Paul Hartnoll

Orbital’s electric auteur gives the anarchist salute to Crass’s Penis Envy (Crass Records, 1981).

I was living in Dunton Green in Kent, around ’82. I’d started on, like, the Anti-Nowhere League and The Exploited. Then a mate, Richard, gave me the Bloody Revolutions single and put me on to Crass. When I found Penis Envy, it was an explosion for a 14-year-old kid.

I would have bought it in HMV or Our Price in London, and played it in my bedroom. I was so kind of innocent to all the things they were bringing up on this album. Poison In A Pretty Pill – I don’t know what pill they’re singing about but, for me, it was an attack on the pharmaceutical world. Our Wedding was crazy, and they managed to get that on to some kind of wedding magazine as a flexi disc! The feminism aspect was the biggest thing for me: only the two women in the band sing on it, which I prefer to Steve Ignorant, in a way. I got equality, but then I thought, Who’s going to cook the dinner?! Hang on, I could. What it’s saying, the big takeaway, is you don’t have to play the love and the consumer game, with the bigger house and the trophy wife and the perfect life. It’s quite philosophical. Crass and Flux Of Pink Indians turned me vegetarian, too. It was like that thing that they do to people when they’ve been taken over by a cult, and you have to deprogram them: it was deprogramming me from society, one I didn’t like but didn’t have the vocabulary to know why I was unhappy with it.

There’s also the amazing production and sound and musicality. Beautifully fuzzy. Sharp and angular. A really tight sense of rhythm and pulse. Another thing that I took into my world was the use of found sound and tape sampling. It’s almost anti-music.

It’s the pinnacle of Crass for me. We’ve got a new album, but it’s probably no Penis Envy! Yeah, I’ve got album envy.

As told to Ian Harrison Orbital’s Optical Delusion is out on February 17 via London.