790. issn 1930-1189

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nonetheless signed with major record labels and recorded for the same media
conglomerates and the music system that they berated in song and on stage.
In the early days of punk, this is largely because few alternatives existed. Examples exist of bands metaphorically biting the hand that fed them, such as
The Clashs song, Complete Control, a response to their record label (CBS)
choosing which songs to release as singles. However, most punk bands felt that
working within the system was a necessary compromise to get the message of
punk out to the masses. Even the Buzzcocks, who had released Spiral Scratch,
considered by many to be the first British independent EP, spent the rest of their
early career working for a major label.
Many British punk bands that later were signed to independent labels only
did so because they were dropped by or unable to secure a contract from a
major label. Their allegiance to independent labels did not necessarily indicate
a perceived higher level of authenticity in independent labels. Even the most
rigorously independent labels have to deal with mid-level distribution systems
to get their records into major record stores. Of course, other punks, particularly Crass and Throbbing Gristle, operated mainly though mail order during
their peak popularity. Today, both bands have music readily available in major
record stores. The rising popularity of underground music eventually led to
both bands licensing their music to distribution companies who had deals with
major record stores.
Many major labels spent literally hundreds of thousands of dollars to subsidize punk bands that despised the values those labels represented, but it is
unclear who was making more of a compromise. Most punk bands, at least the
more committed ones, wanted to maintain a level of integrity and ideological
consistency. But, although many punk bands used the ubiquitous circled A for
anarchy, they did so in publicity photos taken by professional photographers to
promote releases on major record labels, mostly run by large transnational corporations such as Sony and EMI. For large corporations, the compromise was
espousing a radical and revolutionary message through its products. However,
punk bands were summarily dropped when they failed to make a profit.
A central question is whether any kind of message was actually being transparently transmitted to an audience. The Sex Pistols certainly were influenced
by their Svengali-like manager Malcolm McLaren, who was indebted to the
Situationists and earlier forms of radical politics. McLaren had been a spectator
at the 1968 uprising in Paris, and the collage art work for the Sex Pistols early
singles was done by artist and Situationist Jamie Reid. Still, it is unclear to what
extent members of major bands such as The Clash and Sex Pistols actually
believed in the political statements they were making. The Clash, for example,

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79

also had a cultural theorist in their group, Bernard Rhodes, who attempted to
influence them in various directions, but he was eventually dismissed for his
over-involvement and meddling. To be fair, most groups had no real theoretical background in anarchy, nor did they live a communal lifestyle based on
anarchist principles and ways of living. Notable exceptions were the English
radical musical collective Crass and the English pioneers of industrial noise,
Throbbing Gristle, which both espoused radical politics and had lifestyles
consistent with radical and anarchistic ideology, making them two of the few
punk bands who were demonstrably consistent in their lives and music. Rather
than participate in the maintenance of a commodification system, these two
bands spent their rather brief careers making music to challenge actively these
aspects of the music industry.

The Origins of Punk Rock

Craig OHara sums up the consensus on the history of punk: New Yorkers
invented the musical style while the British popularized the political attitude
and colorful appearance.2 Many origin stories exist for punk rock, but it is still
an evolving oppositional subculture. Numerous authors take either an Anglocentric approach to punk rock, locate it as a particularly American art form, or
confine it to a historical period,3 but I believe that these explanations are too
limiting and do not take into account the continuing survival and evolution of
punk. As I observed in The Encylopedia of Punk Music and Culture, punk is
best seen as a virus, one that mutates constantly and resists efforts at understanding and codification.4 The idea of punk as a virusself-replicating and
mutating below the surface, only to unexpectedly reappearcan be a useful
explanation for why punk rock has had so many obituaries but continues to
flourish.
Many scholars have long seen punk as being either dead or as simply a
commodification and marketing gimmick, as with the Vans Warped Tour,
with the public careers of Avril Lavigne and Sum 41, or with the sale of punk
clothing in local stores like Hot Topic.5 But the ideology and aesthetic of
punk rock can be found constantly, not in mainstream media, but in squats,
communal living spaces, volunteer record stores, and independently produced
zines such as Punk Planet, Maximum Rock N Roll, Go Metric, and many others
across the planet. Although issues of authenticity are much debated, especially
in punk zines and web-based communities, OHara is correct when he notes
that punks questioned authority, not only by looking and sounding different

