OUTER LIMITS
He’s a founder member of Crass, so readers might struggle to find a progressive connection. But when it comes to his solo work, fuelled by his passion for jazz and avant-garde music, then it seems perfectly reasonable to ask: how prog is Penny Rimbaud?
Anarcho punk and prog? Has Prog completely lost the plot? Not at all! The Crass co-founder started his musical career in the avant-garde performance art groups EXIT and Ceres Confusion, collaborated with jazz musicians with Crass Agenda, and has recently revisited the world of concept albums with a full-length recording inspired by John Coltrane and the life of French poet Arthur Rimbaud. So it’s high time we asked: how prog is Penny Rimbaud?
In 1967, Penny Rimbaud moved into Dial House, a derelict farm cottage on the fringe of Epping Forest in Essex. He and visual artist Gee Vaucher duly set about turning the 16th century pile into a centre for radical creativity and anarcho-pacifist ideals. For Rimbaud – then still going under his birth name of Jeremy Ratter – it marked the beginning of the rest of his life.
“I moved here when I was teaching part-time at art school,” he tells Prog via Zoom, seated by the window inside Dial House. “After a while I got very tired of teaching and walked out. That’s when I set up this open house, partly because I didn’t know what else to do. I’d got all this sort of debris built up – of trying to make a life as a semi-professional teacher – and the only way I could deal with it was by getting rid of everything and seeing what happened. One weekend I invited as many people as possible to come along and just take what they wanted. All I had left was a cooker, a bed, a bookshelf and a book of Greek philosophy. It felt fabulous.”
Stripped of all but the essentials, Rimbaud painted, wrote poetry, grew vegetables and provided a roof for anyone who wanted to explore an alternative lifestyle. In the early 70s he and Vaucher formed EXIT, a shortlived performance art group with links to the Fluxus movement, at Dial
House. It was also where Rimbaud and underground figure Wally Hope hatched the idea of the Stonehenge Free Festival, inaugurated in 1974.
Three years later, Rimbaud got together with another temporary Dial House resident, Steve Williams, and formed Crass. With Williams (renamed Steve Ignorant) on vocals and Rimbaud on drums, this primitive setup was driven by political fury and fierce self-determination. They may have been an unusual fit – the arty ex-public schoolboy and a workingclass punk 14 years Rimbaud’s junior – but they bonded at a crucial level.
“We didn’t have the same tastes,” explains Rimbaud, whose primary influences were free jazz and European classical music. “Steve didn’t like my avant-gardism and I didn’t like his rock’n’rollism, but we were both very pissed off, for different reasons. So there was a certain coming together on that simple front. It was – and still is, in a strange way – a wonderful relationship. We’re miles apart in virtually anything you could come up with, but we have these strange meeting points and that’s really beautiful. Crass was pretty broad on all fronts, partly due to the diversity of age and class, which created very interesting tangents.”
Quickly growing into a libertarian collective, first heard on 1978’s The Feeding Of The 5000, Crass concerned themselves with all manner of social and ideological issues: animal rights, the environment, feminism, CND, anti-fascism, the perils of religious dogma. The startling sound they made – savage lyrics spitting
“Musically, i’m open to anything. but i constantly return to benjamin britten and john coltrane. those two have been with me all my life.”
indignation over raw guitars, feedback and relentless beats – was just as uncompromising. Crass attracted enemies and devoted fans alike. “Feeding… really took us by surprise, selling thousands when we really didn’t think we’d sell any,” Rimbaud says.
Driven by their DIY approach to the music business, the band founded their own label for 1979 follow-up Stations Of The Crass. It sold 20,000 copies within a fortnight, lodging itself at the top of the indie charts. “One of the guys at Small Wonder [Crass’ previous label] had said a crazy thing to me: ‘You could be as big as The Beatles!’” recalls Rimbaud. “And I think I got carried away with myself on Stations…. A lot of people like that album more than any other, because it actually conforms to certain rock’n’roll principles. And that’s partly because I was feeding vanities. To me it doesn’t have the fierce outsider-ness of Feeding… or the avantgarde rock feeling of Penis Envy [1981]. It’s our weakest album, in my opinion, but it’s our biggest-selling. Sometime afterwards, [critic] Jon Savage said to me: ‘Don’t listen to other people’s opinions and don’t read your own press.’ I’m grateful for that advice.”
Unsurprisingly, Crass didn’t go unnoticed by the powers that be. Everything came to a head, in quite bizarre fashion, around the time of 1983’s Yes Sir, I Will. Having been given classified information from several members of the armed services, Rimbaud and co set about making a fake recording of Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan discussing the sinking of ships during the recent Falklands War. Crass anonymously sent the tapes to the British press.
