On doing what it is you need to do

How would each of you describe the creative work that you do?

Erin: I like documentaries. I like real people’s stories. I like getting to showcase stories of resistance, living well, and not having to participate so much in the structured plans people have in a capitalist life of checking boxes, doing things, and dying alone and unsatisfied. There are so many other ways to live. I think examples and stories of art and politics that make people have richer lives is probably the best umbrella for my creative work. I like audio podcasts the best, but whatever format that story needs to take, it should take.

With this Poison Girls book, there are so many visual components. They left so many flyers, works of art, and books that, in audio, you would never see. And because it’s pretty static, like flyers and zines, it doesn’t work great for video. The videos of them playing, and interviews—because of the time and technology, I’m sure there’s much more out there that hasn’t been digitized. A Poison Girls documentary video or film would be incredible, but that, I feel like, is beyond the capacity of available materials at this time.

Rich: My interest for decades now has been the counterculture movements of, principally, the U.K. and Europe. I researched different aspects of dissident movements, but the one that’s always had a special place in my heart is the British counterculture of the late ’70s and early ’80s, as expressed through DIY, independent, and autonomous printing. I lived through that experience. I wrote for zines and magazines and documented it while I was doing it. I went on to do more things in a journalistic, photo reportage kind of way. This was all in an analog era when you could go to a demonstration and you’d be the person with a camera, because nobody else would’ve brought one because they were big, cumbersome things and you had to get film developed.

I started to get more interested in the history of those movements. Having lived through it, you become more reflective in your 30s and 40s. I started to get into some detailed documentary histories of those movements. I’d written quite a lot about DIY punk and dissident punk, and groups of people who were interested in writing the history of punk began to come together. Punk historiography became a thing.

Was infusing your creative work with your politics a conscious decision or something that naturally came to you as you developed your artistic practice?

Erin: I came to my creative process through punk. There are punk scenes that are not political, but mine [West Coast California punk] was very political. Part of that politics and anarchist thing is teaching people what you know and learning from the mutual aid of education, so my creativity and politics really did come in hand-in-hand.

My family was politically oriented. It was just part of the conversation. Then, finding punk rock, living your life as political was in the music and culture, so it just seemed natural. As I got more skilled in different things, most of my audio skills came from working at a community radio station where I was both a music DJ and a news editor reporter. Some people have to choose at a certain point, and I never had to choose.

Rich: I just started by doing. When I was a young punk, whether it was writing music, words, a leaflet, or a press release, I was completely untrained and learned by the practice of doing what it is that you need to do.

The joyful thing about being young is, you’re kind of fearless. You think, “How hard can it be? I’ll just do the thing that needs to be done. I need to organize the demo, get Crass to come and play my town and have an audience of hundreds of people when I’ve never done it before.” It was very much the confidence and optimism of youth, tied in with that belief in DIY culture. In those early formative years, we didn’t look to other people to do stuff for us.

That was a powerful motivator. It was literally getting on with it through which you would learn how to do a thing. “How do you print a zine? I don’t know. Let’s learn. How do you lay one out?” We did amazing things. We realized we wanted to do, in an analog year, five zines that folded and had a staple down the middle. “How do we do that in an analog age?” Well, you have to buy a really long typewriter with a huge carriage, and then, you have to put your stencil in sideways and work out the pages. You’re going to do all that practical, hands-on stuff. We literally learned how to do it, and it was motivated by a belief in DIY politics.

We were passionate, wildly optimistic, and fearless. That’s a good combination to learn stuff. You make terrible mistakes along the way, and when you look back at some of your early creativity, you go bright red with embarrassment at the quality of the work you produced. It’s part of the process. Directly inspired by our politics and worldview, I think that was the source of our creativity. It was that way around, and it was very like, “There needs to be a demonstration about this. Okay, we better organize it.” That’s a very powerful motivator rather than, “What time do you want me to turn up when you’ve organized everything?”

How did you first encounter Poison Girls and their music and their story? How did you two realize you should be telling this story?

