The Crass response to the Falklands had been pretty much the loudest vocal opposition outside the usual suspects in Parliament. Their first response was a flexi ‘Sheep Farming In The Falklands’, a rather cheap and nasty jibe at the British Army that envisaged soldiers fucking sheep and relied on the double-entendre ‘the Royal Marines are coming’.
“I think we did 20,000 of them,” says Penny who played the radio commentator in the style of Monty Python.“We wanted to get some- thing funny and vocal out there. It was actually before the Belgrano went down that I wrote it. When it just seemed like a joke, because no-one had been hurt at that point. I remember we were on tour doing ‘Sheep Farming’ . . . we had a huge banner with all the words on it. Eve would go along with a stick and the idea was everyone sung along – it was great fun.We were actually on tour when the Belgrano went down and the whole thing wasn’t funny any more . . . it turned into something which was costing lives.We really had a big problem – do we go on doing this song? We did, but the whole colouration changed.
“There was reference to the sinking of the Sheffield – at that point we were still too nervous to make it a clean public statement.We decided that in the event of anyone pinning us down on it, we could say it was a bootleg – someone must have recorded us at a gig – ‘nothing to do with us mate’. Rough Trade agreed to stick it in any old album – that’s how we got it out.”
It was also possible to simply go into Rough Trade and ask them for the new Crass flexi, which they simply took off a pile on the counter and gave you.
info tacken from http://crassahistory.wordpress.com
Crass Records
