JUMBLED NOTES: A CRITICAL HIDDEN HISTORY OF KING MOB

“ The adventure of the arts (painting, sculpture, poetry, literature, music) passes

                  in its decline through three essential phases: a phase of self-liquidation (Malevich’s

                 “white square”, Matt/Duchamp’s urinal re-baptized “Fountain”, Dadaist word-

                  collages, Finnegan’s Wake, certain compositions of Varese); a phase of self-parody

                  (Satie, Picabia, Duchamp); and a phase of self transcendence, exemplified in the

                  directly lived poetry of revolutionary moments, in theory as it takes hold of the

                  masses………..”

                          Raoul Vaneigem. The Cavalier History of Surrealism. 1972.

     Why should I even begin to write this quite possibly longish text on something that happened so many many moons ago? King Mob, though only existing for a  very brief period in the late 1960s, nonetheless affected everything I did afterwards. Always, always on my mind in some kind of way a push was needed in order to get it kick started.

     I met a prostitute – Angela W – from the fishing port of Grimsby on the mouth of the Humber in the north of England. I instantly fell in love with her in an all-consuming way. The pain inside my body so massively accumulated with the death of hopes for the social revolution which would have given my life any meaning and, in a way, symbolised by the death of King Mob in my youth, was kind of half wrenched out of me as she slowly and pensively shambled towards me in a disarming walk. She had a certain compassionate expression on her face. I was finished and fulfilled through, it seemed, this obviously contradictory hammer blow. She was 55 –my age – though 5 days younger. Little by little I got to know her and the intensity I felt towards her just convulsively increased. I adored. The odds were gone and there was nothing left remarkable beneath the visiting moon. I just wanted to give everything of my self to her: the money I had, my possessions but most of all the intensity of my experience – the sheer truth of it – warts and all. Over the following weeks I typed her letter, after much mulled over, letter. They were about so many things but constantly came back to the need to transform traditional notions of Eros – extending the  “oceanic feelings” inherent in Eros to all aspects of daily life. It was as though my youth had been re-visited on me – a youth cut off so abruptly with the extinguishing of revolutionary hopes. All I waited for was her kisses, her beautifully wrinkled breasts, and her northern, out for a good time, life-enhancing laugh (knowing that it also covered a rebellious spirit tinged with a puritanism that also lacked the courage of its convictions). If necessary – cornball though true – I would have willingly died for her as it felt  like a dying in order to live. I was a slave to her erotic, transforming presence and it felt like I was on the brink of a new and different catharsis  (infinitely dialectical if you like) the likes of which had never been born concretely in this world.

      Inevitably - considering a history and past I’m about to enumerate – I felt myself in the kind of Maldorean syndrome/episode which Lautreamont had described – that episode when God came down to consort with a whore and couldn’t make it with her. Well it had the aura of that, though not literally. I wasn’t God nor wanted to be. God was dead a long time ago. It was a certain similarity in situation:  the forbidden transgression preparing for a fresh take-off for the erotic and starting necessarily from the point of a supposed degradation. Possible transformation (for both of us) was palpably there though never materialising. It was Angela that gave me the heat and passion to write this jumble of extended notes and to put them into some kind of order. After a number of years - in the mid 90s - in which I felt too wiped out to even consider writing, simply because everything seemed so utterly hopeless, I’d been given a reason to begin again. This wanton relationship revived in me such long though still pregnant desires with past but not forgotten memories felt as keenly as though they’d happened a few hours ago. Perhaps, (along with millions of others?) I wanted to express as accurately as possible what had happened in that great rebellion. In letters I told Angela about this and the need to write it all down without stopping. She responded with a kind of intense interest (or, it seemed that way).Kissing her most beautiful sagging breasts and her adorable wrinkles, she’d ask me how “the book” was going. No woman had ever been like this – encouraging me constantly to get facts and interpretation down on paper. I said I was now writing everything for her and for nobody else. More than that, it felt like the extension of a personal letter or email to those whom you really feel you can communicate with. It really did seem the best way of writing something  i.e. with no consideration of any audience whose ghostly presence might threaten any truth. She said she also wanted to write about her often “hilarious” (her words) experiences as a prostitute and I thought it was a great idea.

     I also knew with Angela that this “theoretical respect” was (and is) particularly strong among the northern proletariat particularly those harking from that stratum with the dubious characterisation of the labour aristocracy.  Her Father had been a foreman mechanic in a division of Grimsby corporation, and  Angela, after working for a short period as a nurse, married up,  tying the knot with some kind of guy in financial circles  and settling down into a suburban middle class routine. Even though Angela had probably sold herself to the highest bidder in her late teens (it looks as though love on her part never came into the marriage brothel or equally “marriage hearse” as William Blake had so well put it) nonetheless being a fully-fledged professional whore had emancipated her from that stifling background and a quite stunning  searching openness and frankness was beginning to flower. At times it was breathless in its audacity. It was as though Angela’s “job” had freed her from a general mediocrity, from one to one relationships and the ties of the family. Liberated somewhat by the emancipatory air of London (which the place still just to say possesses ) nonetheless too, something of the brilliance of that remarkable town of Grimsby had rubbed off on Angela even though possibly she’d spent a good deal of her married life combating what’s so compelling about the place. Grimsby, that industrial fragment across the north east Lincolnshire plain, cut off from gentrification with its sprawling harbour full of unplanned invention where workers’ cafes housed in old wooden shacks with plastic sunflowers gazing out from tiny windows; where streets twist and turn with an air of promise and delight… and where, on another mind blowing corner just ahead,  a Russian sailor asks you in the only English he knows; “Asda store”. Angela was quite rightly proud of Grimsby.

       Unfortunately though, Angela, it seems, could only express all those often conflicting and incredibly disparate experiences and thoughts to me (bringing about the beginning of some yearned for unification)? Maybe. Maybe not and there’s the rub! As with so many prostitutes who cannot be fully honest and open about their trade they get confused and crash on the dichotomy between two separate existences and perhaps other existences before that. There was a petty snobbery, which ill befitted her and which one could call petite bourgeois in its hypocrisy if it also wasn’t part of a process in motion. You get to a point where you must make a gigantic leap or fall back into endless quick sands until the end of your days. Like Nietzche’s  “pale criminal” which so fascinated Freud, Angela took the latter course. (Remember Nietzche in his critique of  lack of resolution in the mentality of the “pale criminal” also wanted to see a lot, lot more of them). Finally she had to blow me out brutally getting rid of me without even allowing me to say goodbye. I think my subversive thoughts and  drift rapidly disturbed her and how well in the past had I known that tale! She’d never met somebody like me and quickly she decided  (as with so many others before) that I had to be stopped in my tracks – and harshly. Being an old hand at rejection, truth to tell I was waiting for the cruel return of the old familiar pain. I responded with a letter three months later to her address in Grimsby, All I can say in my defense is why go for this type of elimination? It seems though the contents of my letter helped precipitate a nervous breakdown – a breakdown that certainly could have been avoided if she been prepared to grasp the cusp of the situation and move it forward. My pain too was wretched. Her actions, precipitating an angry and hurt response, (sensing an imminent crack up?)  weren’t necessary neither.

     I started to write what follows under Angela’s delightful influence, scribbling note upon note. Since then it has more and more been put into some kind of disordered order but the pain of beginning again was almost unbearable seeing I shall never see Angela again or know what happened to her. Not having the heart or inclination to engage in stalking an utter letting go was inevitable. Somewhat - though very different in circumstance - like De Quincey’s  opium dreams about his dear Anny ( an orphan forced into prostitution rather than through big bucks inclination) whom he lost contact with in the then teeming centre of London’s Oxford Street in the early 19^th century and who he kept vividly remembering for the next 40 years, I sometimes see Angela still. Very different circumstances maybe but the end result - an on-going, palpable absence – remains the same. Much of the following book is about the lack of and renewed need for total critique. Let’s therefore end this preamble by a beautiful comment written by William Hazlitt on love: “I have wanted only one thing to make me happy, but wanting that, I have wanted everything”.

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      This text/ book in very distant collaboration with my brother (and what follows is now no longer written in the first person singular) has been put together in the hope of motivating  others to make their contributions, perhaps correcting unknown errors, lapses and serious omissions which will undoubtedly be here and which the veil of time has drawn across facts and memories. It may prove useful or it may not but it seemed to us that the record had to be straightened up somewhat as the trendy and marginal journalese mythology which increasingly surrounds King Mob  (witness the growing number of books where King Mob is given a makeover) merely reflects the world of Rupert Murdoch and the fantastical constructs of the media in general. Speculation becomes factual evidence and flimsy, often fictional episodes become concrete facts which are then repeated and embellished upon in the next glossy presentation. Ideally, all of them should be binned tomorrow if truth had any say in this ever-darkening, miserable old world.

