page_title: Penny Rimbaud
section_title: Artistic life
hierarchical_section_title: Penny Rimbaud / Artistic life
caption_attribution_description: English: Penny rimbaud &amp; gee Vaucher photographed by Graham Burnett (Quercus Robur) 2002
context_page_description: Jeremy John Ratter, better known as Penny "Lapsang" Rimbaud, 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, alongside Steve Ignorant, he co-founded and played drums in the seminal anarchist punk band Crass, who disbanded in 1984. Up until 2000 he devoted himself almost entirely to writing, returning to the public platform in 2001 as a performance poet working alongside Australian saxophonist Louise Elliott and a wide variety of jazz musicians under the umbrella of Penny Rimbaud's Last Amendment.
context_section_description: Rimbaud 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. Whilst there, he was quick to realise the potential within the then fledgling pop art movement, scoring considerable success as an innovator. His works were included in the Northern Young Contemporaries, and on the back of this he was offered the possibility of working at Andy Warhol's The Factory. He refused on the grounds that he "had better things to do", something which he claims never to have regretted.
  In 1964, Rimbaud appeared on ITV Granada's Ready Steady Go! to receive a prize from John Lennon, after winning a competition to produce a piece of artwork depicting The Beatles' song "I Wanna 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 Vaucher set up the anarchist/pacifist open house Dial House in Essex, UK, which has now become firmly established as a 'centre for radical creativity'. The household is vegetarian and both he and Vaucher remain so today. It was from there during the early seventies that Rimbaud co-founded the Stonehenge Festival alongside Phil Russell, better known as Wally Hope, as documented in his autobiography of 1998, Shibboleth – my revolting life.
caption: Penny Rimbaud (on the composting toilet) and Gee Vaucher, 2002
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