Flyer
Manchester Polytechnic Cavendish House
12th March 1980

Other side of last. Saw Steve Forbett; I remember ‘cos he had this really annoying Steve Hillage looking guitarist who kept jigging around like a pixie; wanted to bring him to his senses...TISWAS....what a joy ;quite anarchic; captured the zeitgeist of the time pretty much....It seemed no matter where you ended up, often at complete strangers’ houses; waking up under the carpet to stave off the cold after some gate-crashed party or other, then scrounging round for some warm, flat, possibly cigarette-butted left over beer, (maybe a partially full " Party Seven" if you were lucky...); and cigarette dimps, to be re-rolled anew... We, the people....plus the good men and women folk of the house would slowly come round, drift in before the telly in the early morning light and bond through an episode of TISWAS, before going our separate ways.....
Crass were ace; very intense ,very theatrical yet somehow very “real”. Quite unlike any other band. An idealised co-operative with a strong following. Don’t know how it all panned out eventually but at ,and for the time they were standard bearers for a widely held ....ology with a host of like-minded label mates ,and seemed to put their financial gain where their mouth was. I thought musically they were very interesting and challenging. Once in a Blue I’ll pull out some of that old vinyl and give it a whirl; reckon a lot of it still stands up; it could only have been of that time.....powerful stuff really. Maybe they’re all living the tax free life in some exotic idyll but I somehow severely doubt it. Hard to believe, looking back that Crass and Adam and his Ants seemed for a brief time to be the keepers of the flame in the post punk afterglow. It seems with hindsight, that one descended into that bastard child "Oi" , so willingly championed by that luminary of journalistic integrity, G. Bushell, and the other camp fell to...well, camp pantomime with everything but the pantomime horse thrown in!.....funny how things turn out...
I think Poison Girls were the support at this one with Vi Subversa, a fifty odd year old leather- clad granny on vocalisation duties....
Oh yeah The Revillos/ Rezillos; Faye Fife and her trusty companions...what a laugh! Kind of a Scottish equivelant of the B52s. Their version of "Hippy Hippy Shake" has, what must be, one of the greatest lead guitar breaks of all time; classic!