In many ways Crass are the quintessence of punk. You might call them punk in excelsis. No band walked it like they talked it with quite so much commitment to the cause of social change.
A collective of anarchists based in a 16th centuury communal house in Epping Forest, they bellowed about social change over instruments thrashed to within an inch of their lives.

This is nothing like that. Nothing like that at all.

Reality Asylum strips the message down to the bare bones – unfiltered, uncensored, unembellished, and definitely not for playing in front of small children or work colleagues. If you play this in public, use headphones.

Crass recorded Reality Asylum in 1978 as the opening track of their debut album, The Feeding Of The 5,000. As soon as staff at the pressing plant in Ireland heard it, they refused to go ahead with manufacturing the disc unless the track was removed from the album.

Crass obliged, persuading their label, Small Wonder Records, to replace it with two minutes of silence titled The Sound Of Free Speech. The perfect riposte.

They then made the missing track available on cassette (with a lyric sheet) if you wrote directly to the band at Dial House, their communal home, sending 45p – half the price of other singles.

Reality Asylum consists of a poem – or rant, or screed, or tirade – written by Penny Rimbaud, succinctly summarising his views on religion with mounting rage.

It’s delivered in the dulcet tones of Eve Libertine, her cut-glass delivery underpinned by the sound of happy children playing, church choirs singing and recordings of war, creating a musique concrete backdrop with occasional guitar and bass by N.A.Palmer and Pete Wright.

Crass later put out an extended version, including a recording of the police vice squad interviewing the band with a view to prosecuting them for blasphemy, and added the original version to the album when it was re-released on their own label in 1980 as The Feeding Of The 5,000 – The Second Sitting.

It still sounds shocking today.