Lost Ones Around King Mob

By way of an explanation...

Though written such a long time ago - or so it seems - parts of these leaflets and declamatory statements following this introduction still have a power to provocatively invigorate and open-up new directions of thought and action emanating from a subversive critique of culture. For our collective 'we' we saw them as the first tsunami against the old world which in our hearts we felt would be superceded fairly quickly by something more considered and more coherently worked out. It was only to be a matter of time and for the moment the sheer blast-off was sufficient! Alas so much for the genuine beatings of our hearts for sadly there's been nothing like them since. Little did we realise the critique of art would quickly meet a formidable impasse it's never remotely recovered from. By 1970 it was effectively dead in the water drowned under a vicious, though often subtle, counter-attack (e.g. feminism's acceptance of traditional artistic form etc) raising more general questions: Was ever the critique of religion met with such bewilderment and hostility? And why is it so much harder to leave the dog days of culture behind?

The following texts - some more than others - make an impassioned plea for life, seeing we exist; 'In this half-light some have called living' as death enters the living by the back door of the illusion of living - wanting more, much more, than this 'apology for life.' It could be said that the late 1960s was the last time people (or rather a large minority of people) the world over attempted to re-invent life and to do so passionately though were to catastrophically fail! Seeing today survival of the human race (plus an ever larger swathe of nature in general) is in dire jeopardy as ecocide looms, are such quality of life concerns beside the point? The two viewpoints are not however mutually exclusive. To assert our vibrant superiority - our need for a joyous life - over the dead time of commodity relations culminating in the abolition of the capitalist mode of production - providing it happens within the next 30 years or so - might just give us the space to turn the planet round from immolation.

It would be easy in these texts - though superficial - to dwell on their often disjointed frenzy or occasional jarring woodenness of misshapen language bordering at times on a certain illiteracy which at the time a fair number of protagonists couldn't care less about or wilfully cultivated perhaps somewhat on the lines of a typical Byron quip somewhere that he'd never have a relationship with a woman who could read and write implying that literacy itself was a form of oppression inhibiting spontaneity. The times moreover were too urgent for such niceties as 'literacy'. At the same time some of the texts are marred by simplistically seeing the path to the realisation of art through juvenile delinquency expressing itself in the growing myriad of youth sub-cultures that were then acquiring a profile. For that epoch when a certain pattern of tediously conforming quiet was the rule this was understandable and vandalism provided something of the shock value that had been lost to an endlessly repetitious modern art bringing forth not much more than yawns. Now we must be seriously aware of these limitations or rather nuanced to vandalisms' huge variations. We never sufficiently emphasised the need for a transformed hooliganism away from those manifestations which are so often the mirror image of the destructive urges capital utilises to re-invent accumulation and its power over us ' a tendency that has gotten far stronger as the decades have rolled by.

Having said this, surprisingly parts of these 'writings' are very well expressed though they hardly have the quality of say William Hazlitt's quarrelsomely beautifully crafted prose in the early decades of the 19th century even though in proclaiming, or rather continuing the dissolution of artistic form to the moment of complete and total fracture, there is a certain similarity. However the immediate impact of these writings wrought in the crucible of the late 1960s were to have far greater consequences than any Hazlitt in helping detonate a profound global uprising - and in some instances having a very stirring impact on particular localities.

One such place was Newcastle-upon-Tyne. It has been said or generally recognised in a superficial arbitrary way that the cultural experience of Liverpool from the Mersey poets through to the Beatles (and in the process dragging in tow many other artistic manifestations) were the liberatory essence of the 1960s in the UK. This though was merely the surface glitz modern capitalism requires for its reproduction. What happened in Newcastle was far more profound picking up on, elaborating, improving on and generally making relevant to modern conditions the almost forgotten or purposefully half-buried anti-art traditions emanating from the first decades of the 20th century as experienced in continental Europe though hardly in Britain. Over a few years from the mid 1960s onwards, these experiments were used and reassembled in an ever-greater subversive totality and pushed beyond their limits where they finally engaged with rebellious young workers in the north-east of England. This happened nowhere else in Britain.

