Have not uploaded a live performance by the most excellent Mob for a while, so here you go…have fun!
Brother Tuck supplied the artwork above.
SOMETHING WRITTEN BY AN OLD FOLLOWER OF THE MOB
There was something uniquely English about The Mob which to this day is difficult to define. A loose, understated eccentricity. A strangeness, fuelled by their association with free festivals and LSD. I can remember the Porky Prime Cut messages scratched on the inner groove of their records: ‘Acid Punks’, ‘Take a trip down’ etc.
Unlike most of the Crass-type bands, The Mob never offered any solutions or calls for action. They simply described how things were and how they felt. While Crass et al attempted to inspire through anger, The Mob inspired through being very truthful. While some put forward pacifism as an answer and others direct action, The Mob offered no answers at all and in this respect they were just like us because we also had no real answers. We all knew the world was wrong but none of us really knew what to do about it. It is this aspect of The Mob that makes them very important in the scheme of 1980’s anarcho punk rock. They were the same as us. They were closer to us than most other bands, closer I imagine than they ever really knew. Though the music they played was relatively simple, the sound the band made was very big and it translated well from small squatted venues to more sizeable and established venues, from small audiences to larger free festival audiences.
Equally important of course, the sound translated well to each listener alone in their homes. I always thought they could have been a hugely successful band in the sense of reaching out to a much wider audience. They were getting better all the time, their last single ‘The Mirror Breaks’ was even covered a few years later, after the band had ceased recording or performing live, by an indie band from Glasgow, The Close Lobsters, for that band’s John Peel session. For some reason, however, they called it a day but in doing so they passed into legend.
John Serpico (Bristol, England)