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(which has debatable importance) but by questioning the prevailing modes

of thought.6 This attitude was looked upon by many theorists, and by many
punks, as evidence of authenticity. The first major band to demonstrate the
authentic anarchist potential of punk was the English anarchist band Crass.

Crass and Engagement with the System

The English band Crass did not form out of the members desire to become
pop idols, but slowly evolved out of a farmhouse collective started by ex-hippie and long time dissident J. J. Ratter, better known under his punk name,
Penny Rimbaud. Rimbaud was an art student who became disillusioned with
the restrictions of the British school system and dropped out in 1965. Inspired
by the revolutionary movements and radical politics of the day, he worked as
a coalman while gradually starting a commune in a small farmhouse outside
of London, opening it to anyone who wanted to drop by.7 Over the next few
years he was joined by Gee, his lover and later the Crass house artist, who was
responsible for decorating the bands manifestos and albums, mostly with a
collage design style. In the early 1970s, the commune decided to form a happenings group and travel the country giving spontaneous free-form performances. A typical performance would start with no set of rules, only a vague
idea of an ending, and very limited parameters, so there was little danger of the
performance becoming stale over time.
After the demise of this part of the commune, and emboldened by the performances of the Sex Pistols and their attendant press coverage, several members of the original commune decided to form another commune, taking their
name Crass from a line in the David Bowie song Ziggy Stardust. Crass decided
to play a fairly standard line-up with two guitars (Andy Palmer and Phil Free),
bass (Pete Wright), drums (Rimbaud), and a rotating cast of vocalists consisting of Steve Ignorant, Eve Libertine, and Joy de Vivre, along with resident artist
Gee and film and video artist Mick, who helped create an image for the band,
epitomized by collage and stark, largely militarisitic clothing and design work.
But one wonders if Crass can be called a band in the truest sense of the word.
Crass deliberately decided not to approach music and performance in the same
way the music industry did, and decided early on that their band would be a
collective that mirrored their collective household. They saw themselves as a
corrective to the dominant star-making machine of the music industry and to
all that they perceived to be wrong with punk rock as epitomized by The Clash
and the Sex Pistols. As Rimbaud noted in Shibboleth:

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Surely Punk wasnt just music, it was a way of thought? Surely it wasnt a fad, it
was a way of being? Wasnt this supposed to be anarchy in the UK, or the USA or
wherever? If the first wave of punk had become velvet zippies, it was up to us to
put the record straight. We werent going to be made into another set of marketplace victims. This time round, we were going to make it work.8

