Crusties in hot weather

[Lucia Lanigan]

I thought they'd all died out 10 years ago, but they're alive and (un)well and moored in expensive house boats on the canal next to London's Fashionable Kingsland Road, making their kids piss in our puddles.

I mean, they might be sitting on the bins and playing really loud music while I want to go to bed, but unlike their dappy 90s ancestors, they're playing some pretty good shit. We've just had a really well selected set of 80s dancehall and 70s Lee Perry cuts, and now they're playing Led Zeppelin (even if some fool did just skip 'Ramble On' to get to 'Moby Dick').

I mean, I do hope they fuck off and die before 11 and that their boat sinks, but I'm feeling the most warmth toward them I ever have. After all, it could have been The Levellers or Back To The Planet, eh?

[evilC]

Crusties in hot weather

Good to hear that their music taste has (finally) improved, though I have to wonder in my supercynical way if it's just a shift made by the shabby Trustafarians to ensure they continue to get shags from the more impressionable sections of the youth.

Nearly all of my friends were 'Crass-punks' back in the early and mid-80s. I.e. they were 'proto-crusties', with their induced dreadlocks and policy of non-washing. Many of them lived in caravans for several years, pitching them up wherever they were least likely to get evicted/hassled. Unfortunately, this routinely meant that whenever I wanted to go and see them, I'd invariably have to wade through ankle-deep mud in my suits and trenchcoats ...and get dirt under my carefully-painted nails, too! Heh!

What really narked me, though - and has left me perpetually jaundiced against such 'movements'/gestures - is that the people who were inflicting this regime upon themselves were the very same people who had ganged up on me in a school class just a few years before and ripped the piss out of me for being the only kid in the class who lived in a council house! Cunts! I have to confess to a certain small glow of schadenfreude when the caravan-bound lifestyle lost it sheen as soon as they encountered some real hardship and they all eventually scampered back to their parents in their comfortable houses in the Surrey/Hampshire countryside. I'm trying hard to think of one of them that has stuck with that lifestyle, but I don't think a single one (out of about a dozen) has.