# Conflict: south London anarcho-punk and the long argument > Conflict came out of early-80s Eltham with a harder, angrier take on anarcho-punk. A look at their records, animal-rights politics and why they still matter. - Source: https://menvafan.net/Musik/conflict-anarcho-punk/ - Section: Music - Language: en - Published: 2026-10-17 - Updated: 2026-10-17 **In short:** Conflict are a punk band formed in Eltham, south London, in 1981, known for their confrontational politics, animal rights advocacy, and distinctive long-form songs. Their first two albums, It's Time to See Who's Who (1983) and Increase the Pressure (1984), released on Corpus Christi Records and Mortarhate Records respectively, are the core of their discography and remain influential in the UK anarcho-punk scene. Conflict are one of those bands whose reputation arrives before the music does. If you came up through the UK punk underground, you've heard the stories about the benefit gigs that turned into fights, the politics that made the Animal Liberation Front sound like a reasonable conversation topic, and the voice of Colin Jerwood sounding like a man who has been shouting at a brick wall for forty years and has no intention of stopping. But strip away the mythology and there's a body of work here that deserves a proper listen, not just a nod of recognition from the crustier end of your record shelf. ## Eltham, not the West End Conflict formed in Eltham, in south-east London, in the early 1980s. That detail matters. This wasn't a bunch of art-school kids in a squat in the centre of town; it was suburban fringe, the kind of place where the bus takes an hour and the nearest decent venue is a train ride away. The early UK anarcho scene was built by people in exactly those places, and Conflict's geography fed into the sound: fast, blunt, without much patience for the more poetic end of the genre. The band's first release, the 1982 EP "The House That Man Built", came out on Crass Records, which is the obvious connection to make and the one that gets repeated in every short biography. Crass had built a functioning infrastructure — a label, a distribution network, a set of assumptions about how punk should conduct itself — and Conflict were one of the bands that passed through it. Their first album, *It's Time to See Who's Who*, appeared in 1983 on Corpus Christi Records. It's a record that wears its politics on the sleeve and its tempo in the red, and it established the template: long songs that break down into spoken sections, group vocals, and a refusal to be charming. It's worth being careful about the Crass comparison. Conflict weren't Crass with the art school removed; they were a different proposition. Crass worked in collage, tape loops and conceptual framing. Conflict worked in direct address, and where Crass could be oblique, Conflict were confrontational in a way that made some of their peers uncomfortable. That discomfort was, broadly speaking, the point. ## The records that hold up *Increase the Pressure* followed in 1984, on Mortarhate Records, and it's the one most people point to when they're arguing that Conflict were more than a live phenomenon. It's still abrasive, still built on those long, shifting structures, but the playing is tighter and the arrangements are more deliberate. If you only own one Conflict record, this is the one to start with. Both are worth checking on [Discogs](https://www.discogs.com/artist/25562-Conflict-2) if you're chasing original pressings, and the Crass Records catalogue more generally is well documented on [Wikipedia](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crass_Records). After that the band's discography gets complicated, as these things do: line-up changes, label moves, releases that appeared in different forms in different territories, and a long-running association with the Mortarhate label. I'm not going to pretend to have a definitive map of every pressing and every reissue, because the details shift and I'd rather say so than invent a discography. The core records are the ones above, and the live material from the mid-80s is where the band's reputation really lives. ## Animal rights as the through-line Plenty of punk bands of that era were vegetarian, or said they were. Conflict were among the most committed on animal rights, and it wasn't a sideline or a lyric here and there. It ran through the band's identity: benefit gigs, support for hunt saboteurs and animal liberation campaigns, and a refusal to separate the treatment of animals from the wider argument about power and violence. That position put them at odds with parts of the left as well as with the state, and the band never seemed especially bothered by that. It's easy, from here, to reduce all of this to a caricature of earnest crusties. But the animal-rights current in 1980s UK punk was part of a broader argument about who gets to be protected and who doesn't, and Conflict were among the loudest voices pushing it into the scene's mainstream. You don't have to agree with every position to recognise that the argument got made, repeatedly, in public, at volume. ## The confrontations The other thing everyone knows about Conflict is the friction: with venues, with other bands, with audiences, occasionally with each other. Some of that is documented, some of it is scene folklore that has grown in the retelling, and some of it is the ordinary consequence of a band that treated a gig as a political event rather than a night out. I'd be wary of repeating specific anecdotes as fact — the punk oral tradition is not a reliable archive. What's fair to say is that Conflict's approach to performance was confrontational by design, and that this made them divisive in a way that a more polite band wouldn't have been. The same qualities that made them thrilling live made them difficult to be around. Both things are true. ## Why they still matter A few reasons, roughly in order of how much they matter to me: - **They took the politics seriously.** Not as branding, not as a T-shirt slogan, but as something that shaped where they played, who they played with and what they said between songs. That's rarer than the scene likes to admit. - **The records still sound like nothing else.** The long-form structures, the spoken passages, the sheer refusal to be concise — it's an awkward, distinctive approach that hasn't dated into nostalgia. - **They're a useful corrective to the Crass-centric version of anarcho-punk.** The story of the genre is usually told through a handful of bands and a handful of London postcodes. Conflict came from Eltham, and they were just as much a part of it. - **The animal-rights argument aged better than most of the scene's other arguments.** Whatever you make of the tactics, the underlying question hasn't gone away. If you're new to the band, start with *Increase the Pressure* and work backwards. If you're already converted, the live recordings are where the band's reputation makes sense. Either way, they're worth more than the shorthand they usually get. For anyone wanting to dig further, the Crass Records history is worth reading alongside the band's own releases, and second-hand copies of the early albums turn up regularly on [Discogs](https://www.discogs.com/artist/25562-Conflict-2). Bring patience. The songs are long. ## FAQ ### Where did Conflict form? Conflict formed in Eltham, in south-east London, in the early 1980s. ### What was Conflict's first album? Their first album was It's Time to See Who's Who, released in 1983 on Corpus Christi Records. ### Which Conflict album should I start with? Increase the Pressure (1984) is the one most people recommend as a starting point. ### What label released Conflict's early records? Their early releases came out on Crass Records and Corpus Christi Records, before the band set up Mortarhate Records.