Crass would practice a practical sort of anarchy in their music, coming

together in a creative process equally inspired by all members of the band.
They would have an equal say in the way in which Crass presented itself to the
public. As Rimbaud remembered, we agreed to adopt a system whereby one
dissenting voice would be sufficient to veto any idea or direction that the band
might otherwise choose to adopt. In this manner, and within the confine, we
would be individually free to do, or say, what we wanted.9 The band espoused
radical politics, anarchy and vegetarianism, which they explained via a series
of pamphlets and manifestos designed by Gee and distributed free at live
performances. As Rimbaud noted from industrial sabotage to bread making,
our flyers not only gave instructions on how to fight the revolution, but how
to survive it with a full belly.10 The members of Crass did not simply want
to be one of the many bands that sang about anarchy as an abstract concept,
they wanted to correctly espouse anarchy as a political and social movement.
Elsewhere, I pointed out that the assumption of the band was that simply
singing about anarchy was not enough, but that the bands political and social
statements had to be backed up by action and consistency.11 Crass was one of
the first bands to start using anarchist literature in their manifestos and was
the first to start hanging the circled-A anarchist banner. This display spread the
symbol and the ideas of anarchism beyond the usual audience of intellectuals
and agitators. As the band wrote, it was us who single-handedly created
anarchy as a popular movement for millions of people.12
While this may be a grandiose claim, Crasss music sold surprisingly well
after it released its music on the Crass Records label, which also included other
bands of similar radical orientation such as Poison Girls and Rudimentary
Peni. Crasss first album, The Feeding of the Five Thousand, included a particularly vicious attack on organized religion. The song, Reality Asylum, was
at first left off the record because an Irish printing plant refused to press the
original version of the record with the song. It later made Crass the subject of
police intimidation and harassment.
Crass decided to fight back, first organizing a graffiti campaign on the
London underground that attacked the foundations of capitalism and sexism
that was, according to them, the first of [its] kind in the UK [to inspire] a

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movement.13 Later examples of the bands revolutionary actions included

several stop the city protests in London in 1982. Thousands of protestors
participated, which led to greater inspiration for worldwide days of civil
disobedience.14
Crass also continued to be lyrically provocative. Their first and most famous
song, Do They Owe Us a Living? challenged the economic policies and
rightward shift in Britain at the end of the 1970s. As the song goes,
The living that is owed to me
Im never going to get
Theyve buggered this old world up
Up to their necks in debt
Theyd give you a lobotomy
For something you aint done
And theyll make you an epitomy
Of everything thats wrong?
Do they owe us a living?
Of course they do! 15

The band never shied away from political controversy, and after the end of the
Falklands war, Crass released its most blistering track yet, the anti-Thatcher
song, How Does It Feel to Be the Mother of a Thousand Dead? It incited
prosecution attempts from Tory M.P.s, primarily over the lines your arrogance
has gutted these bodies of life / your deceit fooled them that it was worth the
sacrifice / your lies persuaded people to accept the wasted blood / your filthy
pride cleansed you of the doubt you should have had.16
Usually not listed in the British charts no matter how well they sold, Crass
decided to keep their politics first and foremost in their music. Their third
album, Penis Envy, directly tackled feminist issues and was sung entirely by
the two female vocalists, Joy de Vivre and Eve Libertine. There was considerable backlash against the album even by fans, who frequently asked, Whyve
you only got birds singing?17 This album also demonstrated Crasss ability to
subvert the conventional patriarchal music system as well as fan expectations
in other ways. Our Wedding, a send-up of teenage pop songs that Crass
recorded as a parody, was released as a flexi-disc by the British teen magazine
Loving, which was unaware of the joke. The song exposed Crass to a public that

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83

was younger and less concerned with politics than the usual Crass audience,
and ended up ruining the reputation of the magazine.
A further piece of agit-prop further demonstrates both the bands radical
credentials and the depth of their musical abilities from a technical standpoint. In 1982, the band released a doctored tape of a supposed conversation
between Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan, in which Thatcher admitted
responsibility for blowing up a British warship, and Reagan threatened to
nuke Europe. Eventually, the bands prank led to considerable media outcry
and a statement from the U.S. State Department denouncing the tape as a KGB
hoax.18 The incident guaranteed publicity and provided a forum for the bands
views. Crass explains the uncertainty the band still felt over its role: We talked
to radio stations from Essex to Tokyo, always giving the anarchist angle on
every question. We had gained a form of political power, found a voice, were
being treated with slightly awed respect, but was that what we really wanted?
Was that what we set out to achieve all those years ago?19 The members of
Crass realized that their very fame was now threatening the radical message
they had been attempting to disseminate for seven years. Rather than remain
on the road as a parody of themselves, or become a standard rock-and-roll
band, the members decided communally to disband and work individually as
they saw best for social change. They summarized their philosophy:
The movement from Class War to Christians for Peace, needs to regain the
dignity it has lost in the process of attempting to confront problems that appear
to be created by others. We have all been guilty of defining the enemy, and
indeed, there are those who would obstruct the cause of liberty, yet ultimately
the enemy is us, yet there is only you and me. We need to consolidate, reassess,
reject what patently does not work and be prepared to adopt ideas that might.
We need to find the self, which that which can truly be the authority that it
is. We need to look beyond the barbed-wire fence and the ranks or police for
a vision of life which is of our choosing, not one which is dictated by cynics
and despots.20