In London sadly similar ideas met with impasse where no practical force was on hand to take them up. In Newcastle such subversion moving out from - and transcending - avante garde cultural experiment acquired such a threatening social potential for a brief period that the hands of the authorities from professors, to trade union bosses, to the police responded with outright repression. After that all knowledge of what took place was quickly and viciously surpressed and/or shrouded in outright calumny. It was a movement without name or figureheads. In a way the artistic ego was shunned if not quite overthrown - the process would have had to be successful for that to have happened - yet nonetheless filled with something like a growing but welcome anonymity as we began to eagerly enter through the doors of a profound unknown lying beyond the reaches of a cultural recuperation capitalism needs and thrives on. Something of this process is hinted at in some of these texts harking back to the old Dada and Russian Constructivist movements where now and again we suggested that their best moments are probably unknown emphasizing those who don't figure in the history books. In a way such comments were mirroring what was happening to us aware, as the late 1960s appeared and progressed, that we had to proclaim and live out our intentions in order to entirely disappear - into fulfillment! This critique was initiated by those who tended to be the most 'brilliantly' facile and adept at knocking out all the neo-Dadaist crap increasingly demanded by the age yet found it truly wanting. The formal evolution of this tendency also implied an encounter with the truth leading to the self-destruction and transcendence of art as what was left of art was nothing but an empty shell. And if you were honest such a momentous moment simply couldn't be ignored.

The hip art orientation in Newcastle from the early to mid 1960s stimulated an 'in-crowd' phenomena where the protagonist, the painter Richard Hamilton, himself well groomed in dadaist Marcel Duchamp's often cultivated enigmas, gave way to a life style consciousness - as Hamilton acknowledged somewhat later - much groomed in fashionable presentation. It was the first inkling of the wretched Cool Britannia image making that has since wearily repeated itself and was so much part of PM Tony Blair's early media effrontery. However, in its early phase it was playing with dynamite as such recognition in no matter how ill defined and fluffy way, did have dangerous consequences for the established order because lifestyle easily tipped into a desire for a new life. This is exactly what happened as the two tendencies diverged rapidly ending up at loggerheads with each other, one remaking the image of a revatilised commodity economy, the other towards critique, confrontation and total social revolution. And there were two different approaches. One closed, self-obsessed with pose, the other open, friendly, often homely, drunken and farting. This meant talking to people and shunning those who wished to be talked about. As this latter milieu widened its social base relentlessly going more and more down over, the element of play inherited from modern art acquired a different focus and arena. We suspect that most of the provocative leaflets produced and handed out by young Tyneside workers, redolent with this mood, have been lost forever. If not we would be delighted to receive any via the email for this website: [email protected] or, some personal account perhaps of what took place in the shipyards and elsewhere. This agitation by 1974 at the latest was all but over with, its memory viciously eliminated as the dross triumphed. Thus Brian Ferry, pop star performer and celebrator of the Hamilton lifestyle clique in his reminiscences has ruthlessly airbrushed out any mention of this subversive tendency precisely because he came under such attack. No wonder. Ferry's later traumatic spat with his fellow musician Brian Eno obviously reminded him too sharply about what happened in Newcastle. However it was a pale reflection of the truth as Eno, though much cleverer than the philistine Ferry, never attempted to breakthrough the paradigms of experimental music as part of a total revolutionary critique. He possibly sensed, like others of his ilk, that any role, career, or big moneymaking prospects wouldn't be on hand by taking such a road!

