‘We never had fun – we were angry’: Eve Libertine talks about her life with anarcho-punk pioneers Crass | punk

‘T“The hinges haven’t changed,” Yves Libertine sighs, thinking about her new album. “All of those songs are as relevant as they’ve ever been.” The album in question, Live at the Horse Hospital, shows no sign of one of punk’s most anti-establishment figures maturing with age. Recorded at a stunning live show in London in April 2024, Libertine collaborated with Chilean guitarist Eva Leblanc, reimagining tracks from Libertine’s back catalog including tracks from their time singing with 70s anarcho-punk pioneers Crass. Produced by the Crass Foundation Benny Rambo, it treads a path between performance art, experimental music and earth rituals. With its harsh operatic tones, Libertine sounds like a fortune teller predicting the end of the world. It’s not easy to listen, but that wasn’t the case with Crass either.

“Honestly, we didn’t have a lot of fun,” Libertine says. “Things were very difficult at times. We were angry; we were trying to say things in a confrontational, shocking way to get a reaction. And we definitely did.”

Speaking via video call from her living room, Libertine has a sense of humor, offering tough opinions and then laughing when she says them, like a giggling murderess. She describes how Rambo’s lyrics for “Rocky Eyes” came from the band’s anti-nuclear activism, which led her to see wastelands everywhere: “Looking at a tree and seeing it as…” She stops on each word for emphasis: “A. Dead. Burned. Stump.” Then another sudden laugh.

It is this sense of provocation and absurdity that characterizes Crass, which formed as a raucous band in the 1970s at Dial House Farm in Essex. The nucleus was Rambo on drums and Steve Ignorant on vocals, with other members of Municipal added. Eve herself started out as a fan at their concerts, “which were empty. There was one where I was the only person left in the audience, wandering around in front of the stage by myself.” By the late 1970s, they had moved on to Commune and taken a place in the band, adding a searing vocal rhythm that, combined with the increasingly diverse musical tastes of the other members, pulled them into more avant-garde territory, where they were as likely to release stripped-down, turbulent vocal collages as they were 1-2-3-4 Thrashers.

Crass was also a political extremist, and several cases were brought against them in the 1970s and 1980s, the first for blasphemy in the 1978 Reality Asylum song, where a Scotland Yard vice squad raided Dial House, before the case was dropped. Later, their 1983 Falkland Islands protest, How It Feels to Be the Mother of a Thousand, prompted Conservative MP Timothy Egar to attempt (and ultimately failed) to prosecute them under the Obscene Publications Act.

However, a 1981 obscenity charge brought by Manchester Police is stuck on Bata Hotel, and it’s one of the songs Libertine decided to revisit for Live at the Horse Hospital. The charge was initially brought against the album Penis Envy, copies of which were seized from record stores in Manchester. Ultimately, a judge upheld the charge against Bata Motel alone, deeming it “sexually provocative and obscene.”

“Much to Penny’s dismay,” Eve laughs again. “He wanted to be prosecuted, and in the end I was the one who was prosecuted.”

The track, a detailed depiction of living as a woman under the male gaze, has been accused of being sadomasochistic pornography. Libertine didn’t bother attending the court hearing, but he remembers what happened. “It was funny. The defense was using an album that Peter Cook and Dudley Moore had gotten away with – it was about Jesus masturbating or something – and they played it in court. Of course, everyone was in hysterics. The judge said very sternly: ‘If anyone else laughs, you’ll be in the cells!’ And so there was lip-biting and coughing fits. The episode was described as ‘a bit of a joke’, although the band ended up incurring heavy fines for the song.

Libertine herself claims that Bata Hotel is “the exact opposite” of sadomasochism, and that her lyrics are becoming, if anything, more resonant with a younger generation of women. Eve quotes: “I examine myself in your thinking, and set it right by a brutal correction.” “When I see what women do to themselves with lifts, silicone, injections and facelifts at a young age… it’s sad that this line could have been written today.”

While she feels that the ills she opposed since the 1970s remain – “warmongers, destruction, plundering of the earth” – her proposed solutions have changed somewhat, and it is surprising that she does not call herself a feminist.

“Our ideologies can hold us back,” she says. “I don’t call myself anything unfortunate in the end, because it can be co-opted. In a lot of these movements, people have isolated themselves and that’s very sad. We’re all so armoured. Don’t see the armor, look down: we’re human underneath it all. When I look at my fears and my pettiness, me, I just want to see it for what it is, and I hope to somehow see beyond that.”

She thinks about what lies behind it, and what still drives her art. “Anger. Anger, compassion, rage – and love.”