By choosing to walk away voluntarily when in the verge of success as defined by

the capitalistic imperative, Crass proved that they were one of the few communal organizations dedicated to consistency and a clear ideological focus. They
redefined British punk rock and proved that bands that espoused anarchy and
communal living could make a difference. The vast number of punk bands and
squatters who adopted the ideology and tactics of Crass and operated outside

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of the mainstream is evidence that their underground influence was enormous,

even if it went unnoticed by most of mainstream society.

COUM, Throbbing Gristle, and the Contradictions of Punk and Politics

Throbbing Gristle, like Crass, started out as an experimental art troupe that
became something much more than the sum of its parts. But unlike Crass,
Throbbing Gristle was not as focused on a consistent ideology. Crass firmly
positioned themselves outside of the system, whereas Throbbing Gristle ignored formal ideology and worked toward redefining issues such as freedom,
the body, and the extremes to which music and performance could be taken.
Modern industrial artists such as Nine Inch Nails and KMFDM make use of
abrasive instruments, noise and shocking spectacles that are about as dangerous as a grade school pageant, but the members of Throbbing Gristle embodied
the alienation and the desire to reimagine popular music.
Throbbing Gristle was originally formed by Genesis P-Orridge (Neil
Megsun), an ambitious art student who was inspired by the 1960s tradition of
performance art and happenings, just as Crass had been. Genesis P-Orridge
decided to dedicate his life to challenging traditional notions of pain, pleasure,
disgust, and the body. According to Simon Reynolds, the original group that
Megsun joined in the late 1960s was designed to be a total art experience
in which expectations of both audience and performer were constantly challenged and reinvented. The original performance troupe lived communally,
wore whatever clothing was available from a communal chest, and slept in
different beds every night. And this quest for some kind of authentic pure self
via a grueling regime of deconditioning became the hallmark of everything
P-Orridge did in art and life.21
After leaving the original group to form his own experimental group,
COUM Transmissions, P-Orridge was joined by girlfriend Christine Carol
Newby, aka Cosey Fann Tutti, who was to be his partner for the next decade.
Together the two dedicated themselves to performance art that involved body
modification, ritual scarring, immersion in various bodily fluids, sodomy, and
other forms of ritualistic pain and pleasure designed to test their bodies to the
limits and test the audiences capacity for disgust. As the 1970s wore on, the
two became more interested in the musical side of their performances and
were soon joined by Peter Sleazy Christopherson and Chris Carter, neither
of whom were musicians in the traditional sense, but who also wished to
experiment with perception and experience. P-Orridge had also decided to