Two of Ron Hunt's texts published here are possibly the most succinct and intelligently written. The Arts in our Time was handed out in the bustling Newcastle Haymarket two months prior to the May 1968 uprising in France. Although well on the right lines in giving greater priority to culture in capital's arsenal of enslavement any such leaflet today couldn't merely repeat what was said then, splendid though it was for those times. Consider the opening lines:

'The Arts in our time are nothing other but a distraction - encouraged in order to prevent us understanding the shape of our reality and lives. They survive as part of the 'media' whose aim is to distract from some essential facts - e.g. the polarisation of annihilative power; the permanent arms economy: the fact that peace is synonymous with the brink of war; that half can treat as waste (planned obsolescence) what could be nourishment for the other - starving - half'.

To be sure good stuff still though today a revamp would be necessary emphasising certainly the distraction (more appropriately the lie) at the heart of cultural appearances through noting its vast extension since to the selling of everything from arms, to devastation, to poverty, the vending of all the food we eat, to every aspect of a commoditised daily life to virtually the air we breathe etc. However even at that time, A French situationist comment like: 'Culture, ugh! The one commodity which sells all the other' was more accurate and is still the crux of the matter.

Ron's following text published here: The Great Communications Breakdown is more complex though still very lucid and was handed for free as a small gestetnered pamphlet. (Remember this was in an age before photocopy or computer printouts). Obviously ranging much farther than a critique of art increasingly disapproving of those confining themselves to specialisms noting that: 'Lack of dialectic perpetuates the status quo' and the essential non-communication which marks our epoch. Only transgression can get anywhere whether in rebellion and/or the convulsive feel of love. Out of date? Hardly! Again, in the so-called 'information age' which we now forcibly have to inhabit, there is no information of consequence precisely because dialectics are banned substituted with the vagaries of quantum physics making do for totality. A couple of sentences in this text cryptically foretells the bleak future about to engulf us - that future of art's vacuity in an historical impasse unable to go back or forward (i.e. towards a rapidly unfolding total revolution).

'Unable to communicate the artist communicates with himself, whispers his defeat to his own ears. But he is still spectacularising something: earth, snow, a photograph, you name it he can remove it from its context, call it art, or whatever he wants. No one expects a stone to speak to us (or paint) - communication is denied. The media happily pushes this year's new thing - earth, lyric abstraction or whatever. It is neatly labelled, handily made compact for assimilation - this void. This is a new life style. Welcome to the void'.

Isn't this a summation of the moment when art leaves (kind of) the studio to become adjunct of a contemporary and empty consumer lifestyle which initially guided by the execrable yuppies everyone is increasingly more or less forced to aim for, submit to and declare (forcibly) they are happy with even when feeling near to complete desperation?

Along with a few other unknown contributions these are undoubtedly Ron Hunt's best bits of writing although his real contribution was his indefatigable courage at a moment leading up to potential insurrection. Nonetheless these efforts had untold consequences which are impossible to measure. Included in this compilation is Ron's introduction 'Transform the world! Poetry must be made by all' to an exhibition of early 20th century avant garde art hosted in 1969 by the Moderna Museet in Stockholm which in pr'cis is somehow acknowledged by Anselm Jappe in his book on Guy Debord published by MIT Press a few years ago. Here though was the crux of a dilemma! The real meat and their shadow in official presentation - self-recuperation as it were. Though watered down in relation to Ron Hunt's best efforts in comparison to the general dross of a void spewed out today from cultural venues virtually on every street corner, the introductory text to the exhibition is intelligence indeed.

Culture and Revolution was presented as a 'talk' though read out from a longish, typed-up, half finished text, which was quickly discarded and left to literally rot. Though in the Newcastle ambience it was delivered to an assembly of people loosely around John Lyle's surrealist group in Exeter together with local hippy dropouts and some dissident art students. John Lyle at the time had tried to breakthrough or breakaway from the overtly artistic orientation of British surrealism injecting some of the more revolutionary stances of French and Belgian surrealists. The 'talk' ' a not very subversive way of presenting such a theoretical drift from culture in the form of a one way monologue/diatribe - quickly turned into hours of discussion and prelude to an enjoyable scrumpy-driven party.