Rich: When I was 16 or 17 and deeply into new punk music, we often had to order stuff by mail that we heard about through the music press and fanzines. I bought [Poison Girls’] first release, “Piano Lessons,” which was really intriguing and different, and not your run-of-the-mill punk thrash. They released the album, the 12-inch Hex—just completely fascinating and slightly unnerving for a young boy to sit and listen to. They began to release other material, and I met them for the first time in 1981 when they came to play in Exeter.

I and a couple of my friends went along to interview them. We were these scrappy, 16, 15, probably 14-year-olds. The first thing they said to me is, “Can your band play tonight?” To my horror, our guitarist was out of town, so the answer was no. I could have supported Poison Girls! That would’ve been one for the ages, but it didn’t happen.

They set aside about an hour of their time to be interviewed by three kids, and they talked about feminism, anarchism, anti-nuclear marches, self-belief, and the myth that rebellion and youth are somehow correlated in the way that, as you get older, you have to stop rebelling. It was the most extraordinary conversation I’d ever had with an adult. That’s not me historicizing that event. We felt, all three of us, that we were having an extraordinary conversation with a group of astute political and creative talents who were completely prepared to sit down and talk to us as people worth talking to.

That was my point of entry with them. They were, of course, amazing on stage that night.

Erin: I learned about punk mostly through music and the radio. There was a lot of community radio and college radio, and you could get college stations from the Bay Area where I was located occasionally. That’s where I first heard Poison Girls.

My friends and I would tape radio shows so [we] didn’t have to write down each artist and song. I remember “No More Lies,” the Poison Girls song, being on one of the tapes, and we were like, “This is so different than everything else. This is incredible.” Hearing that and then realizing, “Wait, this is the same band that did ‘Crisis,’” which was some DJ’s favorite song to play…we knew that one really well.

I knew about them in the way where you kind of half-know about stuff where you’re like, “Which record came first, this doesn’t make sense.” And then, Statement came out, and I was 18 or 19, and it was like, “Here’s the first context I actually have for this band.” By then, I was a DJ, so I played it all the time. As the internet progressed, more books came out, and punk academia started and more information was coming out. I would keep finding things out slowly.

How did you two and the designer Alec Dunn realize you were the perfect collaborators for this project?

Rich: In 2014, I wrote a piece for an academic journal, a reflection of the new punk historiography, called “Punk and Post-Punk.” It was a treatment of the history of Poison Girls. At that time, [Poison Girls frontperson and guitarist] Vi Subversa and Lance d’Boyle [Poison Girls’ drummer, and Subversa’s husband] were still alive, and I shared it with them as well as Richard Famous [a guitarist and vocalist in Poison Girls]. They were really encouraging and very supportive of it, and were quite keen to see me develop that further.

I knew Ramsey [Kanaan] from PM Press, and he approached Erin and Alec to start with and said, “We need a book on Poison Girls. You need to talk to Rich Cross. Involve him somehow, because he’s done some good stuff in this area.” Erin and Alec got in touch with me and said, “Can we meet to discuss Poison Girls?” I’m not quite sure what the sequence of questions and answers was, but eventually I said, “Shall I write it?” There wasn’t any dissent on that suggestion.

Erin: Alec and I were part of a team who did a podcast called It Did Happen Here, and it starts with the murder of an Ethiopian immigrant, Mulugeta Seraw, who was murdered in Portland by neo-Nazi skinheads in 1988. The community organizing that happened in the wake of that murder really was galvanizing. When I personally was like, “There were skinheads on the streets of all the major cities, and then they weren’t there,” it was like, “We won this organizing that we did, this is fantastic,” and then learning later on that they just pivoted. “Less booted, more suited” is what we ended up calling it with the upswing of the Trump era and people being able to be more visible and going back to, it was just hidden as opposed to solved.

We told that story. Alec is an old friend and helped me. When I was doing the podcast, I was like, “Can you listen to this?” And then, he just got more and more sucked in. By the end of the podcast run, there was a team of six of us, and then PM Press approached us and was like, “Would you like to do a book of this podcast?” Because of Alec–he’s a great designer, there [were] enough visuals—we were like, “Okay, we’ll do it.”