Nothing happened for a few months. Then The Sunday Times printed a story about the Pentagon coming across the tape and declaring it part of a covert KGB ploy to undermine American democracy. Tipped off by an unknown source, The Observer identified Crass as the culprits soon after. The success of 1983 single How Does It Feel (To Be The Mother Of 1000 Dead)?, aimed squarely at Thatcher, didn’t exactly endear Crass to officialdom either.
Questions were asked in Parliament, and various organisations, including the KGB, started calling Dial House. Says Rimbaud: “If it hadn’t been for what happened to Wally Hope and my experiences with the authorities around the Stonehenge festival, it would’ve been a surprise [Hope died in suspicious circumstances in 1975; Rimbaud holds the opinion that he was
“Crass was pretty broad on all fronts, partly due to the diversity of age and class, which created very interesting tangents.”
murdered]. I knew the extent to which the state would oppose anything that wasn’t in line with their narrative. We started getting opened mail and hearing the phone being tapped. They’d been very active around my activities investigating Wally’s death and I was given some pretty obvious warnings – in the very polite way that the British police and secret service operate – but it was basically, ‘Watch it, mate, or you’ll be following Wally.’
“On one hand that’s great, because you think, ‘This is why I’m doing it, to challenge these people,’” he continues. “But on the other hand it’s also terrifying, especially living in a house with no locks and living a very open life, where anyone might be at the breakfast table in the morning. There have been periods where I’ve had a very large cudgel by my bed, just in case anyone does try something. I know it’s a strange way of living, but that’s what I vowed and determined when I finished art school. I wanted to set up a human experiment – what can happen? And I have to say it’s been much love and beauty.”
From the get-go, Crass vowed to disband in 1984. Having disseminated their message, they kept their word and played a final show that July – a Welsh benefit gig for striking miners.
A swan song, Ten Notes On A Summer’s Day, landed posthumously in 1986.
Rimbaud holed up in Dial House, writing poetry, plays, novels and essays. He returned to the public forum at the turn of the millennium, as a performance poet. And while he and various ex-members of Crass have shared stages at shows in subsequent years, sometimes under the Last Amendment umbrella, poetry remains Rimbaud’s main focus.
Onstage and on record, his verbal riffs are often set to improvised jazz. His deep love of jazz has been a constant throughout his life. There’s a great YouTube clip of him, from March 1964, receiving a prize from
John Lennon on TV’s Ready Steady Go!. The 20-year-old Ratter/Rimbaud has just won a viewers’ competition to produce the best piece of Beatles artwork. Rather than choose albums from the Fab Four as his booty, Rimbaud selects LPs by Shostakovich and Charles Mingus.
“Musically, I’m open to anything,” he says today. “But I constantly return to Benjamin Britten and John Coltrane. Those two have been with me all my life. Jazz is revolutionary music by nature, it’s not something you play in polite clubs. Coltrane was always out there with that roar. To me, the best jazz is in-your-face.”
The same guiding spirit is at play on his latest album, Arthur Rimbaud In Verdun. Backed by tenor saxophonists Evan Parker, Louise Elliott and Ingrid Laubrock, it’s a fictitious spoken-word piece that places Rimbaud and the French poet whose surname he uses (who died in 1891) alongside each other at the Battle of Verdun in the First World War. It’s a visceral, intense, often nightmarish experience, peppered with allusions to mythology, art and philosophy. Rimbaud’s piercing words explode like shells, exposing a fetid world of pus, gore and desperation, its characters struggling between life and death.
The piece came about when he was asked to perform something Rimbaud related at the National Poetry Library in London’s Royal Festival Hall: “I wanted to approach it from a Dada angle and let Rimbaud do the talking. I imagined seeing it all through the eyes of Jackson Pollock and hearing it through the ears of John Coltrane. So I just let myself rip.”
Penny Rimbaud is still very much the curator of the Crass legacy, regularly overseeing remasters and redesigns. It disappoints him that no one has fully grasped the baton they held out as a weapon of personal autonomy. “Crass is probably more pertinent now than back in the day,” he rues. “It’s not vanity to think that nothing’s even come close to Reality Asylum as an all-out social attack.”
At the same time, he believes that the work he’s done since is “much more radical than anything I did with Crass. It’s far more inclined towards testing the limits of endurance and persistence, the very things we have to break. I’m not an anarchist, I’m a deconstructionist. I’m trying to take the mask away from what is around me, including myself, to exist in one moment. We only have one life to live, but we’re so wrapped up in the swaddling of conformity.
“I like the finishing lines of …Verdun: ‘Fuck you and your hollow whimsy,’” he adds. “The hollow whimsy is the material world; that’s what I’m talking about. Why am I forced to battle to be here? Why do people put up brick walls? Why do they tell me what I am? All this sort of rubbish that we have to cope with. So I’d be happy for just one moment of existence. I could drop dead then. But here I am at 77, still bloody hunting every little corner, turning over every little stone.”
Arthur Rimbaud In Verdun is out now via One Little Independent See www.facebook. com/pennyrimbaudofficial for more.