That it is a half-finished document clearly shows dealing with a far too great agenda in a short space of time. The tub-thumping tone meant nuancing was hardly on the agenda! And in retrospect, not withstanding the growing confrontational temper of the age, the gratuitous violence was probably rather pointless. Nonetheless among such a hotchpotch there are more than a few lines and semi-paragraphs that are still worthy of a more thoughtful, more detailed development particularly the comments on music in an epoch ' decades later - when the dead hand of musicology prevents any escape even among those who latterly have tried to integrate all the disparate tendencies of the 20th century from the blues, to atonality, to sound experiments.

Perhaps it is best to begin with a consideration of a few passages especially those on music because they are heartfelt. Noting that 'high art' music is in decline ' 'its past sublimity clearly over with' and still giving the lie to the present philistine search among scientists today for the Beethoven gene etc, much of the emphasis was funnelled through Dada and Futurist (both Italian and the more enlightened Russian) experiments with pure sound. Surely there had to be some profound point to their researches into sound if only as a path leading somewhere and we looked for it simply because music ' particularly jazz - had played a major part in our lives and amidst intensifying alienation giving us one reason to live.

'Like the rest of the dismantled high art traditions, music gradually dribbled into everyday life through Satie's furniture music, Weburn's silences and Gage's concept of Indeterminacy. Whilst all this may have provided the opening through which liberation could be spied in the distance, it's immediate outcome has been a long waylaying, even a new hip imprisoning of form. Despite Cage's well publicised rejection of concert etiquette, the performer/audience separation and structures of harmony, rhythm etc, he remains careful to maintain himself within the dominating paradigm of high art music. The previous musical laws have been replaced by their powerful shadow, a demanding set of non-rules in say, the dead-pan, straight faced presentation of nothing but common sounds but sounds chained to the privileges of a market recognising a musical hierarchy. For example, an LP of Kurt Schwitters sounds - the Ur Sonata - costs £15, c/o the Lords Gallery. Somebody said we'd never have to pay for the air we breathe but we now have to pay in over plus for the sounds we continually hear in daily life.

And saddest of all: Jazz is Dead. Beginning as a bowderalised expression of Negro oppression, jazz through a coming together of disparate musical traditions derived mainly from work song, blues and the polyglot dances in Congo square in New Orleans, quickly but ineluctably began to follow the trajectory of western classical music and as 'the reluctant art' gradually acquired bourgeois status. Charlie Parker was possibly its finest expression but this man, continually pushing at the boundaries of harmony, finally reminds us of the greatness of Mozart. On the brink of atonality he inevitably hastened the demise of jazz, a music which then dissolved into a fury of sound caught half-way between a recent irretrievable past and a something not realised: the something of a total revolution.'

After another paragraph critiquing pop music one sentence sticks out:

'Previously and in other circumstances, like in Russia after the revolution, music had a tendency to dissolve itself and get lost among a new more total feeling. Perhaps the factory sirens and hooter blowouts are such examples? Now their memory can only exist in a void ' merely a hopeful sign to the day when the new revolutionary concepts of non-compartmentalisation bring into being a celebration of work and play no longer experienced as opposites.'

