CRASS, THE SATELLITES & THE HEROES
Friday 1st June 1979 at Ealing Technical College
(A non-review of sorts for a fanzine that either never appeared, or decided not to print this if it did)
Last night I saw (sorry, tried to see) Crass. You can look at this in one of two ways, as a novel new form of street-theatre (if you wanna be flippant) or as yet another manifestation of, in what will be a long hot summer, attacks on the streets, on the squats and on the gigs all add up to an undeclared war fought in the shadow of adult indifference. But more of that later. When we arrive in Ealing there’s a growing throng of skinheads outside the venue, and a lot of edgy punks. In my experience you don’t have to be a pessimist to know that something will happen: the balmy air reeks of it, and the only consolation is that skinheads generally pay to get into venues to wreck ‘em, thus proving their idiocy. After a while they gather like a black cloud to the back of a long queue, summon their collective vocabularies to grunt “Skin-head!” in unison and give a huge push that propels the first 50 plus punters plumb through the (thankfully open) double doors. As I enter the pearly gates I catch the eyes of the students stood open-mouthed as they vainly attempt to collect the quid entrance fee. They suddenly realise that they’re completely out of their depth (later on I can honestly say that I didn’t pay not to see Crass). And it gets worse. Out of the simmering foyer and into the hall there’s a weedy student in glasses with a little tray around his neck carrying various badges: ANL, RAR, Blair Peach. A sacrificial lamb, laid out on a plate and conjured into reality more completely than any novelist could manage. The phalanx of DMs and shaved heads engulf him. His glasses go in one direction, the tray of badges the other (upwards). And then he’s gone, with nary a blood smear to mark his presence, and with him the evening. A nearby table offering similar wares suffers the same fate. Afterwards, some optimists briefly attempt to conduct what we’d usually term as ‘a gig’. The Heroes play. They are quite good, I suppose, but utterly irrelevant under the circumstances (does anyone notice?). Then The Satellites perform Act Two. It’s like Pinter directed by Peckinpah. The singer, last seen adorning the front of that “New Wave” cash-in LP back in the Summer of Hate, has a good line in humour; the chorus to “Eeyore In The UK”, if that’s its name, goes from “Eeyore Eeyore, wahee wahee” to “Eeyore Eeyore, seig heil goosestep”. Either he’s mocking the boneheads, or one of them has taken the mic: from the scrum it’s hard to tell past the Freddie Starr dance moves. More of the cannon-fodder are swinging from the lights, one of which crashes into the crowd to ironic cheers. I hardly recognise a soul here (what did everyone know that I didn’t ?). In the common room I cadge a fag from a pretty Indian punk girl in leopard-skin trousers. One skinhead says to me “this country’s a socialist shithole innit ?” . Perhaps he had to read Solzenitsyn at school or something; maybe they all did, and shave their bonces in solidarity with those zeks banished to distant, frozen Siberia and now take their revenge for all the boring English lessons spent with meek, mildly-left-wing and well-meaning teachers. Another skin warns me, cheerfully, to mind my head as he and a bunch of his mates try to hoist the pool table through the window. We consider it best to exit the common room as it implodes, windows caving in and everything moveable reduced to matchwood. Back in the hall we, the punks, look at each other mutely. Just then the geezer who drums for Crass steps up to the mic and announces “If you clean up the mess then we’ll play”. I started laughing and, the next day, I’m still laughing. When it becomes clear that no-one, let alone Crass, will play here again in the foreseeable future, we make for the door, only to be blocked by a phalanx of Her Majesty’s Finest, the icing on the cake, who have arrived belatedly to gloat and goad the survivors with slavering, foam-flecked dogs in tow. The pretty Asian girl is arguing with them when one of the loathsome canines sinks its teeth into someones leg. As a melee develops, objects are flying, including cymbals (?). The dogs are straining at the leash, silver-backed and muscular. Girls shriek, there’s the sound of crashing glass; as I try to squeeze through the throng by the door one of the mutts goes for me. A punk alongside has the same idea and we kick the fucker, hard. It squeals, and the human handler, who has a WW2 fighter pilot-style moustache, spits “You’re fucking dead, both of ya!”, but by then we’re out of the door (it goes without saying that we’ve managed to boot a dumb dog, but not a more worthwhile, human, target) passing another unfortunate being dragged along by more pigs and a skinhead clocked as neatly as the black ball by a swinging truncheon. It’s mice and men, and the mobs heading toward Ealing Broadway alternate between the almost-festive and the grimly-subdued, until we pass a pub where some posh locals sipping wine on outside tables make the mistake of loudly mocking the passing peacockery. Some skins peel off, tables and chairs are skittled over: thuds, grunts, shouts of fear, and a statuesque blonde wielding a stiletto shoe in brief, vain, defiance. Outside the tube station there’s lurid rumours of stabbings, rape, hospitalizations etc. Only mass-murder is absent from the gory inventory. There’s talk of the “South Ealing Skins”, but even the minimal degree of organization in evidence tonight is surely beyond such inadequates. Whoever the puppet-masters are (the NF? BM?), the attitude of both the police (more interested in taking out their equal inadequacies on the most punkily-attired, and turning up long after the worst damage has been done) and the punks themselves with their apolitical, apathetic posturings (left wing right wing, all the fucking same-but where are the communist stormtroopers smashing up gigs ?!) merely suit their sinister purposes. Crass too are well-meaning, but they can’t play Conway Hall or secluded arts centres forever, and events may soon prick the bubble of their Essex Garden of Eden. In 1977 we posed with swastikas to piss off the 2nd World War generation, and dabbled with violent shock-imagery. Now, the swastikas are real and so is the violence.
(The above was written in June 1979. I’ve touched up the spelling/grammar, changed the odd word and improved it somewhat, otherwise it’s as it was.
(The below has been copied from issue 11 of PANACHE fanzine, and presents a more graphic viewpoint of the same gig. I’ve left it intact, 70’s colloquialisms included)
“The Satellites are pathetic – they started all the trouble. The skins were inside and wrecked a table of anti- Nazi stuff, but everything was OK till the Satellites came on, by which time the skins were mostly pissed. THEN the Satellites singer starts going ‘Heil Hitler we will kill the Reds’ (Eds note:I’ve heard this is a pisstake song, not pro-NF, but still pretty stupid choice). The skins wrecked the common room and split a blokes head open. Crass wanted to play but the pigs arrived with alsatians! Dunno what happened to ‘em cos the skins attacked people with knives as they were going out, but I hear punks and anti-Nazi skins started on ‘em. All I know is that Crass had their drums and backcloth ruined, and (this is the good bit) the Satellites gear was wrecked and their singer chased out. Worst bit was when skins whizzed cymbals into the crowd like frisbees, cutting a blokes throat (he survived). It was madness! We saw the pigs arrest a bloke for nicking an amp, a Paki girl for obstruction and a punk for having a dog collar. A little punk girl came running up to me crying her head off – skins had raped her and her 3 friends! Skins stabbed 4 people as they left. What the fuck the police were doing is beyond me. The morons then went Paki-bashing. Fuck. I was glad to get out of the place. “
<<BACK TO THE HEROES MAIN PAGE
<<BACK TO THE SATELLITES MAIN PAGE
©Detour Records