     A lot of what’s been written here has been written/talked about – with biro in hand – in the spirit of the ancient Persians: part done when sober the other when drunk/stoned, or both. Finally, the two put together in sobriety and then again, semi-drunkenly modifying yet again each other in something heading towards the ad infinitum. Perhaps Breton’s claim in Les Pas Perdus is still relevant: “one publishes to find people, and for no other reason.”  But also, perhaps no longer considering you must necessarily remain in obscurity more than ever - simply to keep contact with  reality which can only mean a life unmediated, as much as possible, by the spectacle.  In advance, a certain sentence dyslexia must also be mentioned, partially because of the latter method and partially, because it’s also conditioned by a very basic education in secondary modern schools in the coalfield areas of Co Durham and West Yorkshire. You didn’t learn grammatical expression like that but, you were taught something far better than any educational achievement could give: a spirit of up-front honesty with each other meaning never letting your mates down. Later on, attending Ripon Grammar school for two horrendous years, the Headmaster, a Mr. R. Atkinson would brutally call you  stupid and thick remarking that: “English is the language of Milton and not bus drivers like you speak.” Obviously, the fool knew nothing of Milton whose agitational pamphlets even in his lifetime were translated into the language of the Brazilian slaves as well as some of the languages of the Native Americans inhabiting the eastern seaboard! Only later were we to learn about this from Christopher Hill - and that subsequent knowledge only increased  fury against past wrongs. Really though, it was a prelude for what was to become as, increasingly, we were to become a total disappointment to almost everybody of proclaimed value in this society for not fulfilling  the expectations of artists, theorists, academics, revolutionary milieuists, trade union worker bureaucrats and aspiring girlfriends alike! The first injury was the worst as increasingly after that it became like water off a duck’s back.

       It may be said we’ve written about King Mob before in the End of Music so why repeat the exercise? Well yes, apart from this text was never meant to be published, as it was merely a prepatory draft handed around to a few people. The name David Wise was given as the author of this document written in 1978 which was published three or so years later by a group in Glasgow which had been tied up with the once, excellent Castoriadis influenced group, Solidarity. We had no knowledge that the text was being printed. Part of it contained some kind of critical potted history of King Mob. On seeing the pamphlet for the first time, one of us asked for it to be pulped simply because it was merely some provisional notes strung together which initially had seen the light of day based mainly on conversations - which were quite exhilarating at the times during day to day work  plastering, tiling, carpentry etc - on small building sites in East London mainly between ourselves and Nik Holliman who was later to produce The Sprint; c/o BM Chronos.  One or two others, in different, mainly pub based  scenes, had also  made pertinent points which were jotted down but, basically, a name couldn’t be put to it. A transcriber maybe, as it was nothing more than a product of collective, passionate yet democratic  conversation (in the real and as yet unrealised sense of the term). Moreover, the people in Glasgow had altered sentences and captions - some  were even created - and one or two things deleted in that editorial control freakism which is such a baneful cancer on our times and  which has subsequently been applied  to most of our texts not published by ourselves. Of course, this editing scourge from people gladly referring to themselves as “autonomists” in reality, has  yet to arrive at the simplest of individual bourgeois liberties letting a person say fully what they have to say without arbitrary censorship! Originally, these notes were typed up and about 30 photocopies made and passed around to individuals who might be interested inviting comments. Some ended up in Leeds, falling into the hands of the remnants of the studenty, pro-situationist, Infantile Disorders – themselves a fall out from what happened in Newcastle-Upon-Tyne in the late 60s - and the background and impetus to their subsequent rip off by the Gang of Four punk band. A fair number of criticisms were made (including some from the ex Infantile Disorders) and the intention was to put them together in a larger, more coherent, balanced  document as the original tone of the provisional notes was far too wide-ranging,  dispersed and moreover, far too bitter and over-reactive, failing to give any notion of the elan and inventive mood of the times described. In a way it was a submission belonging to the rising tide of reaction. Perhaps the bitterness was understandable considering one was seeing the shadow of those brilliant King Mob times (well, at least comparatively) itself part and parcel of the failed revolt of the late 60s, reduced and resurrected everywhere as hip fashion (i.e. mainly punk rock) but that quite frankly wasn’t good enough in putting forward the flowing outlines of a brief historical moment which partly the pamphlet had traversed.

       Unfortunately, the pamphlet became a kind of icon – reproduced everywhere – particularly by that obnoxious recuperator Stewart Home. We cringed with embarrassment A few years later after the newly re-named  “The End of Music” (courtesy of Glasgow) was published, Larry Law, editor of the pretty meaningless, Situationist Times contacted  BM BLOB asking if he could reprint. Something of the above was related to him through letters and a revised original was partially put together ready to be dispatched but before anything could get that far, Larry Law was taken ill, dying with a brain disease a few days later. The revised text never thus got off the ground.  More work was still needed on it in any case. Even before Larry Law made contact, additional notes and some significant alterations had been made before 1979 but the text remained on hold as we had in mind to produce a long piece on the troubles in Italy in the late 70s. After a turbulent journey throughout Italy (crouching at night  behind convenient brick walls in the midst of gun battles in some of Rome’s disputed areas between the mainly  disintegrating Leninism of Autonomia Operaria -Workers Autonomy - and fascists and living by shop lifting food from super markets);  we put together quite a few documents on the movement, mainly translations from the often  exquisite, profound and melancholic Puzz comics which  later partially merged into the 1977 Metropolitan Indian movement. Nobody was, as usual, interested in publishing and our own meagre resources were limited, obtaining some money from plastering but, coming from a poor background and having no recourse to inherited wealth, the book remained in a folder where it is to this day. It was a shame as it would have been the best book in English on the ferment in Italy. Later, in the mid 90s, we tried AK Press but with their policy of only showing interest in what sells, AK looked at you as if you were somewhat backward in  even suggesting publishing such a loser.

        But to hark back again to the beginning…… This book began with a quote from Vaneigem’s Cavalier History of Surrealism not because it’s some arbitrary show-off, demonstrating superior knowledge about modern culture but because it is the most succinct  expression of where King Mob can be placed – the moment of the passing of art – in that “phase of self-transcendence, exemplified in the directly lived poetry of revolutionary moments, in theory as it takes hold of the masses…..” Inevitably the following text contains many artistic references in an attempt to map out more clearly where we were all coming from  and how we attempted to put a certain momentum inherited from the last days of art into a new kind of attractive play essential  for the seduction inherent in the process of a modern social revolution.

  THE COURAGE

  What Happened in Newcastle-Upon-Tyne.

        The mid-nineteen sixties and Icteric. Re-evaluation of a dissident European past. Russian nihilism. Recuperated artistic dada and revolutionary Dada. The forgotten revolutionary aspects of Surrealism. Conflict with the Tyneside poets. Closing down an Art School. Meetings with Black Mask in New York. Heatwave and the English section of the Situationists in London.

       King Mob was initially a coming together in London of the then constituted English section of the SI – beginning somewhat to fall apart - and an ex-group, together with some other like-minded individuals, around the often confusedly anti -art magazine, Icteric, from Newcastle-Upon-Tyne. (Icteric, let it be said was spuriously anti-art but we weren’t to know that with such clarity at the time). Let us first deal here with the Newcastle experience as it has never been documented before.

        Icteric, founded in the mid 1960s was, more or less, a name chosen at random from a dictionary and therefore in that somewhat time-honoured tradition of modern art emanating from Dada. It meant jaundice and a cure for jaundice at the same time – which everybody felt at its very inauspicious inauguration was appropriate. Simply put, everybody present was pissed-off with art in an institution or gallery, wearied and jaundiced about it if you like, and  looking for something rather more turbulent and effective. Icteric’s central aim and quite resonantly put at the time, was the coming together (fusion) of art and life and was mainly the brainchild of Ron Hunt who was the librarian at the Dept of Fine Art at Newcastle University. Ron Hunt had been appointed to the post at the instigation of  pop artist Richard Hamilton who taught at the university and who, ironically, around the same time, acquainted Don N. Smith with the theoretical journals of the French Situationists. Hamilton though, for some time had abandoned all semblance of radical critique pretty much falling into a benign, left social democracy, coolly and uncritically encompassing consumerist icons.  A cool take was to be the essential in overcoming all adversity! In fact, it was a variant of the same terrible English inability to grasp most essential breakthroughs in perception  and form which so marked the 20^th century and much of the latter half of the 19^th Century. Despite penetrating social critiques like that of William Morris and George Orwell everything else was always to be done in such a seamlessly nice way and ever so watered-down.