On the first Icteric magazine cover a worn photo of the original Russian Concert of Factory Sirens and Steam Whistles was reproduced. This 'concert' obviously emphasised industrial sound, which all the sound experimenters of the avante garde had played around with. In industrial, ship building Newcastle ' well at least in 1966 ' we perhaps had an idea of creating something similar although it was all fairly vague and we could never have put into effect as we were all penniless and with no clout. In any case, if we had succeeded in doing something similar the historical context would have defeated us. In 1920 not only was the media in its infancy but the initial moments of that powerful illusion inherent in Bolshevism that it was the means of self-imancipation/abolition of wage slavery etc was at its height. By 1966 we would have merely been the first in line of those dire Jean Michel Jarre's type spectaculars of sound and light which were to follow. Nonetheless for a couple of years sound obsessed us though our orientation was more in line with an English nature tradition/orientation. Dziga Vertov in 1920s Russia wanted to massively turn up sound. We wanted something similar but also to hear insects' wings or the voice of wind in long grass. Though we never realised it at the time this disposition was more in line with a certain preoccupation of the later romantic poets like Keats, Byron and Shelley who in the process of dissolving time-honoured poetic form also desired to dissolve music into something far richer, strange and fulfilling. Perhaps Keats's "Heard melodies are sweet but those unheard are sweeter/ the spirit ditties of no tone' or that delicious state of feeling hinted at in Shelley's densely impenetrable sonnet 'Music' where he yearns to experience an exceptional natural sound beyond music that would transform him.

Hardly surprising then that these musical passages are probably more thought out than the rest though there is a sentence on film in a revolutionary epoch which still resonates.

'The amount of films produced in an actual revolutionary period would be greatly reduced as real life would offer far, far more than any big screen simulation. The only films that may be needed (as far as we can predict) are kind of documentary, educational films for a transformed TV quite unlike the passive drug-induced machine we now have at our finger tips.'

Perhaps the use of a loaded term like 'documentary' is unfortunate as documentary merely describes what exists and not what might be and our pitifully small band of individuals envisaged dialectical movement and not the stasis of seemingly grim determinants. What we did see in all of this was a need to transform, or more precisely transcend all artistic specialisms and to put their former essences (or something like) into a state of play which at times bordered on a desire to return to a kind of primitive lifestyle which again we perceived has slowly unfolded with the modern experiment in art.

'Free creativity will never exist until all concepts of art disappear ' intermittently intermingling within a mostly joyous life.'

'In a new society without fixed form and static institutions surely the notion of the game distinctly compartmentalised and separate from work and other aspects of leisure time will necessarily disappear? In some ways we will come again to resemble some primitive societies where leisure, work and the game were inseparable.'

We did '-even then - want something qualitatively different and without the taboos and ignorance of primitive societies. We were reducing all known forms of official creativity to zero and dust precisely because they stood in the way of a new, more total creativity made by all and not by artists. As mentioned previously and worth further emphasis, like many other texts and leaflets from the late 1960s there was a somewhat unfortunate emphasis on lowest common denominator hooligan behaviour as a means of liberation as the bridge to realizing Lautreamont's famous maxim of the poetry made by all.

Equally though we emphasised a tabula rasa - a silence. (No wonder for a few years we were fascinated by John Cage's Silence) In a sense this tabula rasa didn't fit with the time particularly at a moment when an ill-defined 'revolution is the festival of the oppressed' came easily to the lips which could mean as long as you placed existing culture on street level it was OK. In Newcastle we emphasised the 'descent into the street' though some of our concerns pointed more poignantly elsewhere and were perhaps more visionary. Surely any new revolutionary period in an epoch where consumer noise destroys so much of our lives and where the open-ended questions surrounding Satie's furniture music can be reduced to musak and ambient volume - will spontaneously embrace such desires. For sure sound systems placed outdoors will not be welcomed nor most likely will performance, installation, event or festival parade in general. Perhaps silence will come into its own at long last or rather we will find the space to passionately talk (about our loss?) to each other without mediation, enforced personal privatization and image making. Is such a future prospect quite unlike the 'creativity' of 1968?

Also reproduced here is Art & Politics = Revolution, published in a Birmingham based Radical Arts magazine and written by John Barker before he became the theoretical protagonist behind The Angry Brigade followed by years in prison. Although John Barker hailed from Newcastle, the spreading insurgent ambience there probably had little impact, as he'd become a student in Cambridge University. This text though is interesting precisely because it is a confrontation with the powerfully entrenched Eng Lit tradition embodied in the citadel of Cambridge University which still has such a terrifying hold.

