The final track on Penis Envy entitled Our Wedding, a satire on slush MOR romantic bullshit, was offered by 'Creative Recording And Sound Services' to Loving, a magazine specialsing in the exploitation of teenage loneliness. Loving proudly offered it to their readers as 'a must for that happy day'. When the hoax was exposed, Fleet Street rocked, while heads at Loving rolled.

The release of Penis Envy confirmed a suspicion that we had had for some time. After one week in the shops it entered the national charts at number fifteen, next week it wasn't to be found anywhere in the top one hundred. The same fate had befallen Nagasaki Nightmare, we knew that it just wasn't possible to be that high in the charts one week and nowhere to be found the next. It seemed obvious to us that if the major labels paid to get their records 'in' the charts, they'd pay to get ours 'out'. We knew that we were disliked by EMI, they'd sent out a circular to their A&R departments forbidding all contact with 'Crass personnel' and their HMV shops have not touched any of our material since they took exception to the poster on Bloody Revolutions.

For some time now we had been touring far and wide throughout the UK, bravely treading where no band had trod before. Village halls, scout huts, community centers, anywhere that was neither the rip-off clubs or the pampered university circuit. Hundreds of people would travel to join us in unlikely spots to celebrate our mutual sense of freedom. We shared our music, films, literature, conversation, food and tea. Wherever we went we were met by smiling faces, ready and willing to create an alternative to the drab greyness all around.

It was not always easy, there were always those who wanted to destroy what we had created. We tried to play the Stonehenge Festival but got beaten up by the bikers; we had gigs smashed up by the National Front and the SWP; we played host to the RUC in Belfast, sent the British Movement packing in Reading and got thrashed by the Red Brigade in London. There was a lot of trouble, but it never outweighed the joy.

Throughout 1981 we were recording Christ-The Album, which by the Summer of '82 was ready to release. This time, however, the trouble did outweigh the joy. 'Great Britain' had gone to war.

Insignificant events on an island called South Georgia, which no one had ever heard of, led to significant events on an island called the Falklands which no one had ever heard of. The first pin-prick had been placed in the anarcho-pacifist bubble, a pin-prick that would in the space of a few months tear the bubble to shreds. As young men died by the hundreds, our songs, protests and marches, our leaflets, words and ideas suddenly seemed to be worthless. In reality we knew that what we had to offer had value, that what we believed in was worthwhile, but for the moment it all semed futile.

Thatcher wanted war to boost her party's flagging pre-election image. If she wanted war, she'd have it, along with anything else that took her fancy. Cruise, Pershing, PWR's, Unions, Dennis.

At risk of being seen as the 'traitors' that we are, through devious routes we rushed out an anti-Falklands War flexi and were instantly labelled 'traitors' by the music press. We also received a severe warning from the House of Commons to 'watch our step'. Protest against the War seemed to be virtually non-existent and criticism in the press was being supressed. When the issues had been abstract, the Peace Movement had been all too happy to shout 'No more war', now there was a war to shout about, the silence was painful.

However it wasn't until the war had ended and we released How Does It Feel To Be The Mother Of A Thousand Dead? that the shit really hit the fan. After Thatcher had been asked in the House of Commons whether she had listened to the record, it was inevitable that she and her party would want to punish us. Tory MP Tim Eggar had the hapless task of fronting prosecution proceedings and right from the start couldn't put a foot right. The case crumbled completely when Eggar was exposed by us on live radio as a complete fool. The Tories backed down immediately after his miserable performance and even went to the trouble of circulating a note in which members of the Party were ordered to ignore all provocation from our quarter. Suddenly we started receiving letters of support from members of the 'Opposition'. Maybe we weren't on our own. Fall guys or what!

We found ourselves in a strange and frightening arena. We had wanted to make our views public, had wanted to share them with like-minded people, but now those views were being analysed by those dark shadows who inhabited the corridors of power. Eggar had created a great deal of publicity for our cause and the press had lapped it up, especially those who, literally at gun point, had been prevented from gaining any real information on the war. It was as if we'd hooked a whale while fishing for minnows. We didn't know whether to let go of the rod, or keep pulling until we exhausted ourselves, which we knew, inevitabiy, we would.

The speed with which the Falklands War was played out and the devastation that Thatcher was creating both at home and abroad, forced us to respond far faster than we had ever needed to before. Christ-The Album had taken so long to produce that some of the songs in it, songs that warned of the imminence of riots and war, had become almost redundant. Toxteth, Bristol, Brixton and the Falklands were ablaze by the time that we released. We felt embarrassed by our slowness, humbled by our inadequacy. At the end of '82, aware that the 'movement' needed a morale booster, we organised the first squat gig for decades at the now defunct Zig Zag Club in London. Along with free food and copious supplies of ripped-off booze, we celebrated our independence once again, this time joined by twenty other bands, the cream of what could truly be called 'real punk'. Together we supplied a twenty-four hour blast of energy which inspired similar actions throughout the world. We'd learnt the lesson. 'Do it yourself' has never seemed so real as it did that day at the Zig Zag.

In many respects the Zig Zag consolidated our thinking, the job was by no means over. So, deciding that we should hang onto the rod and fight the whale, we launched an all out attack on Thatcher and her allies. The run up to the '83 Elections had started, the 'Opposition' had all but collapsed. Labour had made the inevitable, revolting turnabout on its anti-nuclear stance and the Peace Movement was in tatters, muted by its own fears.

The album Yes Sir, I Will was our first 'tactical response', it was an impassioned scream directed towards the wielders of power and those who passively accept them as an authority. The message in the record was loud and clear, 'There is no authority but yourself'.

As our political position became increasingly polarised, we felt it necessary to define our motives in a clearer fashion than perhaps we had done before. The what, where and why of our anger needed explaining, as did our idea of 'self'. We had often been accused of sloganeering, now was the time to come out into the open. Several members of the band produced Acts Of Love, fifty poems in lyricai settings, in an attempt to demonstrate that the source of our anger was love rather than hate and that our idea of self was nor that of an egocentric social bigot, but of an internal sense of one's own being. The ambiguity of our attitudes was beginning to disturb us. Was it really possible to have a bloodless revolution? Were we being truly realistic? Were we being destroyed by our own paradoxes?