Music Arcades: Penny Rimbaud: Acts of Love

This is one of those records I would never have come across had it not been for the idiosyncratic stock management of someone exercising a little discretion in a chain record shop. You wouldn't find something like this in WH Smith, but you might in Our Price or HMV. And that was the best you can hope for where I lived in 1986: independent record shops had already given up on Woking (population circa 90,000) by then — not that any had ever taken root, unless you count the side-shop of hi-fi specialist Aerco — so don't let anyone kid you that the demise of the indie store is a recent, Internet-driven phenomenon. And if you were a freaky music geek, in Woking, where else to get a job but Our Price? So, thank you to whoever it was behind the till there who put in an order for Acts of Love, which I've never seen or even heard of anywhere else, before or since.

Apart from on the web, just now, of course. It's only just now that I've discovered the album is attributed to Penny Rimbaud, member of Crass, rather than Crass themselves. There's no artist credited on the cover, and it's on Crass Records, so I always assumed it was a Crass record (albeit not performed by the full band, obviously). Hell, it was only last year, when someone shared a Youtube interview with him, that I found out Penny was a fella. Oh, I got mocked on Twitter for admitting that (by some quite unlikely people). Pretty poor education in Woking.

I know it was 1986 when I got this because I included a handful of tracks from Acts of Love on the mix-tape I did for Jeremy that summer (mentioned here). Apart from the fact that the album was a recent acquisition, its tracks were short, which fitted what I was aiming for with that tape, which probably included excerpts from at least 40 sources in its 90 minutes. Some were as short as the "Hi there" at the start of Peter Gabriel's Big Time — edits that took ages to get right in the days of analogue cassette recording. But Acts of Love, with its 50 tracks in under 40 minutes, has whole pieces that are just 15 seconds long, so I could slot them into any 'slack' space on the tape.

To be fair, Acts of Love doesn't sound much like a Crass record. To situate it in relation to its contemporaries, its combination of keyboards, percussion and female vocal is kind of like the missing link between Dagmar Krause and Virginia Astley. Just once or twice it comes perilously close to Hazel O'Connor territory.

For some reason the thing that has stayed with me about this album more than the music is the little epigram on the inner sleeve: "Let me say, at the risk of seeming ridiculous, that the true revolutionary is guided by great feelings of love" (Che Guevara).