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85

move further in what could (laughingly) be called a pop direction as, according
to Reynolds, he was captivated by the Warholian notion of using fame, hype,
and controversy themselves as an artistic medium.22
COUM renamed itself Throbbing Gristle, which was Manchester slang for
an erect male penis, and began a career as musical terrorists in the sense that
they were as much dedicated to musical statements as they were to subverting
and undermining the dominant system. They realized that no regular record
label would release their music and founded their own, Industrial Records.
Like Crass, they shared a similar DIY, experimental aesthetic. Throbbing
Gristle realized that to take a truly radical and outsider posture in punk rock,
the first step must be to control the production and distribution of their own
work. They decided to not release records in the traditional sense and to
produce music that is difficult to listen to. As Simon Ford has noted, Throbbing
Gristle was trying to do something new in punk music, taking the aggression
and the DIY attitude, but using the music truly to disturb people.23 The band
experimented with disturbing soundscapes, primal screams, eerie synth bleeps,
and lyrics about fascism and control, and according to Reynolds, jettisoned
songs, melody and groove in favor of just the overwhelming physical force of
the sound itself.24 The band was also known to use infrasonic frequencies
beamed at the unsuspecting audience, in an attempt to cause the audience
displeasure and loss of sleep. At one point, inspired by survivalist literature,
Throbbing Gristle turned their communal house into a virtual stockade,
painting the windows black and surrounding the house with barbed wire
and an alarm system.25 These activities were inspired in part by P-Orridges
experimental approach to magic, or magick, to use the spelling preferred by
Aleister Crowley.
P-Orridge cannot be described as particularly dedicated to a consistent
ideology or to a social program or political train of thought, but instead he
embraced imagery and ideas from any political spectrum that defied mainstream acceptance. As he indicates in his numerous interviews and on his
website, P-Orridge designed his multiple tattoos and piercings to be not merely
decorative, but a challenge to mainstream society: Sometimes people who
cant express something in words express it in a more symbolic way, without
words.26 By walking down the street, P-Orridge desired to be a provocative,
embodied statement that alternative means of expression and constructing a
social persona were possible.
Frictions within the band grew over time, and when Cosey left P-Orridge
for Chris Carter, the band fractured and did not play music again for over
twenty years. Still, Throbbing Gristle proved that communal living, combined

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with magical, militaristic, and almost paranoid views (as opposed to the idyllic
hippie-inspired commune of Crass) could also be experiments in performance
art. But in the experiments of Throbbing Gristle, both they and their audiences
were the white mice.
Throbbing Gristle virtually single-handedly created a new genre, industrial
noise, using extreme behaviors to create extremely provocative and disturbing
forms of art. The band was not only a link between the art communes of
1960s and punk rock, but also were punk rock, and a powerful and much more
subversive project than any other punk band of the seventies who espoused
anarchy without having any real idea of what it meant.27 Although Crass and
Throbbing Gristle both shared a desire to recreate the social order in a limited
sense, they differed greatly in their versions of what constituted a radical
social statement. From the communal anarchy of Crass, who broke up rather
than compromise their principles, to the militant and antisocial Throbbing
Gristle, both bands demonstrated that punk rock radicalism was not merely
the commodified and packaged punk available at the local record store.

Conclusion
Both Crass and Throbbing Gristle epitomized the radical impulse in punk and
articulated a particularly compelling, but also difficult, message of personal,
political, and social liberation. Both struggled to exist not only within the inherent contradictions and restrictions of the capitalist system, but also within
the context of cultural ideas about musicians and performers. Both chafed at
the limits of traditional notions of what was considered musical, whether in
lyrics or in musical ability. Both attempted to create something new, both in
their communal lifestyle and in music. Whereas Crass had overtly political lyrics that articulated their attack on capitalism and the British social order of the
1970s and 1980s, Throbbing Gristle attempted to question notions of the sacred and the profane, especially in terms of their notorious live performances.
Whereas Crass worked on articulating a message of universal anarchy and freedom, Throbbing Gristle questioned whether freedom was possible and held
that only by abandoning traditional ideas about pain, disgust, and the body
could true freedom be found. Both bands were relatively short lived and broke
up before they became self-parodies. Both bands also controlled the recording
and distribution of their music. Both bands also aided like-minded performers
and musicians, and neither seemed to be making music in order to become
rich, or even to survive.