'Thus tradition becomes academic monumentality. But as the present is not living, then neither can the tradition be, for it is not going anywhere.'

Certainly such critique had been missing in the Newcastle crucible and though acknowledged in casual conversation, in practise we simply walked round it. It was a serious omission and John Barker's text was a welcome addition, which from such tentative beginnings was like everything else never followed up remaining for a beckoning future that still hasn't materialised. It is a head-on clash with TS Eliot, FR Leavis and DH Lawrence although leaving some nicer words for a more 'Marxist' semi-retard who had recently entered the English pantheon like Raymond Williams with his woeful ignorance of the rise and fall of cultural form. Barker also brought into play a critique of the avante garde, the passivity of pop concerts, happenings, cultural consumption and compensation and the simple lack of life in concepts like Julian Beck's Living Theatre and raising pertinent questions - which we in Newcastle were so familiar with like 'Why did the guy write this?'

Perhaps John's most pertinent and arresting comments and which all of us in the late 1960s found perhaps the best in the piece and still remain as such have to do with active artistic substitution.

'The most acute of 'liberatory' theatre is CAST going around from university to university ending their shows by smashing some property. This is complete substitution. The Who similarly with their guitars. The audience expects it, wants it to happen itself , but is frightened to do so. Whereas CAST have the artists prerogative to do it. This is the most acute case of the classic 'alienation' which art can afford. We contemplate other people destroying the environment we want to destroy'.

There is though an unfortunate weakness in the text. In proclaiming communality - the potential communality of the factory at a moment of potential insurrection etc there is also something of an insistence on communality in art - whatever that might mean. 'There is obviously great hope in the movement towards communally created art' etc and: 'Revolutionary art and entertainment will most clearly grow up in CONFLICT with their bourgeois counterparts' and the weakness of such a concept is then gloriously saved - just to say - by the following line: 'I mean a very direct attack on it, the breaking up of all the shows which are presented, especially the avante garde versions, which are the most pernicious in that they actually absorb rebellion'' one can only agree with that and still waiting all these years later for this simple realisation to take off once more'

Balls is just that: Bollocks and balls. This has been put in this compilation as a warning, as an example of conscious self-recuperation by two King Mob participants to raise money for future revolutionary publications through conning some trendy periodical of the day to pay top dollar for complete bullshit. The money was then diverted for publishing a further King Mob edition. We never let the magazine editors know we'd named the script 'Balls' and this was the weakness of such a gesture so the question still remains was this a sound idea or not? And the answer must be, probably NO, simply because left in the dark it merely adds to the reigning confusion especially when dealing with a revolutionary analysis watered down into radical sociology. OK we had a good laugh at the time but it's not an avenue to be recommended. Of course, elegantly conning these set-ups as a means of exposing their vacuity is more urgent than ever (the annual Turner Prize especially comes to mind) but it's only of value if the scam is clearly exposed on the night with revolutionary clarity.

Two texts from Fred Vermorel - one on the cineaste - The Rewards of Punishment. Extracts from a forthcoming autopsy - and On Whom Can the Workers Count? are included simply because they are pretty good. The latter ending up with the ringing declamation: "less magazines, more fires comrades"! Although many reading this may know of Vermorel's role in Punk Rock (in tandem with Malcolm Maclaren) and his subsequent subservient career as a lecturer and promo-writer for pop stars he started out with far greater potential and it is worth reminding ourselves of this.

