Crass - Influences

Influences

Crass influenced the anarchist movement in the UK, US, and around the world. With the growth of anarcho-punk came new generations of people who became interested in anarchist ideas. The band have also claimed credit for the revitalisation of the peace movement and the UK's Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament during the late 1970s and early 1980s, although others argue that they overestimated their own influence, despite the radicalising effect that they may have had upon more militant campaigners.

The philosophical and aesthetic influence of Crass on numerous punk bands from the 1980s were far reaching, even if few bands mimicked their later more free-form musical style (as on Yes Sir, I Will and their final recording, Ten Notes on a Summer's Day).

Their painted and collage-art black-and-white record sleeves produced by Gee Vaucher themselves became a signature aesthetic model, and can be seen as an influence on later artists such as Banksy (Banksy and Vaucher have latterly collaborated) and the subvertising movement.

The band has stated that their own musical antecedents and influences were seldom drawn from the rock music tradition, but rather from classical music (particularly Benjamin Britten, on whose work, Rimbaud states, some of Crass' riffs are directly based), free jazz, European Atonality and avant-garde composers such as John Cage and Stockhausen as well as performance art traditions such as street theatre . Members of the band have also cited influences ranging from Existentialism, Zen, the American Beat Poets such as Kerouac and Ginsberg, art and political movements including Fluxus and Situationism, the poetry of Baudelaire and Arthur Rimbaud, British working class 'Angry Young Men' writers such as Barry Hines and Alan Sillitoe and the films of Anthony McCall (McCall's piece Four Projected Movements was shown as part of Crass' performance at an early gig).

Anti-folk artist Jeffrey Lewis's 2007 album 12 Crass Songs features acoustic covers of material originally written by Crass.

In February 2011, the artist Toby Mott showed a small part of his personal collection of Crass ephemera at the Roth gallery, New York. The exhibition featured artwork, albums, including original 12" LPs and EPs, 7" singles from Crass Records, and a complete set of Crass’ self published zine, 'Inter-National Anthem'.