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The members of Crass, except for Steve Ignorant who later joined the British
anarcho-band, Conflict, devoted themselves to living fairly normal lifestyles,
although ones in keeping with their personal politics. Penny Rimbaud continued to live on the farm commune and write increasingly radical manifestos.
The members of Throbbing Gristle all went on to musical careers that in some
ways continued the mission of Throbbing Gristle. Chris Carter and Cosey
Fan Tutti formed the industrial dance band Chris and Cosey; Peter Sleazy
Christopherson went on to join the industrial band Coil; and Genesis P-Orridge formed the cult-like Psychic TV. P-Orridge also went on to a new project,
transforming himself and his wife into an androgynous couple, including each
of them getting breast implants and Genesis later getting his teeth replaced
by gold teeth in a performance piece called putting your money where your
mouth is.28
Both Throbbing Gristle and Crass remain on the fringes of punk rock, but
their influence is extraordinary. To quote Greil Marcuss comments about the
Sex Pistols, it was, finally, no more than an art statement, but such statements,
communicated and received in any form are rare.29 Today, thousands of industrial and anarcho-punk bands across the world cite the two bands as the reason
why they continue to make music in a system that is resolutely devoted to
consumer culture. It also seems clear that the reason punk has survived is not
just the gaudy clothing, but the truly radical impulses embedded in the music.
Punks are notoriously protective of their music, and as the instance where
Nike appropriated Minor Threats album cover for a shoe campaign proved,
are accustomed to being protective of their subculture.30 As Roger Sabin noted
in his introduction to the book, Punk Rock: So What?, punk is comprised of a
vibrant subculture that used knowledge of bands such as Crass and Throbbing
Gristle as a form of subcultural capital analogous to the cultural capital
articulated in the works of Pierre Bourdieu. This subcultural capital allowed
symbolic entrance into a social order bounded by the rules of the particular
subculture. Nevertheless, as Sabin argues, in the punk subculture, different
levels of engagement affect participation and experience.31 Most punks may
not have been aware of the radicalism of bands such as Crass and Throbbing
Gristle, but the more commercialized punk bands nonetheless could be seen
as a gateway to the more ideologically involved bands. Starting with the vague
political leanings of The Clash, one could discover other, more provocative
bands that gave a better articulated version of their radical politics than most
punks. But one could also discover punks with neo-fascist leanings, such as
Skrewdriver, Siouxsie from Siouxsie and the Banshees, and from there go on
to learn more about the National Front or the Nazi party.32

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Crass may not have sold as many records as the Sex Pistols, or Throbbing
Gristle as many as Nine Inch Nails, but in creating and articulating a form of
music that actually was as radical in its conception as in its presentation, both
groups helped to demonstrate that punk rock was not merely a fashion statement or empty posturing. In a world of increasingly commodified music, especially the modern punk subgenre of emo, in which almost any band with
eye-liner and a pop hook is marketed to a younger audience as authentically
punk, it is illuminating to reinvestigate two of the pioneers of music that challenged the dominant ideologies of commercial music and society.33

NOTES
1. Legs McNeil and Gillian McCains, Please Kill Me: The Uncensored Oral History of Punk (New
York: Grove Press, 1996); Clinton Heylin, From The Velvets to the Voidoids: A Pre-Punk History for a Post-Punk World (Chicago: Chicago Review Press, 2005). Other works include Mark
Andersen and Mark Jenkins, Dance of Days: Two Decades of Punk in the Nations Capital (New
York: Soft Skull Press, 2001); Jon Savage, Englands Dreaming: Anarchy, Sex Pistols, Punk Rock
and Beyond (New York: St. Martins Griffin, 2002); and Steven Blush, American Hardcore: A
Tribal History (Los Angeles: Feral House, 2001). Savage touches on social and political issues
in Englands Dreaming and in much of his journalism, but the primary focus of his major work
has been on a historical examination of punk, with less emphasis on critical theory. There have
been welcome correctives to this in works on music and resistance by Simon Frith and Dick
Hebdige, as well as on punk rock in particular, including Roger Sabins Punk Rock: So What?:
The Cultural Legacy of Punk (London: Routledge, 1999) and Greil Marcuss Lipstick Traces: A
Secret History of the Twentieth Century (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1989). The
latter take a more nuanced approach to the punk movement, whereas much of the material still
follows the canonical, or great man theory of punk. The same list of major punk bands and
influences is trotted out, with many very important lesser known, with extremely influential
punk musicians and theorists left by the wayside. There have been other recent welcome attempts to be more inclusive, especially Lauraine Leblancs Pretty in Punk: Girls Resistance in a
Boys Subculture (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2002) and Maria Rahas Cinderellas
Big Score: Women of the Punk and Indie Underground (Emeryville, CA: Seal Press, 2005), which
examine women gender and queer issues in punk, and Brian Cogans The Encyclopedia of Punk
Music and Culture (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 2006), which attempts in several sections,
to examine the radical subcultural impulses inherent in many parts of the punk scene over
the last several decades. However, even these books do not focus sufficiently on the radical
impulses that, to put it succinctly, talked the talk and walked the walk.
2. Craig OHara, The Philosophy of Punk: More Than Noise (San Francisco: AK Press, 1999), 25.
3. These include Sabin, McNeil, and McCain.
4. Cogan, Encyclopedia of Punk, xviii.
5. Simon Reynolds, Rip It Up and Start Again: Post-Punk 19781984 (New York: Penguin Books,
2005).