      Considering this was taking place in England (and in a relative back water at that) covering an avalanche of omissions, repressions and outright hostility, Ron Hunt bravely at the time, delved into the history of modern art and began to put the record straight beginning to place all the long lost and forgotten (on purpose) radical experiments into the beginning of some coherent trajectory whose outcome at the time we were all rather fuzzy about  but which was slowly but surely becoming clearer each day. Icteric became, more or less, the fulcrum of this unfolding - enlightening primarily ourselves - before any concern for anybody else. Basically, it was motivated by getting hold of anything that wasn’t stultifyingly “English” in the conformist sense we found so unappealing. We went back and re-evaluated the Russian nihilists of the mid 19^th century like Dobrolyubov and Pisarev  who’s “Destruction of Aesthetics” hit a chord. We liked the hardness of their comments: “Shakespeare or a pair of boots”etc. Pisarev had said of himself he “would rather be a Russian shoemaker than a Russian Raphael”. In a sense though it was their rebellion we liked even though it brought prison and calumny upon themselves. Pisarev’s: “Denial is a hard, tedious and deadly task” meant something as we eagerly read Lampert’s “Sons Against Fathers” in preparation – unbeknown to ourselves at the time – of our own revolt of sons (and now daughters!) against fathers! Could we go along with it to the letter? Hardly, but it was another of the necessary ingredients which later was truly to go somewhere. Finally though and perhaps inevitably, we found the concepts of the Russian nihilists too severely utilitarian for our liking. True, it was utilitarianism bordering on the apocalyptic but that didn’t really fit in with our growing rejection, or rather, that suppression and realisation of art we were searching for despite been none too clear about this at the time. It wasn’t just an either/or question. It wasn’t just a question of the hungry and dispossessed for whom culture was a luxury they could ill afford.  In fact, concern for the poor didn’t even come in to it. We were arriving at the simple, though very dialectical, recognition that culture within its own frame of reference no longer possessed the slightest quality and the subsequent emptiness beckoned towards the creation of something entirely different. The conclusion that this meant inescapably the destruction of the commodity economy, social revolution and the creation of an entirely new world we didn’t immediately perceive but it did mean that a blow by blow repeat of Russian nihilism was irrelevant and quite beside the point. After all during the lifetime of the Russian nihilists, great art particularly in the form of the Russian novel was at its height. However, Tolstoy’s final rejection of the role of novelist was more in tune with Pisarev’s essentially moral rejection – and incidentally illustrating the powerful impact of the nihilists on Russian society – than in the prepatory self-destruct of the novel’s form as undertaken by the much younger Marcel Proust around the same time. A destruction which was to be continued and carried on to the final chaos of Joyce’s, Finnegan’s Wake. Slowly but surely we were getting some sense of this though always in a pretty chaotic way.

       We mustn’t though be too simplistic here about Pisarev’s views. He wanted to see the emergence of a “non-cultural” scientific culture neither invented nor abstracted which could only be represented, “in actual living phenomena”. As Lampert was to put it: “It was to be a culture which reflected man’s changing and unimpeded vision of the universe, free especially from all the burdens of the past, and with none of the hot air of exalted places. It’s “temples”  would be “the workshops of human thought” It would eschew the artist as a sacred monomaniac, misunderstood and misinterpreted and ensure his status as simply a human being, endowed with a special gift of articulation and free from somnolence and escapism. His business would be roughly, to articulate on behalf of the inarticulate, to express for those who are unable to express themselves what is conducive to their growth as human persons and “thinking proletarians”. He would be a spokesman for others and the despair of aesthetes yearning for elegant elaboration”. Whilst the language of some of the above is too loose and imprecise for our times, a little later,  around 1966, we couldn’t help but make something of a connection between this and Dziga Vertov when first viewing his 1920’s film “Man with a Movie Camera” and reading about the concepts behind Kino-Eye and the factograph. But more about that later…

      The first Icteric magazine contained a translation by Anne Ryder of some of Jacques Vache's   “Lettres de Guerre” and the first such translations in English to have appeared   (the rest of the letters were to appear in further editions of Icteric). In a way Vache’s letters set the tone for what was to follow. It meant, down with gallery art and, from now on, let’s look at those historical figures whom attempted to negate art in the far-off days of Dada, Surrealism and Russian Constructivism. The painters and poets of these movements were quickly pushed aside and downgraded for their orthodox, though, in their time, radical representations. We were only interested in these people if their activities, pointed towards the beginnings of the real transcendence of art.  Finally we preferred the real negation. For us, the future lay in Arthur Craven, the boxer - the supposed nephew of Oscar Wilde - and the vitriolic producer of   Maintenant, Vache (again) and Rimbaud at the moment he quit poetry.  (Little did we know at the time that Breton criticised him for this seeing his subsequent activities, like gun-running were so dubious). It was their negation of art that meant everything to us. We really responded with an ever growing deep sympathy for the best of Cravan’s comments like; “You must absolutely get through your head that art is for the bourgeois, and by bourgeois I mean: a monsieur without imagination”… and… “Soon you won’t see anyone but artists in the street and the only thing you’ll find no end of trouble in finding is a man” (Remembering this great comment by 1972 a comment was placed in a diary: “It’s taken this long for “soon” to become reality”. Thirty years after 1972 it was to have an even more astounding truth). We also really liked some of the early Surrealist experiments  like the meeting at the  relatively unknown church of St Julien de la Pauvre on the left bank of the  Seine and the  early kind of practical psychic-automatism drifts of the Surrealist walks proceeding from a point based on where a pin had been stuck into a map at random. We weren’t so foolish, naive or headstrong as to not consider that some of these random drifts nearly pushed some of these protagonists into suicide.  Then there were those supposedly brutal  Surrealist slogans like; “leave your children in the woods set off on the roads” etc which we really got off on.  We also admired some of the imaginative environmental projects of the Russian Constructivists around 1920, particularly Klebnikov’s soup lakes and the proposed slow flying white on white squares schemes proposed by Malevich etc. Indeed, Icteric made a replica of Malevich’s coffin that was exhibited in some exhibition some years later which Jappe was to praise for its “excellent iconography” in the bibliography of his book on Debord in 1993 (?). We were interested in the concept of the factograph and bearing El Lissitsky in mind, it seemed like the starting point of an anti-literary presentation. Cinema wasn’t spared either as we dismissed the entertainment industry preferring Dziga Vertov’s films of the early 20s and the first collaborations between Luis Bunuel and Salvador Dali, particularly  Le Chien Andalou and L’Age D’Or in the 1930s.We readily accepted that cinema as provocation had come to an end at this point when  rioting  greeted the latter’s first screenings. Had anything like this happened since? We wanted to do likewise simply unaware of more recent and precise statements of the Lettrist anti-film particularly Howlings in Favour of De Sade  and which had provoked public outrage but we were only to learn about these events some three years later.

     However, all this growing lucidity was jumbled up within Icteric together with a hotchpotch  of modern art repeats, what Duchamp was to characterise  around the same time as the “double- barrel effect”, a point we noted at the time though we reacted with dismay when we heard Duchamp was making multiple editions of his old ready-mades for sale, no doubt apeing Andy Warhol’s activities just down the street from him in Manhattan. We felt it was a sellout, which of course, it was. Though for all of us painting and sculpture, novels and poetry were out and finished nonetheless some environmental constructions were deemed OK, those that were somewhat akin to artifacts that would have been more or less at home in those international Surrealist exhibitions of the 30s and 40s. Not necessarily the most spectacularly weird but things like the full coal sack hung from the ceiling  of one of them. We particularly liked the fact that the sack accidentally bust open and all its mucky contents were scattered over the floor. Maybe our special liking for the latter had something to do with living in Newcastle and the presence of the north-east miners - who’s to say? It was only a year or two later that we were also to realise the futility of the latter, the more we developed a critique of the commodity. Icteric produced anti-sociological questionnaires some of which were Surrealist  repeats. “Why not commit suicide”was one of them and people were invited to fill them in. The responses were arid and, perhaps not surprisingly  even worse than what Breton had hoped for decades earlier. There was no budding Artaud around replying to the original questionnaire like: “I am unhappy like a man who has lost the best part of himself…..who has committed suicide already”. But did you want a budding Artaud when you knew of individuals – even in this relatively optimistic period – who’d had enough and slashed their wrists in the bath anyway? You shuddered and with no answers giving any eureka   we concentrated on producing stickers again tending to be repetitious of the past such as “Surrealism Is The Communism of Genius” but seeing this was Newcastle in the mid 60s and not Paris in the 30s it really wasn’t going to make much headway.                                                                                                                                                                                     

           Happenings, or rather at least some of them, were embraced although that didn’t stop us taking the piss out  of a Merce Cunningham performance of his supposed “free expression” dancers in London (much to the annoyance of some of the audience particularly when hearing Yorkshire accents – confirming perhaps the loutishness - of the provocateurs?) and putting on a nonsensical piano rendition performed by Trevor Winkfield mocking John Cage and taking delight in the fact that some idiots took it seriously. In fact we were mocking ourselves too as we had taken Cage and Cornelius Cardew seriously just a year previously and had even interviewed Cage in Icteric! Silence and the transcendence of music did really impact upon us though but we were left wondering about the process of its overcoming – and still are for that matter. Little did we realise how all half-negation can be capitalised and how avante garde sounds a la John Cage were to be turned into the music of Enrico Morioni as backdrop to the Spaghetti Westerns, that last gasp necessary ingredient that helped give the zing to the last consequent Westerns. We read with interest about the auto-destructive activities of Metzger and Latham’s book burnings disliking the fact that the latter were turned into objet d’arte to be hung on walls. We also pointed out - to everybody’s disbelief- that these acts of auto-destruction influenced The Who (the performance ritual of guitar smashing) smashing up your instruments as a substitute for a real smashing up. Being clued in, we also quoted Tzara’s dictum from a half century ago “musicians smash your instruments, let blind men take the stage”. As if to give a point to this we rather pointlessly repeated Tzara’s ROAR which just meant inviting everybody you could to turn up in a  Newcastle city car park and ROAR your head off. Maybe a couple of 100 or so did just that. Jean Jacques Lebel, the French happener, around the same time wrote a long article for Icteric which though tending to extol his happening nonsense at the time was somewhat lucid about Artaud and very anti police. Unbeknown to us, about the same time Don Smith and Rene Vienet, after a night drinking, went round to his apartment and thoroughly slagged him off for his confusions about art and general lack of coherent critique. Jean Jacques just stood there – more or less apologetically. Although years later Don felt rather bad about this, it obviously had a good effect on Jean Jacques, as he rapidly then developed a much more lucid and subversive take on society and of course was one of the French contingent who were to tear down the fences at the Isle of Wight pop festival in 1971. A bald attack can certainly be good at times in pulling people across who are hovering on the brink in any case. A final comment upon Icteric’s contents reveals a complete though, for the time, well-intentioned muddle. A quasi-scientific document on butterfly oddities and recollections of rapturous displays of these delightful insects was also published and in terms of the detritus of modernism, was one of the better things in the magazines. The same might be said of a text on the amazing activities of slugs, which fell between a kind of factograph and natural science. The fact is though if Icteric had appeared 20 years later it would have been instantly capitalised by the right wing Saatchi Brothers end of culture emporium. As it was we were heading in completely the opposite direction.

