sheep farming in the falklands

Crass Records 121984/3

• A) Sheep Farming In The Falklands
• B) Gotcha!

Recorded on 27th/28th April 83 at Southern. Personnel as usual. Comes with foldout poster/lyric sheet. Track A was originally releasedearlier same year as a single-sided transparent flexi disc.

CRASS sheep farming in the falklands flexi

This is the original version, anonymously published by Crass

The Crass response to the Falklands had been pretty much the loudest vocal opposition outside the usual suspects in Parliament. Their first response was a flexi ‘Sheep Farming In The Falklands’, a rather cheap and nasty jibe at the British Army that envisaged soldiers fucking sheep and relied on the double-entendre ‘the Royal Marines are coming’.

“I think we did 20,000 of them,” says Penny who played the radio commentator in the style of Monty Python.“We wanted to get some- thing funny and vocal out there. It was actually before the Belgrano went down that I wrote it. When it just seemed like a joke, because no-one had been hurt at that point. I remember we were on tour doing ‘Sheep Farming’ . . . we had a huge banner with all the words on it. Eve would go along with a stick and the idea was everyone sung along – it was great fun.We were actually on tour when the Belgrano went down and the whole thing wasn’t funny any more . . . it turned into something which was costing lives.We really had a big problem – do we go on doing this song? We did, but the whole colouration changed.

“There was reference to the sinking of the Sheffield – at that point we were still too nervous to make it a clean public statement.We decided that in the event of anyone pinning us down on it, we could say it was a bootleg – someone must have recorded us at a gig – ‘nothing to do with us mate’. Rough Trade agreed to stick it in any old album – that’s how we got it out.”

It was also possible to simply go into Rough Trade and ask them for the new Crass flexi, which they simply took off a pile on the counter and gave you.