CRASS’ album, ‘Yes, Sir, I Will’, was in 1982 possibly the most angry and hard hitting attack on the political/military/industrial complex ever consigned to vinyl. In 2014, Rimbaud was asked to participate in the Rebellion Festival, which caused rewriting the album by replacing screams of anguish with laments of love. Retitled as ‘Yes, Sir, the Truth of ᴙevolution’, Rimbaud was joined by CRASS’ lead vocalist Eve Libertine plus a group of leading musicians from the London jazz scene with whom they’d worked extensively in the past, named ‘L’Académie des Vanités’. The live recording of that show, presented here, captures all the tense excitement created by presenting a primarily punk audience with complex poetics of love, accompanied by equally demanding freeform, improvised jazz. However, as had generally been the case with CRASS’ output, wild and worrisome, it would be wise to expect the unexpected.
‘We are poets, armed with the cobblestones of love, unconditional, uncompromising, beyond need of proof.’