         We were also coming from jazz, the other corner stone of our end of culture orientation particularly a passion for be-bop and its aftermath. However, even on this front were becoming perplexed. Something was happening to jazz – it was beginning to fall apart and as much as we really desired to go along with John Coltrane’s latest developments we were flummoxed albeit, trying to pretend we weren’t. We were in fact beginning to relate the trajectory of jazz to the crises besetting the totality of modern art.

         As if to underline this in an Ornette Coleman/Don Cherry concert in Newcastle in 1966 we clamoured on the stage and put up in big letters, ICTERIC behind the performers. Interestingly, nobody objected and the jazzmen showed no interest whatsoever. Truth to tell, by then, we felt our statement (our Ad perhaps) was better than the free form jazz itself simply because we knew we’d become engaged on a free form quest ourselves perhaps far more searching than the free form jazz itself which we also dimly recognized was kind of heading in the same direction though without the same clarity. (Later, we equated the ghetto uprisings in the United States as its real creative outcome having surpassed the musical form).

         Moreover only three years previously a bunch of us in Newcastle had sat in awe in front of John Coltrane, Eric Dolphy, MaCoy Tyner and Elvin Jones, opened mouth at its transcendental brilliance knowing full well we were listening to something fantastic though even then – with a kind of premonition and a sad feeling in the gut – knowing somehow it wasn’t going to be repeated because real history was beginning to say something far more pertinent and which the last days of jazz was straining to discover to. (How one can have sense of such things in the offing perhaps we’ll never know). There was though a very enjoyable conclusion to this earlier moment. We and our friends – as per usual – sat through Coltrane’s rendition of God Save the Queen which was then an obligatory formality all entertainment paid lip service to. One of us, David Young, loudly proclaimed to the stage and audience alike: “that it was the best God Save the Queen" he’d ever sat through.

         The times were a’changing fast and the activities around Icteric were more and more moving towards total subversion. In no way could the group hold together and tensions within became palpable the more that risks were taken. In any case the group even when playing with the art/anti-art dichotomy had provoked outright hostility from the cultural establishment in Newcastle who were so conservatively brain-dead they couldn’t even see where their own cultural future lay. Instead of intelligently patronizing or co-opting or even simply realising there was nothing overtly anti the system  here (it was too confused for that)  they came down upon it forcibly and stupidly - none so much when an article was published in a rag called The Northerner in 1966. It’s perhaps worth quoting a few extracts from it……

“ It was becoming increasingly obvious to a few people that there was no longer any valid reason to make sculpture or paintings. Looking at the current art magazines revealed a uniform dullness: nothing seemed to shine anywhere. The real was so much more interesting than the simulated and offered so many more possibilities” which was  how it began. It was meant to be  intentionally provocative, encompassing a kind of put-on blatant philistinism The opening sentence was followed by an attack on all art from Rembrandt, through Degas to Rodin in the spirit of Dada – a movement which was praised - along with the most subversive anti-art aspects of Surrealism and Russian Constructivism  using ample quotes which ironically belied the ‘philistinism’:  Painting is a pharmaceutical product for idiots”(Francis Picabia) “art is nonsense” (Jacques Vache) and “the high images have fallen”(Andre Breton) etc.

       “ ……… what we did as a group (Icteric) was merely to recognise this and to notice that in the last 25 years there has been a shabby attempt at restoration. After the rejection of aesthetics by Constructivism and Surrealism, Cubism (which Picabia called a “cathedral of shit”) was reaffirmed with abstract expressionism.”………………………………………………………………………………………………                      

      “What artists do now is merely capitalise on a stage in development and not carry it off one quarter as well. For instance, Neo-Dada which is supposed to relate to Dada when it’s patently obvious that, say, a painter like Roy Lichtenstein relates more to Matisse than say, Duchamp. There is the same saleable gallery product, the same lovely “well applied paint”, and the same viewing distance from the “canvas” – even using a canvas! Incredibly conservative. Is Lichtenstein a salon painter – the 1960s Bougereau ? (a French academician in the late 19^th century). Is he even as good” ,

       “Are not Rheinhardt’s and Stella’s paintings about the death of painting? Painting about Malevich’s “deserts of vast eternity”? As Nietzche said: “The desert grows woe to him that bears the desert unto himself”. Malevich rejected the love of the desert and ended by making Suprematist designs for his coffin. Will Stella do likewise? It is distressing to see pictures that were done in an iconoclastic spirit now interpreted as how to make pictures.”

       “…If all there is in front of us is a future of style, style, style, we must still attempt to recreate this (fundamental fury) that motivated Surrealism, Dada and Constructivism – and that re-creation must not be a style neither. Perhaps we can start by burying Surrealism, Dada and Constructivism, by recognising that they were in turn second class revolutionary movements”.

     In a way this was all very pointed stuff for the ignorant times of the mid-60s and, moreover, in a very backward country in comparison to France and though working in the dark without knowledge of the International Lettrists or Situationists, nonetheless we were on the right path towards liberation preparing the ground, readying us as it were to hear and inwardly digest the more lucid grasp which had been taking place elsewhere, even though the same message was also not at all well known in its place of birth. In saying this though, the short text on Icteric was finally confused and inconsistent and these passages quoted above were the best parts.

     Nevertheless, as previously mentioned, this brief text created a furore among Newcastle’s cultural establishment. Some even called for legal sanctions particularly as it had come on the heels of a declamation proclaiming support for the floods in the Italian city of Florence in 1966, when the river Arno burst its banks and had devastated (or for us had “transformed”) the art treasures of that Renaissance city. No one came to our support and their was a loud silence from those - to be oh so famous - Tyneside Poets emanating from the somewhat avante gardism of Basil Bunting’s writings – around Tom Picard and the Morden Tower collective who’d proudly brought Allen Ginsberg to the cold Newcastle nights. They really didn’t like that assault on poetry. How dare we when surrounded by philistinism and straights in any case! In return we thought they were bollocks without a critique! Looking back perhaps one could say that such things were a kind of crude even vulgar though necessary provocation of traditional artistic values, Nowadays though, when we survive in a situation where the nihilism of post modernism in its re-development/commodification mania encompassing memories, willfully trashes these self same objets d’art and where “higher values” are seamlessly flattened out in the pure value of money from anything and everything, such stances just don’t have the same effect. Everything becomes an equivalent and Damien Hirst is the equal of Michaelangelo etc.

       We were cutting through crap as well as floundering. We were real at the same time as the media – in a general sense – was taking us. Maybe here it’s best to quote from a diary jotting of 1972 as it also recounts something of which we were feeling at the time. “The overt recuperation of the Happening though was already well underway as it headed towards the mainstream as utilised in - HELP - the first film by the Beatles. They also laughed at Neo-dada art objects - wire sculptures etc. New media techniques of montage and quick  splicing were developed as a form of hip youth cum-class-aggression against an ossified English ruling elite – but  all set firmly within a capitalist order.” At the same time, around 1966, re-reading Harold Rosenberg’s, The Tradition Of The New - a book mainly about American Abstract Expressionism - suddenly the best of his comments came into focus as we noted an undertow which Rosenberg didn’t dare clearly express. The Tradition of The New was better than the art commodities described – in particular beginning to notice that neo-Dadaist products were “the relics of subversion” and  “a ritualised vanguardism”. This was just what we wanted to hear and by then we had the wit  to distance ourselves  by then from his ultimately laudatory appraisal of  Abstract Expressionism.  A little later, in the same diary – looking at it again after all these years (!) - there follows something else and which still doesn’t make complete sense – though getting somewhere: “ The gestural, post  abstract expressionist activity, wasn’t enough without a better comprehension of the breakdown of everyday life. Taken as a one-dimensional, post artistic, it also couldn’t immediately comprehend the sheer totality of present day nihilism which does mean a greater comprehension of work, sex, personal relationships and the family, as well as the mirage of all important consumer identifications”.

