Various - Bullshit Detector (LP) - 45RPM

Bullshit Detector landed in 1980 on Crass Records, and it still feels like a flare fired into a grey British sky. Crass had been preaching DIY from Dial House in Essex, but this was the proof. They put out a call for tapes, sifted through piles of home recordings, and sequenced a compilation that sounded like a country full of bedrooms and back rooms waking up at once. As a listening experience it’s messy, crackly and impossibly alive. You can hear chair legs scraping the floor, mics overloading, cassette hiss snaking through the riffs. Then a chorus barges in with real bite and you remember why people fell for anarcho punk in the first place.

John Loder at Southern Studios helped Crass get this unruly mass onto wax, and you can feel the collective hand in the way the sides move. There are jagged blasts that are over before you register the band name, then slower, spoken pieces that read like agit pamphlets set to a metronome. The shift keeps you alert. There’s no gloss to hide behind, so the songs sit there with their nerves showing. A bass drops out mid verse then returns slightly out of tune. A snare rattles like cutlery in a drawer. But the urgency holds it together. Half the charm is hearing people figure out how to make a record while making one.

It’s also a map of a moment. Dozens of unknown groups get their shot, often with contact addresses printed so you could write to them. That small detail turned the album into more than a sampler. It became a directory for a scene that stretched from squats and youth clubs to zine editors and community print shops. The compilation kicked off a series that would run to three volumes by 1984, and the later instalments even caught early flashes from bands who’d go on to wider fame, which tells you how tuned in the project was to the grassroots. Here on the first volume, the politics aren’t an add-on. They’re baked into the rhythms and the room tone, right down to the way voices crowd the mic to make the point land.

The cover art sticks with the stark black and white aesthetic associated with Crass, all photocopied grit and hard edges, which makes sense for a record that treats presentation as part of the message. The label’s low price ethos also mattered. Crass wanted the thing to circulate, not sit behind a velvet rope, and that intent rings through the grooves. It’s punk as process, not product, though the product is oddly beautiful. Play it loud and it hangs together like a collage. Snatches of melody leap out, slogans turn to hooks, and you start flipping the sleeve to find the band again. You won’t always succeed. Some groups never made another record. That fleeting quality makes Bullshit Detector vinyl oddly collectible, because you can’t pad it out with discographies and deluxe reissues. For some names, this is it.

If you’re chasing Crass vinyl, this one deserves a spot alongside the canonical albums. It isn’t a tidy listen, but it does something those studio LPs can’t quite do. It widens the frame and puts the listener in the workshop. You can hear the inventiveness born of cheap gear and limited time, the way people twist a broken amp into a new texture or turn a chant into percussion when the drum kit gives up. It’s the difference between reading a manifesto and walking into a meeting.

Copies surface now and then in local bins, and it’s the kind of comp you might stumble on in a Melbourne record store wedged between fanzine-era odds and ends. If you’re nowhere near a shop, you can always buy Crass records online, though part of the fun is following the messy paper trail and letting the record guide you to related singles and tapes. Fans who collect Crass albums on vinyl will already know the feeling. One track sends you searching for an address inside the insert, which sends you to another long out of print 7 inch. Next thing you know, you’re down a rabbit hole that connects scenes across towns and decades. It’s a good rabbit hole to be in, especially if you care about how music communities actually work.

For those building shelves in vinyl records Australia circles, Bullshit Detector is more than a curiosity. It’s a time capsule and a working blueprint. Put it on and you don’t just hear songs. You hear the confidence that grows when a label opens its doors and says, show us what you’ve got. Forty plus years later, that invitation still feels radical, and the record still answers it.