Description

Eve Libertine – Sea

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Eve Libertine is best known for her role as co-lead vocalist in Crass – the seminal anarchist punk band who, in the late ’70s, launched a cultural attack on all social fronts; God, Queen and Country. Libertine wrote and performed most of the songs on the group’s third album, Penis Envy, which concentrated exclusively on feminist issues and featured only female voices.

After Crass disbanded in 1984, Libertine trained briefly as a classical singer and then went on to release her first post-Crass album, Skating The Side Of Violence. She toured extensively in the West Coast of the US, supporting folk-hustlers Chumbawamba.

Sea was recorded by the BBC at London’s Vortex in 2003 as part of the London Jazz Festival. “During the performance, there were moments when I felt I was on the sea within the improvisation, at other moments it was as if Kerouac was there beside me”, said Libertine. The poem Sea is taken from Big Sur, a biographical novel Kerouac wrote when he was suffering extreme depression following the publication of On the Road, his subsequent exposure to the media and his new-found fame.

Libertine’s collaborative poetry and jazz projects were borne out of a concert at Queen Elizabeth Hall, organised in opposition to the Iraq War. The concert was curated by Libertine and Crass drummer and lyricist Rimbaud and led them to found The Crass Collective. The Collective expanded to include the jazz musicians that Rimbaud and Libertine had come to know through the Vortex Jazz Club and buoyed Libertine on to create further collaborative works of this nature.