      Around this time, Ron Hunt arranged an exhibition in Newcastle called “Descent into the Street” which despite the contradiction between the title and the situation and which we were aware of, clarified things further for us as it was a compilation of past acts in the first 40 or so years of the 20^th century where art was pushed historically behind us preparing the way for a greater general, communal creativity. It contained pointers towards the negation and supercession of art although we were still fuzzy about where the path of   supercession lay. In a sense the exhibition was the explanation of that history, if a little confused at times like bringing in examples of Maoist calisthenics etc. A little later Ron heard about the activities (from some marginal art magazine) about the activities of Black Mask in New York who’d made an intervention at some cultural meeting in a plush art gallery shouting “burn the museums baby”, “art is dead”, “Museum closed” etc. Exhilarated he told us and none too soon as we were in trouble! One of us (Johnny Myers) had just padlocked and chained up the entrance to the university art school preventing any student or teacher from entering and on which was placed a notice in big black letters: “Art School Closed Forever”. Moreover, just before that, he’d sprinkled gunpowder in a long trail down the interior steps and through the corridors of the sculpture school and was going to light it before getting stopped by horrified students who grassed him up .Soon letters were sent out to New York and we got replies immediately: “brothers/sisters come and join us”! So two of us (Dave Wise and Anne Ryder) went from Newcastle To New York and in the summer of 1967 engaged in some of the activities of Black Mask  (one which resulted in being held up by the police at an H. Rap Brown meeting) and/or simply enjoying their company and writing one or two things, particularly a completely over the top blood thirsty manifesto on which was placed the names of some of those who’d gathered around the now defunct Icteric. Having by then heard of the Situationists in New York Ben Morea gave us the personal addresses and telephone numbers of those individuals who resided in London whom we duly contacted on our return to England. But first another part of the missing link.

THE LATE 60s AND KING MOB.

      The English Situationists and the Newcastle rebellion join forces. Similarities and differences. Reading Marx, Lefebvre and Hegel. Black Mask and the Gordon riots of 1980. English romanticism and the guerrilla/gorilla actions of King Mob. Intervention against theatre. King Mob potlatch. Subversive wall slogans.

      Initially what resulted was a series of euphoric get-togethers in London ardently discussing everything under the sun in flats, pubs and other venues. A meeting - if you like – between north and south -  (to give a posthumous revision to Disraeli’s book of the same name) between us, Chris Gray,  Don N Smith, Tim Clarke and Charles Radcliffe.  In short, the English section of the Situationists. There was nothing formal at all about these passionate conversations and no thought of making groups, reconstituting ourselves etc and nothing about organisational forms/structures and what have you. Nor did we discuss much about our different survival situations – us on the dole, them with some money or other. Mainly it was all about what was unfolding in America – the student rebellion and the urban insurrections especially in Watts, Newark and Detroit, along with endless piecing together of radical theory coming together from the best of the old world of art and politics  - usually emphasising their most destructive aspects. Marx smashing the street lamps in London’s Kentish Town, Durutti smashing up chairs as bourgeois domesticated articles and inevitably the practical demolition of the world of art as conceived by the most aware artists, especially Lautremont. We equally lauded anti-art measures deployed by people other than artists. Insurgent anarchists were praised like when Bakunin hauled masterpieces from art galleries hanging them on the barricades of 1848 knowing  full well the military top brass would balk at destroying priceless artfacts thus giving some protection to the insurgents. The latter was communicated to Ben Morea in New York who, duly impressed, incorporated the same action during the barricaded sit-in around Columbia University in New York sometime later. Of course a lot of this re-reading and re-interpretation of history was affected by what was taking place on the streets in the here and now particularly the outbreaks of youth hooliganism in the western world of commodity domination which we saw as the potlatch  festivity bringing about the contemporary destruction of capitalism.  It was all, to be sure, rather too simplistic as others, much later, pointed out.  Even at the time, though ready to virtually destroy anything  in sight, nonetheless we   felt such vandalism had to be improved upon and initially, at the very least, accompanied by a theoretical explanation saying why we should encourage others to do such things. Everybody was also reading voraciously at the same time anything from Hegel to Marx, to Lefebvre to histories of the Spanish revolution of 1936 etc. A rapid coming together of revolutionary knowledge and thought from all over was kind of quickly assembled and in haste. In retrospect, there was too much haste as the immanent pressure of the times wasn’t allowing much space for good, reflective digesting. A few years later we sadly realized this was to prove a much more serious omission.

      Of course we also passionately discussed the Situationists and their predecessors finding out by word of mouth - from the horses mouth if you like - all the unknown history of post second world war cultural and political subversion and how we could no longer separate the two as they inevitably tended more and more to enmesh. Astonished, we heard about the Lettrist interventions in the 1950s particularly Michel Mourre’s invasion of Note Dame dressed as a priest incarnating a litany proclaiming “God is Dead” only to be set upon by the Swiss Guards with swords drawn ready to hack him to pieces finally escaping with some nasty cuts. Why had all this information been withheld from us was an initial response and only confirmed what we’d felt deep down all our lives:  England  was a truly conservative shit hole!

     It was all compelling stuff between us though Charlie Radcliffe was the most subdued, not to say a trifle cynical about it all, something that must have happened recently as remember he had been through the ordeal of a possible prison sentence because of his involvement with printing fake bank notes with a declaration against the Vietnam war printed across them. He was also becoming somewhat wearily hostile (well to some degree) with the Situationist scene and even in late 1967 could say: “You’ve got to have money to be a Situationist”. It was a fair enough comment on the English section of the SI - and it went home  alright – as we’d quickly realised  these were people of means and obviously were in receipt of tranches of inherited wealth which funded their refusal of work allowing them to experiment with a much greater freedom in acts of blatant refusal than the vast majority of those at the sharp end. On first meeting Chris Gray in an instance we thought “shit, this guy’s posh” but fuck it, it didn’t matter let’s get down to the real nitty gritty and does it matter where anybody comes from? We were aware of this privilege but equally we were aware at the time of the profundity of their comments and theoretical take on things that really were quite inspiring. Differences in economic position wasn’t though an obstacle at the times as all of us wanted to immediately  engage in subversive acts together, accompanied by high quality theoretical explanation which was way beyond anything the left could conceive. We knew we were capturing the hidden subversive tendency of the times and we knew it was really going to communicate. No question about it!

      Knowing Charlie Radcliffe so briefly it may have been better to have put some of this in the personal biography section here. It would also have been  inappropriate because his figure is so shadowy. He never overcame his disillusionment though one forgets how brilliant the guy had been. To take one example; memorably he asked some draughtsman to help him make a vicious satire Walt Disney’s world. Dollar signs were plastered all over the cartoon as the familiar characters indulged in all kind of rude things. Mickey Mouse was having a piss, Goofy was humping and so on. It was hilarious. The limited print run is now surely lost as the poster has never been reproduced. Slowly Charles Radcliffe was to disconnect himself from all contact, shying away, finally blanking you in the street in an embarrassed sort of way and rather ashamed about it. It sure was disconcerting as you were left wondering just what had you done? Little did we realize the man, along with Howard Marks (of “Mr. Nice Guy” fame) was getting into a lucrative hash and grass dealing syndicate which drew the line at  hard drugs. Interestingly, despite the increasing distance he was mimicking some of the romantic themes King  Mob was going a bundle on though the latter was utilizing them in a more revolutionary way. Charles Radcliffe’s cat and mouse game with custom and excise was straight out of Robert Louis Stevenson or maybe putting into play a pirates fantasy construct complete with pieces of eight buried in secret chambers on wild cliffs! Moreover, it wasn’t all for personal gain as some of the dosh was diverted to help fund some of the more radical underground press especially INK. However the whole scene though superficially rather swash-buckling was full of ‘grasses’ in the real sense of the term overlapping with spooks, the secret service and some gun running possibly related to the IRA. Though at a distance it could look attractive but isn’t also part of the very essence of the modern day entrepreneur?

      Of course there had been Situationists  from these islands previously in the persons of Alex Trocchi and Ralph Rumney but we hardly referred to them except to note they couldn’t escape the clutches of art as both their reputations were based within the cultural sphere: Trocchi as a novelist and Ralph Rumney as a painter.  Interestingly, Ralph Rumney who grew up in the north of England called his home town Halifax: “A town without culture”. On first reading this there was something of a “jeez that’s really getting somewhere” having experienced that warm, untutored behaviour which is so typical of the inhabitants of that town. No such thing however! He meant it in a derogatory way as a criticism of Halifax as Ralph Rumney never could let go of the role of artist except for a brief moment in the mid 1950s in Paris. What undoubted merit had been in the man in his early years picketing army recruitment centers in Bradford, draft dodging reading a forbidden copy of the Marquis de Sade and traveling – simply because he was forced to flee Halifax as well as England was simply lost overshadowed by all those dreadful collages and montages no better or worse than your average LP cover from the 1950s or 60s. Ironically, that “town without culture” in 2002 hosted an exhibition of their rehabilitated son.  Exile from art was never an option and truly today there really is no out of the way place escaping the deadly aesthetic embrace!

