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GONZO MAGAZINE: Jon talks to Miss Crystal Grenade
Carol Hodge was last seen in November 2011 on stage at the Shepherd’s Bush Empire. She was holding the hand of the one-time Crass vocalist Steve Ignorant as they clos...
GONZO WEEKLY #47: Jon meets Steve Ignorant
As regular readers will know Gonzo are very proud to be bringing out a record (imminently) by GONZO WEEKLY #57: Jon meets Miss Crystal Grenade
Last week I wrote:
I am very pleased to say that according to everyone I have spoken to, the launch party for Carol Hodge aka Miss Crystal Grenade's debut album went s...
GONZO WEEKLY #58: Crystal Grenade guides us through her debut al
Erich Kästner prefaced one of his acclaimed children's novels twice: there was the 'Preface for Beginners' (ir those who had not read his previous novel featuring the same characters) and the ...
GONZO WEEKLY #158: Jon meets Carol
Some years ago, due to public demand, and – one suspects – because he wanted to lay some demons of his own – Steve Ignorant went on a world tour called The Last Supper. It was bil...
GONZO WEEKLY #241: Carol Hodge interview
Carol Hodge is a remarkable young lady and possessed of a remarkable talent. I first heard about her when she joined ex-Crass vocalist Steve Ignorant about halfway through his ‘Last Supper&rs...
Latest news
Carol Hodge talks about the excitement of playing Glastonbury with Steve Ignorant’s Slice of Life, we meet a bloke who wants to make a giant bronze statue of Great Cthulhu in the Orkneys, Phil Bayliss’ reggae themed Listening Post, the details of Hawkwind’s legal victory and the Doctors of Madness box set. Good ‘ere innit? Read More
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Crystal Grenade Biography
Carol Hodge was last seen in November 2011 on stage at the Shepherd’s Bush Empire. She was holding the hand of the one-time Crass vocalist Steve Ignorant as they closed both Ignorant’s world tour and his career of singing songs by the one-time Kings and Queens of anarchopunk, with a massively emotional version of Bloody Revolutions. Even watching it on YouTube brings tears to my eyes so I can only imagine what it would have been like being in the audience or even more on stage. Carol joined Ignorant’s world tour half-way through after the previous female vocalist had dropped out for family reasons. And she had some pretty big shoes to fill (I suppose if I was clever enough I should make some sort of reference here to Crass’s notorious song about Chinese footbinding but I can’t think of one). And she filled them righteously. After all, having to perform songs made famous by the doyenne of anarchapunk, Eve Libertine, cannot have been an easy task. One of my favourite moments from the tour was also from the last show, when Eve joined Carol on stage for a particularly blistering version of Shaved Women.
But what happened next?
Carol has adopted the personality of Miss Crystal Grenade, an existentialist Victorian artist, singer and freak show performer with a peculiarly deformed hand. Accompanying herself on piano, and with some songs featuring multi-tracked vocals (presumably by her), this music fills the same sort of cultural territory as did the recent BBC detective series Ripper Street; a gloriously aesthetic re-creation of the latter days of Victorian London. In Miss Crystal Grenade this slice of ur-historical synthesis now has the perfect soundtrack.
