# King Mob

King Mob was an English radical group based in London during the late 1960s and early 1970s.
Influences on the group included the Situationist International and the New York City group Black Mask / UAW/MF. It derived its name from Christopher Hibbert's 1958 book on the Gordon Riots of June 1780, in which rioters daubed the slogan "His Majesty King Mob" on the walls of Newgate Prison, after gutting the building.

## Background

On 21 December 1967 Timothy Clark, Christopher Gray and Donald Nicholson-Smith were excluded from the Situationist International. Charles Radcliffe had resigned from the SI a couple of months before this. These four had constituted the English Section of the SI and subsequently formed King Mob with twin brothers David and Stuart Wise, who had recently arrived in London from Newcastle.

## Activities

The group published five issues of its journal King Mob Echo as well as many posters and leaflets.
One of King Mob's first actions took place in April 1968. Members of the group, including one dressed in a gorilla costume and two in a pantomime horse outfit, led a procession of local people to Powis Square where the fences enclosing a private garden space were demolished in protest at a lack of play areas for children in the area. Several arrests followed, but the action resulted in further protests culminating in the local council purchasing the square for public use.
In December 1968, inspired by the New York-based Black Mask's "mill-in at Macy's", King Mob entered the Selfridges store in London, with one member, dressed as Father Christmas, attempting to distribute all of the store's toys to children. Police subsequently forced the children to return the toys. This action involved Malcolm McLaren who reputedly applied the group's situationist ideas in the promotion of the Sex Pistols.
King Mob also allegedly made plans for a series of other actions, including blowing up a waterfall in the Lake District, painting the poet Wordsworth's house with the words "Coleridge Lives", and hanging peacocks in Holland Park, London. However, none of the aforementioned plans were executed.
Graffiti attributed to King Mob was observed in many places, particularly in the Notting Hill area, including, "I don't believe in nothing - I feel like they ought to burn down the world - just let it burn down baby." The most celebrated graffiti attributed to King Mob was the slogan which was painted along a half-mile section of the wall beside the tube (railway) commuter route into London between Ladbroke Grove and Westbourne Park tube stations in west London:
    "Same thing day after day – tube – work – dinner – work – tube – armchair – TV – sleep – tube – work – how much more can you take? – one in ten go mad – one in five cracks up."

## Legacy

Pink Floyd's Roger Waters claimed that the "Same Thing Day After Day" graffiti inspired the song "Time" which appeared on the group's 1973 Dark Side Of The Moon album.
In their book, Sex Pistols: The Inside Story, Fred and Judy Vermorel assert that King Mob had a significant influence on the punk group:
   "But if the Sex Pistols stemmed from the Situationist International, their particular twist of radical flash and burlesque rage was also mediated through a band of hooligan pedants based in the Notting Hill Gate area of London. This was King Mob."
King Mob was the inspiration for the principal character of the same name in the 1990s comic strip series The Invisibles by Grant Morrison.
An anthology of the original King Mob journal titled King Mob Echo: English Section of the Situationist International was edited by Tom Vague and published by Dark Star and AK Press in 2000.
David and Stuart Wise continued to publish material under various guises including BM Bis, BM Blob and then the Revolt Against Plenty and Dialectical Butterflies websites.