      King Mob was a spontaneous coming together of subversive youth from middle class and working class backgrounds though most had been through aspects of higher education, which they’d found to be a constant stream of ridiculous mumbo-jumbo. Distancing themselves from this experience they were engaged in a process of overthrowing all the received wisdom from their respective backgrounds. There was for a brief  - too brief – moment a remarkable similarity between them and little class hostility was evident in the paramount need to express the coming together of what we thought at the time was the  first total revolutionary critique in history. Sheer passion and the desire to live a life free of money (the intensified invasion of exchange) and the social relations of commodity production was the very essence of what we were about, so why should class matter in all of this? It was our negation and what we wanted – a new world – which mattered. In retrospect, class mattered  quite a lot particularly when the revolutionary moment had passed and there was a necessity to more accurately reflect on what had gone wrong in order to create a more substantial base for any future assault on the old order and to make certain a true history of the times and its failings would not be lost, if only to assist those coming. At the time though it was the pure desire to live authentically, to experience “Christmas on earth for the first time” as Rimbaud put it that really mattered.

       There was no thought of breaking away from the Situationist International among the original members and indeed at that time a magazine was been put together containing original texts freshly written. They were of a high standard and the projected SI mag was indeed better than what was to appear in the pages of King Mob a little later. They had a greater lucidity and coherence even though they tended to be somewhat repetitious of the French centre. On the other hand, they were shot through with asides on Anglo/American society drawing somewhat from previous Heatwave articles making them specifically pertinent to these societies. Most of these polemical texts have unfortunately been lost as the proposed magazine was abandoned very quickly though they’d all been collectively written, some making greater contributions than others. We saved the only known one: The Revolution of Modern Art and the Modern Art of Revolution put together by Chris Gray and Don with occasional help from Tim Clarke. Ten years later because of its outstanding quality we made photocopies of it, handing it around various individuals particularly ex-Infantile Disorders people in Leeds. One eventually found the way to BM Chronos who quite rightly published it as an important historical link as well as a very good piece of writing in itself. In that text there are references to Black Mask couched in a comradely critical way.

       And then came Vaneigem’s bombshell communication after his meeting with Black Mask in New York in late 1967. Principally Vaneigem objected to Alan Hoffman a kind of mystical but political acidhead who’d started to show an interest in Black Mask. We’d met him on the lower East Side with Ben Morea though Ben was thoroughly dismissive of him in mid ‘67 and just thought of him as a passive hippy unwilling to actively take on American society unlike the ghetto blacks or, to a lot lesser extent, the students. Actually, we couldn’t get on with Alan neither finding him not that dissimilar to the Newcastle Morden Tower poets whom we detested. It seemed as though he had more of a Beat take against American society, like some more clued-in Ferlinghetti than clearly anti-art and what have you - what with his Reichian orgone box psychologising tendencies which really were more the by-product of Wilhelm Reich’s persecution for adhering to revolutionary perspectives in the atmosphere of an American society experiencing the first taste of what was to become McCarthyism. Generally Ben was really down on the hippies in the Lower East Side and when panhandling asking us for spare change, he’d aggressively turn on them, saying, “ask the fucking tourists”. Ben in any case at the time survived through part time shit jobs, window cleaning and what have you and he didn’t have many benign liberal sympathies on that level. He’d come from a fairly poor Italian American background and wasn’t that enamoured of those more economically privileged although, unlike these islands, he wasn’t always mouthing off about the middle classes. One forgets the speed of events and individuals were changing themselves within days and hippies rapidly became a lot more than hippies starting to fight back taking on the police etc. It was this general movement that brought Ben and Alan closer together. Also, Ben had a serious liver complaint and he couldn’t touch alcohol thus acid went down very nicely. What became the counter culture though was fast developing in subversive directions and the overlap between Alan Hoffmann and Ben Morea was something that must have been repeated countlessly throughout America in the late 60s. Of course there were bad things to it and mysticism was one of them. Ben was inevitably very upset about Vaneigem and started raving on in letters about the man of letters disposition he put across accusing him of not knowing anything about those at the bottom of the pile and street life in general. This created quite a dilemma in London as Chris Gray and Don N Smith in particular wanted to keep all the newfound friendships here alive and kicking. Knowing our friendliness with Ben Morea they didn’t want to cause too many upsets before things had really kicked in in terms of doing something together. Presumably because of their prevarication they were excluded from the Situationists and the rest, as they say, is history. It was a major factor though that never came out in the officially recognised reasons for the exclusion as put out by the French section.

        Out of this lacunae and initial disorientation followed by a kind of re-think,  King Mob developed. The biggest influence in it by far was Chris Gray who moved his abode from the Earls Court area to Shrewsbury Rd in Notting Hill, an area chosen as  one that offered possibility for finding other similar people with its air of general marginality. It was also cheap and flats and bed-sits were easy come easy go. Although unique in London Notting Hill had other equivalents like Balsall Heath in Birmingham and Whalley Range in Manchester. The split off from the Situationists caused soul searching but the spirit of the times was clearly moving fast and the need to work out some on-going activity keenly felt. At the time, Smiths, the popular  newspaper and trashy mag newspaper chainstore brought out a series of attractively presented folders on various events in the history of these islands. One of them was on the Gordon riots of 1781 in London when a huge swathe of the capital’s destitute population was swept up in an orgy of looting, burning and bitter revenge.  A guy called Hillary had written a book on the subject, which though reactionary in tone and stance brought out the awesome majesty of that splendid occasion. On the walls of a destroyed Newgate prison some insurgent had painted up: “His Majesty King Mob”. This seemed too good to miss as a title for a magazine cover and moreover we were connecting with a great though relatively unknown past. Obviously the book provided the basis for the modern presentation sold by Smiths which also included lots of drawings, paintings and lithographs illustrating the fury of the event. We avidly poured over it liberating further copies for others to read. We weren’t really interested in the whys and wherefores of the riots like its “No Popery” it was the fact that London was put to the force of fire and we were thus liberally interpreting the picture ourselves as we dreamed of doing the same thing all over again!  From the fall of 1967 we began doing just that well before any such magazine came into existence, preparing the ground as it were by spraying up big wall slogans and producing lots of small stickers viciously satirizing the “I’m Backing Britain” campaign promoted by the then Labour party PM, Harold Wilson  who was trying to encourage workers to spend a few hours every week working for nothing thus, according to the propaganda, helping save the country! Some schmucks did and were congratulated on camera by Wilson himself. Stickers were produced with slogans on them like  "Bugger Britain”, “ IWW - I Won’t Work”, “Never Work” (Marx), “Fuck Exploitation” -  while underneath the wording there was a miniature Union Jack. Basically Don was behind all of this and he handed lots of them out to anybody mindful to gum them up wherever they could.

         Of course, the title King Mob Echo suggested we wanted to make an impact – essentially a popular impact without being populist which meant something quite different to a mass circulation, 20^th century Daily Echo type newspaper. The magazine itself became the first of a bunch – the first and the best – though that’s not saying much. By 1971 even run of the mill leftists were doing things along similar lines. “7 Days”, for instance was heralded as a left wing tabloid harking back to the days of Picture Post but unlike King Mob Echo, it was full of specialist articles on rock music, TV and what have you written by various left wing career specialists who were already doing very well for themselves  (e.g. Stuart Hood, the former controller of the BBC etc). Somewhat later, John Barker (ex-Angry Brigade) proposed producing the “Pink-Un”, a kind of popular newssheet mimicking in style, if not in content, the old Saturday night sports gazette. No doubt a man with the insight of a John Barker would have created something OK but like many schemes we’ve all had it never saw the light of day.

        Quite quickly King Mob developed into the most consequential critique emanating from the detritus of culture in Britain in the 20^th century and far superceding anything posited by the Vorticists around Wyndham Lewis and the anemic English Surrealists. Its influence was widespread only for its cutting edge to be blunted almost immediately and over the ensuing years, to be completely lost. It changed a climate only to linger on as a distorted shadow and a trendy image. In its pristine condition, King Mob challenged all artistic form – something, which had never remotely happened in these islands before though there had been precursors during the Romantic movement in the late 18^th and early 19^th century though those early essential innovations were to be eradicated by subsequent events not least through the Imperial triumph of Britain in Europe and the world during the Victorian epoch, a legacy  the enemy within still hasn’t recovered from.

         Action became everything and disruption a daily event including some pretty good hand to hand fighting with the police in the anti-Vietnam war demos despite completely disagreeing with the leftists with their slogan of Victory to the Vietcong etc. It’s true we wanted to start the war in England but we wanted it to take place on a higher and more visionary level than any civil war in history – a war where everything institutionalised would be deemed worthy of target and subverted with maximum clarity.