When that was happening, Ramsey was like, “Would you want to do a book about the Poison Girls?” I was like, “Yes, and also, no way. That’s so over my head.” I talked to Alec and was like, “I’ll say yes if you say yes.” Then, we were like, “How do we do this?” We knew about Rich because of his writing for Poison Girls, and I had done an interview with them by email for some reissues that had come out, and I had written some obituaries, but you could tell Rich was the [ideal] writer. Alec and I were like, “If this guy can write it who was there, who has written all this other stuff, this is great.” We just started talking on Zoom and got along, and I think it was a very smooth process, for being basically strangers when we started.

I’d love to hear more about not just getting connected in the first place, but figuring out that you were going to be great collaborators.

Erin: We’re all passionate about it, so we just jumped in. We’re all really good at what we do at this point in our lives. It was pretty clear. I don’t know, it just kind of happened. You just sort of take the chance and it works out.

Rich: I think we very quickly established that it was lovely and easy to work across the Atlantic online. We did have a couple of days together, me and Alec—he came over to digitize some of the Poison Girls’ family members’ personal archives. We had them in digital format so that they didn’t have to ship these irreplaceable artifacts by mail.

What’s helped hugely is that, from really early on, we were sharing drafts of things that I had written for comment and… Normally, in a book, you write the thing, and then you give it to the designer, and the design work begins. But because this was a full-color, large-format book and we knew that the visuals would be so important to the success of it, early on, Alec was sharing his designs, and we were immediately in collaboration. It wasn’t like Erin or Alec were waiting for me.

From the very beginning, we were seeing what the book might look like: “Let’s just throw my draft into Alec’s design and see how that feels, and then let’s share that with PM Press and get their insight.” What was nice about that relationship with PM Press is, they said, “You’ve got to land at 60,000 words.” We would find more material and interesting things to include, like extracts from Richard Famous’ gig diaries. I wanted to include some really detailed band lineup information. We wanted to do spotlight interviews with more people, and because we had this thing growing organically as we were working on it, PM Press was able to say, “We like this a lot. We’ll give you the go ahead to add more.”

We’ve landed much nearer 100,000 words than 60,000 words, because that collaborative process all the way through has been really different to anything I’ve worked on before, which is completely sequential—you write, you edit, then you hand it to the designer. I mean, we had the first designs in the first couple of weeks. Alec was just playing around with page layouts and we were just pouring words in. That made the process really exciting, and you also get a glimpse of the end point really early on.

It wasn’t completely abstract. Within weeks of agreeing to do it, we were starting to see bits of the book, and that really helped. I’d want to do that again in the future, to see the book as I’m writing the book. It’s a fantastic catalyst for the author.

Erin: When we were testing it out, we were like, “Is this going to work or not?” We were like, “Let’s pick a record or a timeframe. Let’s pick Chappaquiddick Bridge [Poison Girls’ debut album] because here’s this pivotal moment in their history, and it’s not as well known as the earlier stuff.”

The way that Rich approached the writing and graphics, you really don’t have to know anything about the time or place that [Poison Girls] were in before you get this book, because it’s all in there. Not just the story of the band and the graphics and art processes that they were doing, but the political realms they were into.

Rich: We were very quickly on the same page that you couldn’t just say, “This single, this album, this tour, this single, this album, the end.” That wasn’t a very interesting history. It doesn’t tell you anything. What we really wanted to do was to put that into that context, and I had no pushback from my collaborators.

It was clear that we did want to explain one of their most celebrated songs, “Persons Unknown.” It had a political context rooted in U.K. radical politics of the time, and they [did] something different with it. But you need to understand the trial “Persons Unknown” in the U.K. and why it was such a significant pivotal moment for libertarian anarchist politics, and show how connected they were to it.

We never wanted to just tell the song of the single. That’s useful as far as it goes, but you want to root it and explain it contextually, either because you were there and you want a refresher on it, or you weren’t there because you weren’t born. Hopefully, it’s of interest to see, “I’ve got new context for this. I can appreciate this in a better way because, now, I understand the context in which they were writing it.”