Now into their late 60’s, and still working the buildings with the same London gang they’ve been with since the late 70’s, key King Mob faces Dave and Stuart Wise have never stopped writing and agitating, and this, a companion volume to last years’ warmly received ‘King Mob: A Critical Hidden History’, pulls together polemics, reflections, and righteous rants from the last 30 years. Opening up with ‘Like A Summer With A 1000 July’s’ extensive, sideways look at the wave of urban in...
Now into their late 60’s, and still working the buildings with the same London gang they’ve been with since the late 70’s, key King Mob faces Dave and Stuart Wise have never stopped writing and agitating, and this, a companion volume to last years’ warmly received ‘King Mob: A Critical Hidden History’, pulls together polemics, reflections, and righteous rants from the last 30 years. Opening up with ‘Like A Summer With A 1000 July’s’ extensive, sideways look at the wave of urban insurrection that swept inner city UK in 1981; debunking punk’s ‘situationist myth’ in ‘The End Of Music’, and a brief, but definitive look at the glorious ‘King Mob/Father Xmas at Selfridges’ prank of 1968. ‘Nietzsche: Revolutionary’ looks at the much revered/contested philosopher as "a reluctant communist", "proto ecologist" and "brother Hegelian. Separate chapters look back with affection and honesty at old friends, comrades and English Situationist founders Ralph Rumney and Alexander Trocchi respectively. Along the way, shards of surrealism cut through: the assault on art "in the great mod battle of Keswick", when "a travelling theatre was again torched, " or the Dadaist guerrilla flavoured August ’81 bank holiday attack when "the model railway station at Brighton was molotoved by white youths."And whilst an unwavering ideological perspective firmly rejects the stasis of the post war ‘revolutionary left’, just as it recoils in disgust at encroaching Neo Liberal barbarism, Dave Wise never shies away from reflecting on the personal, via the prism of the political :"Guy and Michele broke up around 1970everybody’s relationship did, including my own; a break up I never got over, and I’ve thought about my beloved Anne Ryder every day of my life since. These break-ups weren’t about sexual difficulties or inadequacies nor about not being able to relate or even love, but finally about history and how the most profound revolt ever experienced failed so utterly, and the essential by-product of such failure was a psychosomatic pain so desperate it seemed in need of therapeutic treatment; a treatment simple warm cuddling and quiet affection couldn’t match. We stormed and smashed open the gates of paradise to let in every exploited nutter who cared to join in… yet on the brink of utopia we were refused entry and where, just where, could you go from such a point of no return?"