        Most of the actions were spontaneous affairs, though a few were planned a few days – at most a couple of weeks – in advance and were worked out to some degree, although always allowing a lot of autonomy in this provisional working out. We never informed the police and the broad outlines of what we intended doing was passed on down through eager friends into that new grapevine/diaspora which so quickly hove into the horizons of existence in the late 60s. There was sufficient advance warning of the action allowing others to make their personal contributions if they were so minded. In fact, when the interventions occurred there were always enough unfamiliar faces to add interest plus the anticipation of getting to know them personally afterwards.  The well-produced Selfridges leaflet was perhaps the only real advance publicity even though no date and time was placed upon the proposed action as it was up to those enthusiastic individuals who took away bunches of these leaflets to communicate these facts. This leaflet, along with those sparse others we produced, always went from hand to hand. We shunned leftist or anarchist bookshops in distributing these leaflets (though not for magazines like King Mob I etc but even this was done sparingly as we really did hate bookshops!)  This way of hand to hand distribution also did mean that the police were always taken by surprise even though, inevitably they turned up within half an hour to round up and sometimes arrest the usual suspects, more or less in the time it took for any old pub brawl to get sorted by them.

       The intervention in the Powis Square dispute in Notting Hill in the spring of ’68 that basically announced King Mob in the arena of an anti-publicity publicity, was arranged entirely by word of mouth and with no accompanying leaflet. Although most of us had just recently moved into the West London area (it was in the days of the ubiquitous cheap bed-sit and the rented shared small flat existing before the squatting era) we were quickly aware of local anger about the lack of play space for children which in Notting Hill had resulted in children been knocked down by cars. Finally, a child had been killed. There were green spaces around alright – big enclosed garden areas – but they were for the leisure activities of  an isthmus of rich people who in a pastiche of ribbon development, extended down into the “Gate” from the rich folks on the (proper) Notting Hill. At the time they were seen as the colonisers and sadly three decades later were finally to completely occupy our homeland and steal our very lives from us.  In 1968 they were fenced off from the local community by seven foot high iron railings and the poor were denied access to their lovely green lawns. Complaints were visible alright but the protest was led by the paraphanalia of Labour and Communist party types via the umbrella of the Notting Hill Peoples Association, a multi-racial ad hoc community forum made up of largely unpaid community activists hanging on to the shirt tails of  reasonably well-funded do-gooders like George Clarke whose charisma induced a resentful though somewhat acceptable subservient response from his subalterns. The “protest” - if you could call it that - was a lack-lustre, pusillanimous, official affair. We decided to change all that simply to test our metal and we didn’t even bother to inform the local leftist worthies just what we were about. They’d have objected in any case to our proposals and would, most likely, have informed the police. Instead, we arranged through word of mouth to attack the fences surrounding the square on a Saturday afternoon when there’d be enough people having a weekend drink-up or strolling through Portobello market to get perhaps a few of them  to join us. A gorilla suit and a circus horse outfit were hired for the occasion.

          Thus, in a crowded Henekeys pub on one Saturday lunch-time in April ’68, one of us went into the lavatory and put on the gorilla suit.  A black bomber speed lozenge helped  which though encouraging confidence, also made things hotter inside the makeshift fur. Like “Morgan: A Suitable Case for Treatment” (an English film about schizophrenia at the time) the theme of man/gorilla was put into real  play – and consciously so - meaning  put whatever  the recent spectacle contains into concrete action - in order to come up with some real subversion. Roaring out the lavatory and pounding the gorilla’s stiffened cardboard chest  - a la Morgan –  causing some drinkers to shriek and drop glasses, the creature shot out of the pub immediately (as planned) meeting the circus horse and all those other  (unplanned)  people who we hoped would be there. We needn’t have worried. There were plenty. Together we all set off down Portobello Road shouting our heads off asking all onlookers to join us in pulling down the fences around Powis Square so that local kids could have somewhere safely to gamble about in. Well, a lot more other things were shouted out too because this had become instantly an occasion where you could shoot your mouth off and if it was ostensibly about kids it was also much more about total revolution - for us big kids - and that came across loud and clear. Arriving at Powis Square we set about the fences though within minutes, as expected, police vans arrived and the arrests started during some violent scuffles. The gorilla and the circus horse were arrested along with a fair number of species of homo sapiens. In the dock at Marylebone Magistrates Court, (that familiar place!) two days later, the judicial procedures turned into an act of hilarity particularly when the front end of the horse pleaded “guilty” and the back end “not guilty”    (“Irish” and Abbo) simply because the back end couldn’t see what was happening up front! A copper objected to having been bruised by one of the gorilla’s paws – and so on. Well, people were rolling around in the court with barely suppressed laughter though later the local press hardly mentioned this laughable commotion.  Remember, it was in the days before the let-it-all-hang-out sensationalism which sells more copy than ever it did in the late 60s. Finally the court farce received attention in a This England column in the New Statesman.  At the time this was called publicity and even high-profile! Even the Selfridge’s invasion, a year later, only received a bit column in the liberal  Observer Sunday, culture-bug news rag. Yet, much later the event was to become some kind of talisman - although if it hadn’t been for the spectacular recuperation of Malcolm McLaren and Punk Rock most likely this wouldn’t have been the case.

         In the aftermath of this attractive but violent intervention, demonstrations then began to take place regularly. Finally, one Saturday afternoon, soon after the initial eruption, a determined assault was made and the fences were torn down with the police more or less looking on. They were torn down with the assistance of mainly, direct action Maoists from the local Vietnam Solidarity Committee. Some of the local community stalwarts – mostly working class and who’d been having a rough time – though  flattered by the attention of middle class community activists with funded means  and now acquiring a modicum of status – people like Pat McDonald (who now has a blue plaque to her name over Powis Square) - were the most vociferous in attacking the insurgents. Yet they were almost immediately  – with the fences flat on the green grass - to regain the campaign initiative instituting all the legal requirements, as Powis Square became an official children’s playground. They were essentially the worker bureaucrats and need we say more! Well, truth to say, all of us – Maoists and Autonomist Situationists alike - let them get on with it as we really weren’t that interested in mealy-mouthed council machinations.  All of us – ersatz  Stalinists to the “Nameless Wildness” people - just wanted everything to explode everywhere. It was our only concrete overlap though an impassioned one. More particularly, us lot certainly weren’t interested in institutionalised space or even in a controlling space delivering an anodyne version of a child’s increasingly desperate desire for play  administered by aspiring youth workers well interested in an easier job via those new frontiers of the State which were (just to say) beginning to open up. On the contrary, we wanted to see uncontrolled children’s play. If that was a further liberating factor in urban riot so much the better and spontaneous, vandalistic exuberance – a real throwing off of the history of civilization as well as its application to the needs of capitalism – was beckoning.

       On a hot and barmy evening during June 1968 in the midst of a rare drinking bout downing whisky (in the heady days of that year pure grass or hash – or nothing at all – were preferred) somebody amongst us presented us with a leaflet advertising a play by the contemporary Spanish avante gardist play write, Arrabel.  The performance was taking place nearby up by the tube station at Notting Hill Gate. It was actually occurring in a church obviously run by some hip vicar. (In fact it was the venue where that obnoxious and trendy Gate Theatre aestheticism sprang from - later to situate itself above a nearby pub) This montage of modern art and religion was rather appropriate and certainly enough to glowingly invite attack. We just couldn’t pass this chance up and drunkenly stumbled up there, laughing and joking and intent on trouble. We went in through the door and saw this bunch of obviously avante garde performers strutting their stuff on a stage. It didn’t really matter to us that Arrabel was a persecuted artiste in Franco’s  Fascist Spain. For us, the avante garde – wherever they were situated – were the enemy too regardless of the particular repressive conditions they lived in. Maybe this at the time was too simplistic. Certainly, a distinction should perhaps have been made between the differences performing Arrabel in Madrid and London. True, but what the fuck when you are also coherently drunk! After all, at the time, you would have had no hesitation in disrupting the anti-theatre theatre, nihilistic presentations of Samuel Beckett even though he had excommunicated himself from Ireland - having suffered a nervous breakdown on Dun Loaghoire pier product of a state enforced Catholic repression making things impossible for him. But were such personal experiences adequate enough reasons for the existence of The Theatre of the Absurd? Whatever - back to that lovely evening! Immediately we took over the stage pushing the actors aside and from this platform started mouthing on loudly about the need to destroy the separation between art and politics in the search for a new form of self-activity which must involve social revolution.. Some tried unsuccessfully to drag us of off the stage mostly (and interestingly) from the audience, picking on  women disrupters more than  men. Some of the actors came up to us and said they were in agreement with France May ‘68 that was still taking place at the time though in its final death throws. We replied: “how can you when you are still prepared to accept the acting role reinforcing the audience/performance separation – the very lynch pin of modern day capitalist passivity” - or some such words. It was anyway more or less that.  We weren’t thrown out. We left in disgust as nobody came up to us and said they agreed.  The strength of the Emperor’s Clothes of an “art” having lost all creativity – yet how this awesome vacumn was to grow! “Love Thy Void” a contemporary slogan was to say but as Nietchze wrote so long before that: “The desert grows, woe to him that bears the desert unto himself”. Wasn’t Malevich’s, White Square that very desert devastatingly posited in another form and wasn’t avant garde art to repeat  this statement  from then on, endlessly? The amazing fact is: why hasn’t there been thousands more of these  Arrabel-like disruptions and getting ever better? The last thing we wanted our disruption to be was as a one off pointing to nothingness.  A  voice to be spectacularised as  a contemporary  Mallarme-like Dice Throw of unique subversion. How we failed!

