This is the story of how the punk band I was in when I was 16 and 17 managed to get a track on the first punk compilation on the Crass label. When I was 16, some mates and me formed a punk band. Initially, there was two rhythm guitarists. And I was one of them. And none of us could play apart from the lead guitarist could play a little bit, but we were all just learning. But that was the ethos at the time to have a girl.

Our then lead singer, wrote all the lyrics for the songs. And in our first six months we didn't do any gigs. We did hire a four track studio to record I think it was probably four of our songs

Most of us got into a band called Crass, an anarco punk band called Crass and we sent off that tape to Crass who had their own record label in the hope that they'd like it, or perhaps they might release it. That didn't happen. But it did open communication with Crass and we organized for Crass to come and play in Maryport in West Cumbria with us supporting. As we went through that process, as we got more and more into Crass and the politics around Crass, different members of the band, including myself, started to write more of the songs. And we got quite tired of the lead singer and his approach to everything; his approach to life. And he wasn't really interested in the same sort of stuff that we were - songs more filled with bitterness and anger at life, which is a little bit how he was really.

And so we decided we'd had enough of him and the rest of the lads asked me to be the lead singer, which made sense on the level that I was one of the members who wasn't very good musically. But also, we probably had one too many guitarists - there wasn't any great need for two rhythm guitarists. Some might say there wasn't any great need for any rhythm guitarist in most of the songs we came up with.

So anyway, we managed to get Crass to come and play in Maryport. And on back of that, they contacted us to say, actually, we're producing a compilation album that includes a lot of the bands we've played with, and we'd like to put one of your tracks from that tape…

But by this time, we become quite different people, quite different politically, quite different musically. And we're a very different band, not least because we're a different group of people. We got rid of the lead singer as I said. So we quite arrogantly decided that we didn't want one of our tracks from the band that we were to go on the compilation album.

So what we did was we set up in my parents attic and we played live into a tiny tape recorder which was probably about eight inches by eight inches square. And we played live into a tiny tape recorder. Thought that will do the trick and actually sent that off to Crass and said again, quite arrogantly: “No, we don't want you to put out that previous one we sent you a year ago because that's not who we are any more, we wanted to put this out”.

And to be honest, to our surprise they did. But thinking about it, we didn't really contemplate letting them publish a track that was a representation of almost a previous band - we wanted what we saw as our sort of rabble rousing political end of the set that usually got everyone going when we played. So we did that and Crass agreed and put it on, and then sent us lots of free copies of the first “Bullshit Detector” compilation.

(It's probably worth pointing out that the on the actual recording Crass simply put what we'd recorded onto the tiny record tape recorder onto the record. So you can actually hear the button record button being pressed down, which makes it sound really dry, which is why it was but we also were really pleased that our guitarist managed to get a sort of a great sound out of his guitar right at the end, which just was the first time that had happened but it really came off so we were really pleased with the the end product.)