Various – Bullshit Detector

Various - 'Bullshit Detector Volume #1' (Crass Records, 1980). Without doubt the greatest expression of the DIY punk aesthetic ever pressed on vinyl. A clarion call to many dispossessed youth to express themselves musically as well as a media for spreading ideas throughout a community which may otherwise have remained geographically and culturally isolated from all the other like minds forming bands and starting 'zines across the land. At a time when most of the established punk bands had polished their sound and were gracing the TOTP studio this galvanised and gave ideological cohesion to the emerging, embryonic scene that became later known as 'anarcho-punk'. It is a record which remains even today unduly underestimated and maligned for its 'quality', which, of course, wasn't the point of the release at all. Stand-out tracks for me have always been the gratingly atonal Snipers 'War Song', the discordant lo-fi dementia (with what genuinely sounds like buckets and dustbin lids for drums!) of The Sucks ‘3’ and the primal pogo of Counter Attack’s ‘Don’t wanna fight for you’ . Bullshit Detector #1 stands as the first ‘punk’ record that irrefutably proved the ethos that ‘anyone’ really could DO IT, be on record and have their voice heard; even if that voice sounded like it was recorded down a phone and was accompanied by a toy guitar.