Lost Texts Around King Mob

King Mob was initially a coming together in London of members of the English section of the Situationist InternationaI and like-minded individuals from Newcastle associated with the anti-art magazine, Icteric, and the Black Hand Gang.

Following Guy Debord’s expulsion of the English members of the SI in December 1967, the King Mob Echo was co-founded in April 1968 by former SI member, Chris Gray and ‘friends from the north’, Dave and Stuart Wise.

The material in this collection by King Mob writers and their associates still has a power to provocatively invigorate and open up new directions of thought and action emanating from a subversive critique of culture. For the most part, these documents have been forgotten and therefore never archived in the libraries of art history and the ‘popsicle academy’ of media/music studies. Indeed, they had to be rescued from what Marx called “the gnawing criticism of the mice”.

Contents

• Dave Wise and Stuart Wise (King Mob), Introduction: By way of an explanation…

• Ronald Hunt (Newcastle-based art historian), The Arts in Our Time: A Working Definition; The Great Communications Breakdown, (1968)
• Dave Wise and Stuart Wise, Culture and Revolution (1968)
• John Barker (Angry Brigade) Art+Politics = Revolution (1968)
• Fred Vermorel, (music writer who collaborated with Malcolm McClaren in formulating Punk Rock), The Rewards of Punishment and On Whom Can the Workers Count? (1970)
• Chris Gray (Situationist) and Dave Wise, Balls! (1970)
• Phil Meyler (Dublin associate of King Mob), The Gurriers (1968) and Notes from the Survivors of the Late King Red (1972)

The book is dedicated to Stuart Wise, 1943-2021.

Link to download the book online at Amazon UK Kindle Store (free for Kindle, £4.99 to buy).
https://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/B0CRV263X7/ref=sr_1_10?crid=JFPL2WTBLQJT&keywords=king+mob&qid=1704824615&sprefix=king+mob%2Caps%2C118&sr=8-10

From the Introduction

BY WAY OF AN EXPLANATION …

Dave Wise and Stuart Wise

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 For our collective ‘we’ saw them as the first tsunami against the old world which in our hearts we felt would be superseded fairly quickly by something more considered and more coherently worked out.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 has 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” (from The Gurriers)……

It could be said the late 1960s was the last time people (or rather a large minority of people) of the world over attempted to re-invent life and to do so passionately….only to catastrophically fail! Seeing today when 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/time to turn the planet around from immolation.

It would be easy in these texts – though superficial – to dwell on their often disjointed frenzy or occasional jarring woodenness, of a misshapen language bordering at times on a certain illiteracy which, at the time, a fair number of protagonists couldn’t care less about or willfully cultivated. This was perhaps somewhat on the lines of one of Byron’s typical quips that he would never have a relationship with a woman who could read and write; thus implying that literacy itself was a form of oppression, inhibiting spontaneity. Moreover, the times were too urgent for such niceties as “literacy”. At the same time some of the texts here 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 quietism 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 nuances - regarding vandalism’s huge variations. We never sufficiently emphasized 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.