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Heyyy, uit de comments bij PowNed, dit lijkt de tape in kwestie (? als het geen bewerkte remix is), 'k had 'm nog nooit gehoord (hoewel het best zou kunnen dat ie inmiddels op een of andere compilatie staat): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QmfLP1IOip8 .

De plaatser geeft de credits aan http://killyourpetpuppy.co.uk/news/crass-capital-radio-reagan-thatcher-t... , beslist de moeite.

Waar dit specifieke verhaal (mbt Crass, niet die vrijgegeven stukken als zodanig) nu recent in de mainstream-pers is opgedoken, blijft me wat onhelder; PowNed verwijst naar The Daily Beast http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2014/01/04/the-british-punk-band-t... , Ravage naar The Huffington Post http://www.huffingtonpost.co.uk/2014/01/02/margaret-thatcher-reagan-pran... . Een blik op Google News leert dat het zo langzaam wel de ronde lijkt doen.

nb: >de band zelf heeft het in z'n sleeve-notes onthuld<

Ja, o.a. te vinden in die Southern records-link hierboven. Sta me toe te citeren, we schrijven dus ca. '84:

"(...) 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?

It was at this time that we sent the now infamous ‘Thatchergate Tapes’ to the world’s press. The highly edited tape, which took the form of a telephone conversation between Reagan and Thatcher, had her admitting responsibility for the sinking of the Belgrano, an issue which at that time she had not been confronted with, and implying knowledge of the Invincible’s decision to ‘guinea-pig’ the Sheffield, a fact that still has not come to light. So as to leave no stone unturned. we caused Reagan to threaten to ‘nuke’ Europe in defence of American heritage, a hypothesis which is probably not as wild as it seems.

The tape lay dormant for almost a year before surfacing in the State Department in Washington DC. The categorical denials that were issued in relationship to the tape and its contents acted as a clear indication that the methods that we had employed to discredit Thatcher and Reagan were in no way dissimilar to those of The State Department. Why else would they have taken our somewhat amateurish efforts at tape forgery so seriously? Inevitably, they waved the accusatory finger in the direction of the Kremlin. Shortly after that, several papers in America, and The Sunday Times in Britain, ran the story as proof of KGB ‘foul-play’. It was the first time that the press had run any story that, albeit in a roundabout fashion, questioned Thatcher’s integrity concerning the Belgrano. We were overcome with a mixture of fear and elation, should we or should we not expose the hoax?

Our indecision was resolved when a journalist from The Observer contacted us in relation to ‘a certain tape’. At first we denied knowledge, but eventually decided to admit responsibility. We had been meticulously careful in the production and distribution of the tape to ensure that no one knew about our involvement. How The Observer got hold of information that led to us is a complete mystery. It acted as a substantial warning, if walls did indeed have ears, how much more was known of our activities?

Since the graffiti days of ’77 we had been involved in various forms of action, from spraying to wire cutting, sabotage and subterfuge. We had been concerned that if we went public on the tape all manner of other ‘offences’ might bubble to the surface. Now we had exposed ourselves to that risk and the telephone started to ring.

The world’s media pounced on the story, thrilled that a ‘bunch of punks’ had made such idiots of The State Department, and ‘by the way, what else had we done?’ Throughout the years as a band we had never attracted such attention, the telephone rang incessantly, we travelled here and there to do interviews, all of a sudden we were ‘media stars’. We were interviewed by the Russian press as American TV cameras recorded the event, we were live on American breakfast TV, we talked to radio stations from Essex to Tokyo, always giving the anarchist angle on every question. We had gained a form of political power, found a voice, were being treated with a slightly awed respect, but was that really what we wanted? Was that what we had set out to achieve all those years ago? (...)"