Penny Rimbaud - Biography

Biography

Rimbaud (so named as a tribute to poet Arthur Rimbaud, the 'Penny' being a pun on the phrase "arfer (half a) penny", referring to the long discontinued British Ha'penny coin) was expelled from two public schools, Brentwood School and Lindisfarne College, and went on to study philosophy at Magdalen College, Oxford, before quickly realising that, in his own words, 'Oxford wasn't about learning, but about a peculiarly unpleasant form of class indoctrination'. From there he worked briefly in the rag-trade at Warner & Sons of Berners Street, purveyors of fine furnishing fabrics, from which he was sacked for 'liberating' a length of silk brocade out of which his girlfriend had fashioned a ball gown. After a period of bohemian wandering in Spain he enrolled at the South East Essex Technical College and School of Art in the early 1960s, where he met his lifelong creative partner Gee Vaucher. While there, he exhibited a talent for tailoring, and quick to realise the potential within the then fledgling pop art movement, he scored considerable success as an innovator.

In 1964 he appeared on Granada TV's Ready Steady Go! to receive a prize from John Lennon for winning a competition to produce a piece of artwork depicting The Beatles' song "I Wanna Hold Your Hand". His prize was a copy of Mingus by Charlie Mingus and Dmitri Shostakovich's Cello Concerto, to which Lennon, clearly discomfited, remarked 'Rocker!', adding as an aside, 'That's nowhere, man. I'll get you for that'.

In 1962, while travelling around the Costa Brava Rimbaud and his friend Mick Smee (also known as "the Pope") made up a dance called Le Twiddle as a riposte to both the Twist and to a lesser extent Johnny Hallyday's Le Madison. Le Twiddle was particularly licentious and became popular with young men in bars and nightclubs leading to outraged reports in the Spanish press ("English Claim Pope Invented New Dance"), which in turn attracted the attention of Franco's Fascist Guardia who banned it, making several arrests to prove their point. Rimbaud and Smee managed to escape unscathed.

Inspired by the film Inn of the Sixth Happiness, Rimbaud set up the anarchist/pacifist Dial House community in 1967 with Gee Vaucher, and, together with his friend Phil Russell (aka Wally Hope), helped to instigate the free festival movement at Windsor and later Stonehenge during the early 1970s.

As documented in Rimbaud's essay Last of the Hippies and his autobiography Shibboleth, Russell was arrested and incarcerated in a mental institution after having been found in possession of a small amount of LSD. He was later released, but appeared to have been seriously mentally damaged by his experiences, especially the side effects of prescription drugs that he had been administered, and subsequently died. The official verdict is that Russell committed suicide, although Rimbaud claims that he uncovered strong evidence that he was murdered. Rimbaud has claimed that it was his anger over unanswered questions surrounding his friend's death that fueled and inspired him to form Crass.

Although Crass disbanded in 1984, Rimbaud continued to write and perform both as a solo artist and as a part of the Crass Collective alongside other ex members of the band such as Eve Libertine, Gee Vaucher and Steve Ignorant, as well as other artists and musicians.

His works include the originally self-published Reality Asylum, a vitriolic attack on Christianity which has appeared as a 2 minute track on Crass' 1978 debut album The Feeding of the 5000, as a longer single and as a 45 minute spoken word monologue.

He also wrote Rocky Eyed, an extended poem attacking then prime minister Margaret Thatcher and her government following the 1982 Falklands War which was recorded as the Crass album Yes Sir, I Will, The Death of Imagination (a 'musical drama in 4 parts'), The Diamond Signature (published by AK Press) and Oh America, a response to the September 11, 2001 attacks and America's subsequent War on Terror which includes the line Give us justice which is not the searing spite of revenge, peace which is not the product of war nor dependent upon it.

Since 2003 he has worked as part of Crass Agenda (latterly Last Amendment), performing live and releasing material in CD format including Savage Utopia, a collaboration with Coldcut's Matt Black and other jazz musicians, and How?, a reworking of Allen Ginsberg's beat poem Howl, recorded live at the Vortex Jazz Club.

During 2005 Rimbaud completed a philosophical work "This Crippled Flesh" (first and second editions published by Bracketpress, 2010), as well as appearing in Dominic Thackray's short film Girlfriend in a Kimono.

He has written introductions to books including the controversial The Evil Empire: 101 Ways That England Ruined the World and Graham Burnett's 'Earth Writings' and in 2007 was working on a "Jazz Requiem" with saxophonist Ed Jones. He is also a regular columnist for the Stoke Newington based magazine N16.

He contributed several spoken word tracks to the 2008 Japanther album Tut Tut Now Shake Ya Butt. Rimbaud also features on the 2010 album by The Charlatans (UK band) Who We Touch. Most recently (September/October/November 2010), he has been studying with Dr Matthew W Griffiths, Professor of Physics at the University of New Haven. They are currently co-authoring a book - Tricking the Impossible: An Investigation into Modern Alchemic Thought - about which Rimbaud asserts on Street Carnage that 'quantum is the new poetry of the soul'.