© Steve Ward

CRASS: THE SOUND OF FREE SPEECH –
THE STORY OF REALITY ASYLUM

Brandon Spivey | United Kingdom | 2023 | 95’ | OV

When punk still took the anarchy A seriously: »Crass« were practically part of the British punk primordial soup, founded in Essex in 1977, not just as a band but as an art collective. When they wanted to release their first album in 1978, the pressing plant refused to press the original song »Reality Asylum« onto the disc. The lyrics were deemed too blasphemous. So the track remains silent and is consequently given the title “The Sound of Free Speech”. Director Brandon Spivey takes this episode as the starting point for an outline of the band’s history, which is inextricably linked to the extreme left-wing political and artistic understanding of its time, when neoliberalism cancelled the at least somewhat softer social agreements of the post-war period and thus overturned the global economic order. The film by Spivey, who is not only a director and musician himself, but also a convinced political activist, tells the story of what this meant at the time and in this region, i.e. in the 1970s and 1980s in Great Britain, and how an anarchist movement reinvented itself in resistance to this through punk, and therefore knows how well such a retrospective, such a balance sheet fits in with the helpless present.

The film is of course inconceivable without the consent of the former band members, and the most important protagonists of this project such as singer Steve Ignorant and drummer Penny Rimbaud – but also companions such as Annie Bandez (aka Little Annie) and a few more – do not hold back with statements. Nevertheless, it is also clear that Spivey is outlining his personal perspective here. Many of his formal decisions are remarkable: He not only stages talking heads, but also uses animations and collages archive images – particularly disturbing: the aggressive montage of footage of how the French liberated by the Nazis shave the hair of women suspected of collaboration, drive them through the streets and humiliate them, matching the title of the B-side of the »Reality Asylum« single that was later released on the band’s own initiative: »Shaved Women«. For this part of the work, Spivey once again sought out a group context, with one trail leading to Berlin, to the left-wing media collective sansculotte.de .