Above: The slogan that adorned the Hammersmith & City tube line at Westbourne Park, West London formany years before obliterated by tag banality

Above: some of the stickers mocking the "I'm Backing Britain" campaign initiated by the then Labour PM, Harold Wilson

 

Above: Two King mob posters (The Luddite letter was a found object in

EP Thompson's "The Making of the English Working Class")

There follows what was soon to be regarded as sexist and crude by the first wave of nice, refined feminists who alarmingly quickly dismissed King Mob in a simplistic way as male chauvinist. Had they never been in a public urinal (?) to find this is the type of stuff which goes down - often more in women toilets than men's - though most of this now in our cleansed day and age is instantly wiped clean by hired firms of graffiti busters. These cartoons were of course a detournemont of bog-wall style and deployed precisely for shock value in relation to a fairly dire occupation at the London School of Economics heavily manipulated by the paid-up intellectuals of New Left Review. The guy who did this never got anywhere though later his lovely partner from down home Liverpool did say the basis of feminist hate was the white working class male which, only changed after the feminists experienced - what were then called - third world males! The original feminists never knew a thing about what could be achieved by deploying crude diversion but there again they were antipathetic to the spirit of '68 instantly intent on re-vamping a Labour party hostile to concepts of autonomy and open assemblies never mind the death of art! Yes, the cartoons were crude but they were meant to be. Finally though, you couldn't have met a nicer, more caring, penniless, hurt guy than our friend, Richard 'Irish' Bell, who did these drawings! In the years to come, the all-pervasive feminist ambience made sure these drawings were never ever reproduced though for Malcolm Mclaren they mightily helped influence the outlines of Punk and its imagery. And where would all women punk groups like The Slits have been, which feminists then opportunistically raved about, without these much more profound indicators pointing to an entirely different reality to that of radical image making?

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Above: Xmas leaflet which accompanied the invasion of Selfridges in 1968. Many were handed out to shoppers and many scattered across Oxford St

Above right: A piss take on the technocratic and future ultra capitalised city centre of Newcastle as conceived by the planners in 1968. Reproduced in a local gestetnered mag

Below: Detourned comix from the first Dublin based Gurriers mag (A "gurrier" was Dublin lingo for a teddy boy)

For other articles on King Mob see the following:

• A Hidden History of King Mob (Posters/Cartoons)
• A Hidden History of King Mob
• A Hidden History of King Mob (Conclusion)
• Lost Ones Around King Mob
• King Mob: Icteric & the Newcastle Experience from the early to late 1960s