Back in the early to mid 1980’s, Britain was a musical melting pot, with independent acts and musical cults of all shades existing not-particularly-peacefully side by side. The charts were a melange of dreadful disco, former punk acts turned pop stars, the latest music press fads, and dinosaur pre-punk acts that refused to die (Queen etc). Outside of all of that, though, there was a genuine DIY underground, far from the commercial considerations of the music ‘biz’. That split into the electronic and experimental industrial underground headed up by Throbbing Gristle/PTV, and the Anarchist punk underground spearheaded by Crass and Crass Records. There was some overlap at the edges, but these two scenes existed largely discrete from each other, and a million miles from the regular pop and rock worlds, even down to the choice of venues.
The chosen medium was cassette and short run singles and albums with DIY sleeves, promoted by word of mouth and via the myriad of self-produced fanzines and flyers and distributed through a network of small record shops, anarchist and left-wing bookshops, and DIY mail order outlets run by dedicated individuals across the country and internationally. It was the true realisation of the original promise of punk that had been let go of by the record contract chasing first wave of punk, but picked up and embraced by passionately committed and principled individuals operating on shoestring budgets out of squats and back rooms.
There was a thriving alternative gig circuit too. No commercial promoter would touch the likes of Crass, Blood and Roses, The Mob, or Flux of Pink Indians as their scrappily recorded and unconventional noises were not money spinners and both records and gigs often sported ‘pay no more than..’ tags to keep prices low and affordable to the (usually broke) core audience. Venues were sympathetic Student Unions, schools and halls in out of the way places, along with squats and anarchist centres, especially London’s Centro Iberico on the Harrow Road, which served as the de facto epicentre for the movement, along with Crass’s Dial House HQ in Epping.
It is this scene that forms the focus for ‘Bits of Paper’, with those reproduced bits being the plethora of gig posters, flyers and printed statements that gave the scene its distinctive identity.
Although the Anarcho-Punk visual style is often seen as the stencilled lettering beloved of Crass, or the scratchy, apocalyptic, biro drawings that adorned many sleeves and posters, there is a far greater artistic variety on show here. Some posters are reminiscent of the swirly, hippy doodlings of Oz magazine or Hawkwind. Others are skilful collages and line drawings. Yet others are clumsily naïve posters produced by schoolkid punks. The range of bands featured on the posters illustrates a surprising variety of musical styles, from the Goth sounds of the Sex Gang Childen and Southern Death Cult, through Blood and Roses, The Apostles, The Mob, Blythe Power and, of course, scene leaders Crass, Poison Girls, and Flux of Pink Indians. Artwork is frequently adorned with statements; “Aint No Freedom In America”, “Smash The System Now – Please” (very polite, that!), “Our Minds Are Strong”. Centro Iberico is also omnipresent as the venue of choice for many. The scene wasn’t solely London based. Bristol, Nottingham, Ipswich, Oldham, and Coventry, all feature. The Mob and Blood and Roses seemed to play absolutely everywhere though.
This tenth anniversary edition is produced in large format full colour and at over 250 pages long both is fantastic value for money and allows you to appreciate the detail that a smaller monochrome format would lose. Aside from the reproduced artworks, much of which would be lost forever without books like this to capture them, the real gems here are the eye witness testimony and stories from those involved, telling of gruelling long-distance trips on coaches and trains, bunking the tube and hitching rides where they could in order to get to gigs held in obscure venues.
Those experiences often recalled mindless violence from marauding skinheads, tales of kindness and insanity in equal measure, police harassment, and the lives of schoolboy anarchist punks from across the country. In a pre-internet age, networks were postal, fuelled by rubbing soap bars on postage stamps so that the franking mark could be cleaned off and the stamp re-used over and over (no QR codes then!), and meeting up with like-minded individuals at gigs and squats.
These formative experiences had a far greater impact than the music. As Penny Rimbauld, founder of Crass would later admit, the experience of being a member of Crass was awful, with violence directed at them by local skinheads at gigs, police hostility, constant lack of money, and long trips in rickety vans to the back of beyond to play for kids who would otherwise never be able to see them play live. I myself saw them a few times at Birmingham’s Digbeth Civic Hall and can honestly say that it was one of the most influential events of my life, not because of the music (of which I have the dimmest of recollections), but because it showed me that anyone could do something for themselves
Although self-produced, and very affordable (I picked this up for just £18) in keeping with the DIY ethos, the ultimate irony is that this comes as print-on-demand from corporate giants Amazon. Be that as it may, this is an excellent and very readable record of those times that avoids mythologising and presents the grubby and unvarnished reality rather than dons the rose tinted spectacles, as is all too common with such publications.
Essential Information: ‘Not Just Bits Of Paper’ Tenth Anniversary Edition is available from Amazon.