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89

6. OHara, Philosophy of Punk, 28.

7. Penny Rimbaud (Ratter JJ), Shibboleth: My Revolting Life (London: AK Press, 1998), 48.
8. Rimbaud, Shibboleth, 77.
9. Rimbaud, Shibboleth, 101.
10. Rimbaud, Shibboleth, 102.
11. Cogan, Encyclopedia of Punk, 45.
12. Crass, . . . In which Crass voluntarily blow their Own (liner notes), Best Before (Crass Records,
1986).
13. Crass, In which.
14. Cogan, Encyclopedia of Punk, 45.
15. Crass, Do they owe us a living? Best Before (Crass Records, 1986).
16. Crass, How does it feel to be the mother of a thousand dead? Best Before (Crass Records,
1986).
17. Rimbaud, Shibboleth, 127.
18. Cogan, Encyclopedia of Punk, 46.
19. Crass, In which.
20. Crass, In which.
21. Reynolds, Rip It Up, 125.
22. Reynolds, Rip It Up, 127.
23. Simon Ford, Wreckers of Civilization: The Story of Coum Transmissions and Throbbing Gristle
(London: Black Dog Publishing, 1999), 125.
24. Reynolds, Rip It Up, 128.
25. Reynolds, Rip It Up, 133.
26. V. Vale, Genesis and Paula P-Orridge, in RE/Search #12: Modern Primitives (San Francisco:
RE/Search Publications, 1989), 164.
27. Cogan, Encyclopedia of Punk, 228.
28. Genesis P-Orridge Biography, 26 July, 2006 www.genesisp-orridge.com.
29. Greil, Lipstick Traces, 7.
30. Robert Levine, A Nike Poster Upsets Fans of the Punk Rock Band Minor Threat in A Major
Way, New York Times, 4 July 2005, C4.
31. Sabin, Introduction, Punk Rock, 7.
32. Vivien Goldman, Achtung Baby!: Siouxsie and the Banshees, Mojo Special Edition: Punk: The
Whole Truth, April 2005, 6265.
33. For reasons of space I have concentrated on these two British groups, but the examples they set
were not the only ones that can be analyzed through a theory of authentic politics. For example,
because of limitations of time and space, this work does not take into account the numerous
punk collectives around the world that live and practice radical politics on a regular basis. I also

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have not examined later collectivist movements in England, as they are beyond our scope here.
Also, although it would make a worthy subject for an article, this work did not encompass the
many American punk bands, labels, and collectives involved in the DIY movement, nor did
this work analyze the underground zine movement as Stephen Duncombe did in his authoritative work on the American zine and radical politics. See Duncombe, Notes From Underground:
Zines and the Politics of Alternative Culture (London: Verso, 1997). I hope that other scholars,
inspired by this work, will engage in further research into these subjects.