# Penny Rimbaud

Penny Lapsang Rimbaud (born Jeremy John Ratter, 8 June 1943) is a writer, poet, philosopher, painter, musician and activist. He was a member of the performance art groups EXIT and Ceres Confusion, and in 1972 was co-founder of the Stonehenge Free Festival, together with Phil Russell aka Wally Hope. In 1977 with Steve Ignorant, he co-founded the seminal anarchist punk band Crass and served as its drummer. Crass disbanded in 1984. Until 2000 Rimbaud devoted himself almost entirely to writing, returning to the public platform in 2001 as a performance poet working with Australian saxophonist Louise Elliott and a wide variety of jazz musicians under the umbrella of Last Amendment.

## Name

Ratter claims to have changed his name by deed poll in 1977, as, in his own words, he "wanted to be his own child". The surname was taken from that of the French symbolist poet Arthur Rimbaud; the forename was chosen because Rimbaud's brother Anthony would refer to him as "a toilet-seat philosopher" (a penny being the price to enter public toilets in the day).

## Early life

Rimbaud was expelled from two public schools: Brentwood School in South East England and Lindisfarne College in North Wales. In early interviews, he claimed to have studied philosophy at Magdalen College, Oxford, but later claimed that this story had been fabricated "so that they couldn’t disclaim my role as an intellectual."

## Artistic life

In 1964, Rimbaud appeared on TV's Ready Steady Go! to receive a prize from John Lennon after having won a competition to produce artwork depicting the Beatles' song "I Want to Hold Your Hand." Rimbaud worked briefly as an art teacher before becoming disillusioned with education, and then spent some time working as a coalman.
In 1967, inspired by the film Inn of the Sixth Happiness, Rimbaud and Gee Vaucher, both vegetarians, set up the anarchist/pacifist open house Dial House in the Epping Forest of southwest Essex, which has now become firmly established as a "centre for radical creativity."

### Wally Hope's death and Crass

At Dial House in the early 1970s, Rimbaud co-founded the Stonehenge Festival along with Phil Russell, better known as Wally Hope, as documented in Rimbaud's 1998 autobiography Shibboleth: My Revolting Life. Following his incarceration in a mental institution for possession of LSD, Russell appeared to have been seriously mentally damaged, especially by the side effects of prescription drugs that he had been administered, and subsequently died. Though the official verdict declared Russell's death a suicide, Rimbaud claims that he has uncovered strong evidence that Russell was murdered and that his anger over unanswered questions about the death inspired him to form the anarchist punk band Crass in 1977.
When Crass disbanded in 1984, Rimbaud adopted a hermit-like existence, writing and publishing poetry, philosophy, essays, novels and plays. In 2001, he returned to the public platform as a performance poet, first working with saxophonist Ed Jones and then with Louise Elliott, who has become his full-time accompanist. With Crass vocalist Eve Libertine, in 2003 he founded the Crass Collective, later known as the Crass Agenda and finally the Last Amendment, a loose collective of jazz musicians, artists and filmmakers who share Rimbaud's interest in progressive, improvisational art.

### Written works

Rimbaud's written works include the originally self-published Reality Asylum, a vitriolic attack on Christianity that appeared in heavily revised form on Crass' 1978 debut album The Feeding of the 5000, as a longer single and as a 45-minute spoken-word monologue. Other writings include: Rocky Eyed, an extended poem attacking 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"); and The Diamond Signature (published by AK Press). Oh America is a response to the September 11, 2001 attacks and the United States' subsequent war on terror. It 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."

## Current work

Rimbaud contributed several spoken-word tracks to the 2008 Japanther album Tut Tut Now Shake Ya Butt and spoken-word vocals for the Charlatans track "I Sing the Body Eclectic" on the album Who We Touch.