Finally we end with the Irish based The Gurriers mainly written by Phil Meyler. It has been placed in this compilation of forgotten texts precisely because it has been probably purposefully forgotten having caused a furore. After bringing out Arson News - a crude but fiery diatribe - Phil took the kernel of the chaotic King Mob breakthrough and tried to transpose it on Ireland, particularly Dublin, city of his birth. He put together a couple of editions of The Gurriers (Dublin lingo for hooligans) which completely upset the two dominant ideologies in Irish life ' the Catholic church and an Irish nationalist culture orientation - launching a broad-sided, wild attack on both which didn't pull any punches. On the surface The Gurriers may appear to lack the finesse and the calmer more theoretical (intellectual?) approach of King Red in Dublin two or so years later, but is this really true? (It was a promise which sadly was never fulfilled and as a reminder of this a final postscript announcing the closure of King Red is included here - In Notice from the Survivors of the late King Red - written in that pontifical solemn style, arriving in the 1970s, full of self-important wordsmith aggrandizement, and which we quickly learnt to keep clear of). One remembers with delight on first reading The Gurriers just how down home, raw and splendidly nutty it was. After the obligatory attack on professional roles there is the great exhortation: 'You must destroy the lorry driver within yourself' and you wondered just how do you do that?

Though a rant from the heady year of 1968 The Gurriers is a far more coherent rant that one might care to admit if merely glanced at. It is avowedly anti-nationalist (including the IRA), anti-church and anti-art cobbling them together with erotic cartoons in a small pamphlet where a necessarily brief look into those pertinent aspects of Irish history which have played their part in suppressing autonomous social revolution. Lines from situationist texts are utterly plagiarised (nobody in Dublin at the time would have even known one way or another!) followed by entirely original critiques of present day Ireland compressed into a sentence here and there. On reflection, the section on culture (inevitably for the time called: The Death of Art) is still the part most pregnant with possibilities if somebody could still expand such a drift into something more rounded and detailed. Following a bald and unpolished though intelligent summation of the impasse encountered by James Joyce and how he could have broken out of it which was nonetheless well on the right lines, there follows a splendid one-liner condemning Flann O' Brien's anti-cultural, cultural pretensions. Would there had been more of them! 'When the characters in Flann O' Brien's novel unite to destroy the novelist and the novel within the novel they still face the real novelist Flann O' Brien. Their freedom is decided within the closed system of that novel. The task today is to unite to destroy our masters in the real world' - announcing two sentences later that: 'The coming work of art is the construction of a passionate life. The poetry of everyday life couldn't care less about poetry.' The specific critique of culture in Ireland still remains at a woeful level and amazingly still so. The demolition of the role of 'the Irish writer' - a real lynchpin of capital accumulation in Ireland - could be such a starter!

Remember though, when Phil initially launched his attack peppered with cartoon strips of nuns saying they wanted to be fucked, there were over 8,000 books banned in Ireland by the 1923 board of censorship dominated by a fundamentalist Catholic church. his intervention was accomplished in something of a vacuum in Ireland due to a basically intense sexual repression fostered by the church. Its effects spilled over necessarily involving all other aspects of thought and the nascent counter culture there was muted in comparison to America or some other western European countries at the time.

For his pains, Phil's broadsides alerted the unwelcome attention of the Irish Special Branch who seized what 'pornographic' Gurriers they could plus related documents when they raided his Mother's home in Dun Laighore putting this poor, god-fearing, semi-literate lovely woman through a horrible ordeal once she realised what blasphemous activities her son had become involved in. It was probably the biggest (and by far the most explicit) anti-cultural intervention that Ireland had seen since the hey day of its avante garde in the early 20th century and certainly superceding those well known examples like Synge's Playboy of the Western World in 1907 and, years later, Sean O Casey's The Plough and the Stars, an anti-war play, which was mistaken by the Abbey audience as being anti-nationalist. Both provoked riots having put the back up of a hellfire Catholicism.These efforts, though considerably better than their English counterparts, were well within the bounds of traditional artistic expression. The Gurriers was much more advanced - enraging the state rather than a somewhat backward audience - and still remains a lone signpost pointing to a much more fruitful becoming. In passing, it's probably worth mentioning some of the choicer examples of Phil's output at the time like the cynically accurate Tony Trend in Carnaby Capers plus some other cartoon strips also distributed in Ireland, as well as elsewhere, which further angered the establishment.