‘Things haven’t changed,” sighs Eve Libertine as she contemplates her new album. “All those songs are as relevant as they ever were.” The album in question, Live at the Horse Hospital, shows no sign that one of punk’s most anti-establishment figures is mellowing with age. Recorded at one blistering London live show in April 2024, Libertine collaborated with Chilean guitarist Eva Leblanc, reimagining tracks from Libertine’s back catalogue including ones from her time singing with 1970s anarcho-punk pioneers Crass. Produced by Crass founder Penny Rimbaud, it treads a path between performance art, experimental music and earth ritual; with her strident operatic tones, Libertine sounds like a soothsayer foretelling an apocalypse. It’s not an easy listen, but that was never the case with Crass, either.

“We never had much fun, to be honest,” Libertine says. “It was really heavy going at times. We were angry; we were trying to say things in a way that was confrontational and shocking to get a reaction. And we definitely did.”

Speaking on a video call from her living room, Libertine is good humoured, offering up stern opinions then laughing as she says them, like a chuckling assassin. She describes how Rimbaud’s lyrics to the track Rocky Eyes came from the band’s anti-nuclear activism leading her to see wastelands everywhere: “Looking at a tree and seeing it as …” She pauses on each word for emphasis: “A. Dead. Burned. Stump.” Then another sudden laugh.

Confrontational … Libertine performing with Crass. Photograph: Courtesy: Eve Libertine

That sense of provocation and absurdity defined Crass, formed as a shouty agit-punk band in the 70s in the Dial House farm commune in Essex. The nucleus was Rimbaud on drums and Steve Ignorant on vocals, with further members added from the commune. Eve herself started out as a fan at their gigs, “which used to empty out. There was one where I was the only person left in the audience, pogoing alone in front of the stage.” By the late 70s she had moved into the commune and taken up a place in the band, adding a scorching vocal cadence that, along with the increasingly varied musical tastes of the other members, pulled them into more avant garde territory, as likely to release seething, abstract sonic collages as they were 1-2-3-4 punk thrashers.

Crass were also politically radical, and several cases were brought against them in the 70s and 80s, first for blasphemy for the 1978 track Reality Asylum, with Scotland Yard’s vice squad raiding Dial House, before dropping the case. Later, their 1983 Falklands protest How Does It Feel (To Be the Mother of 1,000 Dead) prompted Tory MP Timothy Eggar to try (and eventually fail) to prosecute them under the obscene publications act.

However, a 1981 charge of obscenity brought by Manchester police stuck to Bata Motel, one of the songs Libertine has decided to revisit on Live at the Horse Hospital. The charge was initially made against the album Penis Envy, copies of which were seized from Manchester record shops. A judge eventually upheld the charge against Bata Motel alone, deeming it “sexually provocative and obscene”.

“Much to Penny’s chagrin,” Eve laughs again. “He would have liked to be prosecuted, and in the end it was me who was.”

The track, a detailed depiction of living as a woman under the male gaze, was accused of being sadomasochistic pornography. Libertine didn’t bother attending the court hearing, but remembers what happened. “It was hilarious. The defence was using an album Peter Cook and Dudley Moore had got away with – it was about Jesus wanking or something – and played it in court. Of course, everyone was in hysterics. The judge said very sternly: ‘If anyone else laughs you’ll be in the cells!’ And so there was biting of lips and coughing fits.” She calls the episode “all a bit of a joke,” though the band ended up incurring heavy fines for the song.

Libertine herself argues that Bata Motel is “quite the opposite” of sadomasochistic, and that its lyrics have become, if anything, more resonant with a younger generation of women. “I study myself in your reflection, and put it to rights with savage correction,” Eve quotes. “When I see what women are doing to themselves with tucks and silicon, and injections, facelifts at a young age … sadly that line could have been written today.”

While she feels that the ills she has railed against since the 70s have remained – “warmongers, devastation, fucking the earth” – her proposed solutions have shifted somewhat and, surprisingly, she doesn’t call herself a feminist.

“Our ideologies can hold us back,” she says. “I don’t call myself anything with an -ist on the end, because it can be co-opted. A lot of these movements, people have isolated themselves and that’s very sad. We’re all very armoured. Don’t see the armour, see underneath: we’re human beings under everything. When I look at my own fears and pettiness, my ego, I just want to see it for what it is and, in doing that, hopefully somehow see beyond it.”

She thinks about what lies beyond that, and what still drives her art. “Anger. Anger, compassion, rage – and love.”