         Later, during 1968, on one of the summer demonstrations against the Vietnam war which frequently took place in central London, King Mob made a contribution of a different sort. Abbo made a gigantic mock hamburger with a dummy  American G.I. stuffed between a kapok imitation of a giant bread role. It was then trundled through the streets of central London around Mayfair and Tottenham Court Road accompanied by a replica of a huge baked bean can (again made by Abbo) which housed 4 people. Obviously this play on gigantism  was also a comment on the pop art of Oldenburg and Warhol – putting it to real purpose and not fetishising it via the now purely marketing con of the gallery product – and needless to say the way it should be used. The demonstration was supposed to be a serious moment of opposition to U.S. Imperialism. After the Powis Square events, the Maoists more than any other leftists showed interest. Thus some of the individuals on the inside of the can belonged to various Maoists “splittists” – as they bizarrely referred to themselves and much to our amusement. Although a couple of them were unreconstructed Stalinists nonetheless inside the can they quite merrily shouted; “beans, beans, beans, beans” endlessly picking on the same ditty some others had recently deployed in a disruption  in Newcastle! In a minor way it was part of the birth of that Maoist spontaneism which produced Mao Spontex in France in ’69 and ten years later, Mao Dada in Italy and which still finds an echo in the early 21^st century in a similar Mao Dada movement in Brazil. Was it just pure opportunism to collaborate with such people or was not the momentum of the time daily changing these people too, though only in a piecemeal and not a unified way, which despite our own manifest shortcomings, nonetheless we were also possessed b? The trouble is  “unity” for these spontaneous though disintegrating Maoists never seemed to arrive.  Like the “beans” there were only glimpses. One of the Maoists had until recently been an engineering worker in a very large Glasgow factory and was fed up listening endlessly on reverential knees to Harry McShane – one of the most principled of the old Red Clydesiders. Simply the Maoist guy was open to making changes and fresh discoveries. Are you to reject such a person out of hand? Later he was to live for years on Chicago’s south side and was the only pale face around.

          There were also a number of other things broadly done in the same way as the interventions described above. In 1969, we intervened within and against the Notting Hill Carnival, hiring a truck and fitting it out as a moving Carnival float. At that time the Carnival was a polyglot affair and anybody who lived in the Notting Hill environs was welcome to join in and make a statement with the minimum of bureaucratic hassle or exacting procedure from the organisers, just as long as it wasn’t fascist or racist. The Carnival had been going for a number of years and was – typically for Notting Hill – the invention of Ronnie Lazlitt, a white woman, community worker. Only during the 70s did the Carnival gain an almost exclusively Caribbean flavour with the formation of the Carnival and Arts Committee. We only decided to join in as a wind-up, as an occasion to demonstrate some real (black!) humour and not to affirm any shallow media image the area was rapidly acquiring. Mind you we weren’t open with the Carnival organisers about what we proposed to do. In fact the truck simply joined the parade surreptitiously but no one much seemed to care. A “Miss Notting Hill 1969” at the centre of the float was a piss-take on the scantily dressed Miss World TV contest as it was also a means of mildly detourning the glitzy, somewhat razzmatazz image of the Carnival. Simply put, “Miss Notting Hill” was nothing other than a heroin addict with a mock three-foot long hypodermic full of red paint stuck in her arm. The trouble is as the parade went through the street few tried to stop it and nobody really objected to its presence with any conviction. Enough people though were perplexed as to what was been stated. Some did laugh at the cynical joke side of it. It’s possible the float might have had more effect but unfortunately a torrential downpour lasting hours scuppered all of that. On this occasion though it would have been better to have provided some explanatory leaflet even if it  was only  some hotch potch of our reflection on drugs etc, some of which – as this text gives some idea about – were pretty interesting. As it stood, it could have easily meant  something else entirely. The “intervention” was thus more like a dissident, bad stage-prop contribution that wasn’t really questioning the audience/performer fulcrum and which the changing face of the spectacle would soon well enough accept and with alacrity. Hardly surprising then that it was around this time  Chris Gray came up with the idea of the utterly atrocious, vile and offensive pop group which became the spawning ground of punk rock  and which would functionng through exactly the same fulcrum as the Carnival float thereby negating any assault on modern capitalism.

          In most of these actions though there was a common underlying way of doing things. Most of them involved carnival-like,  post-Dada like props in one way or another. Again, as the comment by Vaneigem which fronts this book suggests, this had its legacy in the collapse of modern art as it moved towards its demise dialectically transforming itself as some of its impulse moved into a creativity made by all and not by one. More needs to be said however. These actions accompanied by bits and pieces of paraphanalia also provided a cue for performance art or, later, the active advertisement or, simply, those  TV japes without any profundity  like Trigger Happy TV etc  and which really are quite nauseating. Even at that time, John Fox – in what became “The Welfare State” troupe - was to use something of a similar formula suitably emasculated of all subversive content. A little later he collaborated with the musician Mike Westbrook in inane events deploying elaborate sets with costumes/puppets and what have you which brought him cultural accolade in real nonsense extravaganzas like “The Apocalyptic High Dive” which involved 50 participants jumping from a tower whilst symbolically disemboweling ravens.( A kind of Maldoror without depth like an Eric Cantona poem without  Rimbaud.’s lucidity). John Fox had been involved in the mid-60s agitation in Newcastle but was one of those who quite quickly  turned rancorously against the revolutionary negation it was leading to. “Art is Dead do not consume its corpse” didn’t go down well at all because that was what John Fox was very precisely to finally design as product. Moving with the globilising times, by 2001 John Fox was calling his outfit, “The International Welfare State”. Still capitalising on frozen moments (well for him) of the Newcastle revolt with his “Art of Death” installation in London’s Round House (Winter 2001) which recalled the Icteric death questionnaire and the reconstruction of Malevich’s coffin, Fox now manufactures differently conceptualised but still trivial funerial commodities as a supposed new  way of dealing with death! Well, someone’s got to do it. 

         On the cusp of the 70s some of us were becoming all too keenly aware of just how those far more principled interventions we’d been involved could be used by a power eager for fresh stimulus. We were becoming more and more critical of the trappings, thinking we should become more severe on ourselves and more spare in what we did, in order to further distance ourselves from any semblance of the aura of a late and moribund modern art which we might be in danger of becoming decked-out with. After all some of the English Beat poets - Mike Horowitz etc – were beginning to patronise our wall slogans, reproducing them along with the odd flyer of ours in newly published  avante garde books with their names prominently splashed all over them. We heard they wanted to meet us and get to know us etc. We naturally blanked this with disdain. By the early 70s, sad to say, it seemed Chris Gray also wanted also to somehow formalise and find funding for this type of more explicit intervention enumerated above (c/f appendix on Chris Gray) but the essential people he would have needed to carry this project through were, by then, too pissed-off to  step back into a recent past just at the moment they were finding it virtually impossible to go forward!

          On another level and nowhere near so semi-formalised as this, bit by bit we hoped through weaving in and out, we’d begin to encounter the forces which could materially realise the dreamt-of real potlatch of destruction as daily we contributed our small offerings to the process of furthering decomposition. Some of us almost on a daily basis kept gate-crashing the offices of the burgeoning underground press slagging them off for their lack of any theoretical grasp as well as their failure to get involved in any form of cutting edge direct action. It was also hardly surprising that we tried to turn ritualised demonstrations into orgies of  generalised destruction. On March the 17^th, 1968 we started to turn over cars in Oxford St getting quickly pushed aside rather heavily by demo stewards. Obviously we were nervous anyway about provoking such a break in England’s recent tradition of peaceful protest and thus connecting again with its distant but deep riotous past! By October of the same year such assaults had become easier to carry out  (in the meantime, insurgents had quite magnificently smashed up a lot of cars in France) and we were a lot less fearful as we contributed to violent disorder smashing show room windows and trashing the regalia of the rich near the Hilton Hotel in Hyde Park as well as giving many a camera a good seeing to when those stupid idiots within our own ranks of protestors started clicking shutters. (The latter tactic seems much in need of revival when nowadays there are often more cameras than demonstrators on demonstrations).

        For us at the time Vaneigem was one of the first individuals  bringing into clear focus the destructive potlatch of rebellious youth and wildcat strikers in their first mass outbreak of spontaneous violence when they smashed up cars, neon signs and burnt out newspaper offices in the Belgium general strike of 1961. We didn’t then know there had been a more theoretical history leading up to this which had come from a gelling together of ethnographers like Levi Strauss and latter-day Surrealist academics like George Bataille. Did this really matter because we’d certainly got the real point when put in a contemporary context? At the time and well into the 70s, the official left ( including Trotskyists) condemned or generally dismissed these manifestations as unfortunate excesses of the proletariat and not as manifestations of their revolutionary essence. At the same time though even in these  actions things quickly turned out to be not quite so simple.

                              As thoughts from a 1972 diary was to reflectively elaborate.

       “ On the other hand by the early 70s, certain small groups – probably initially recognising this potlatch for the joy it was –tended in a loose, pointlessly-organisational sense ( and sometimes as a limbering up prelude to terrorism) to imitate and spectacularise this potlatch in various pre-meditated, voluntaristic actions like trashing whereby this, by now processed, false potlatch, became a “doing i