The Mob - No Doves Fly Here - Ching Cassette Tape - Demo Version

NO DOVES FLY HERE: A PLEA FOR PEACE.
SOME WORDS WRITTEN BY ALISTAIR LIVINGSTON - MUCH MISSED - MAY HE REST IN PEACE.
“We are not afraid of ruins. We are going to inherit the earth. There is not the slightest doubt about that. The bourgeoisie may blast and burn its own world before it finally leaves the stage of history. We who ploughed the fields and built the cities can build again, only better next time. We carry a new world, here in our hearts. That world is growing this minute.” [Buenaventura Durruti - Spanish anarchist 1896 - 1936]
I first met the Mob in 1982, when they were living at Brougham Road in Hackney, East London. Brougham Road had been built 100 years earlier, as one of an endless succession of cheap, brick-built streets of terraced houses. In the 1970’s huge swathes of Victorian Hackney were demolished to be replaced with tower blocks. Brougham Road (complete with its outside toilets) had been due for demolition, but the money ran out about the same time as punk emerged. So, Brougham Road survived to become home to a vibrant and diverse community of squatters. On one side lay a newly built housing estate, on the other a derelict wasteland. Brougham Road was still squatted when the Mob arrived in 1981. Before the move to London, the Mob had been living in the depths of rural England - Seend and Stoke Sub Hamdon.
“The Mob were living in a rented house in Seend in Wiltshire and we bought a bus to tour on. When we got it ready, we took it for a test drive to visit Josef who was living in Brougham Road. The next morning a guy walked out of number 74 and asked us if we wanted to buy the house for £40. This was the amount he had spent on getting water on and changing the Yale lock. We only lived in Seend for a few months. Our real roots are in Stoke Sub Hamdon in Somerset. The Seend place was our first attempt at communal living. We knew an old gay gangster from Yeovil and he set it all up. The real shining light of living in Yeovil for me was the closeness of Stonehenge. We would go on school trips to London and would pass the festival which at the time was only 200 or 300 people there. I remember vividly thinking “That’s for me”. From about 1977 or 1978 the whole Yeovil scene would decamp to Stonehenge for weeks on end. Most of the songs were written hitch- hiking up and down the A303 to London”. [Mark Wilson of the Mob]
Seend is village near Melksham in Wiltshire in the west of England. In 1801 it had a population of 1000. About the time Brougham Road was being built it experienced a brief industrial revolution when three blast furnaces smelting local iron ore employed 300 people, but by 1981 the furnaces were long since gone and it had become a rural hamlet of 1000 once more. Stoke Sub Hamdon is an even smaller hamlet in Somerset.
How could a punk group like the Mob emerge from such places?
The answer lies in the way that punk radiated out from its ground zero in London. Punk did not just explode in cities like Manchester. Inspired by the Sex Pistols ‘anti-Jubilee ‘of 1977, punk also exploded in the most remote and obscure towns and villages inspiring hundreds, even thousands, of punk groups across the UK. Most of these flowers in the dustbin of history faded as swiftly as they had flourished, but a few, like the Mob, survived.
The Mob were able to survive through their connections with an older counterculture. Whilst punk in London began to decay, the Mob were playing gigs with archetypal hippies Here and Now, along with Zounds and the Androids of Mu. This hippy / punk crossover had its punk roots in the 1978 Alternative TV / Here and Now tour which took in Stonehenge Free Festival - and where the Mob also played.
The Mob’s relocation to Brougham Road was fortuitous. Thanks to a Crass / Poison Girls benefit single - ‘Bloody Revolutions / Persons Unknown’, in late 1981 an anarchist centre was set up in a warehouse in Wapping in East London. This became the launch pad for dozens of anarchist punk groups. It also became the focus for an anarchist punk community which survived the collapse of the Wapping centre to create a new anarchy centre in West London - the Centro Iberico.
The Centro Iberico was an abandoned school which had been squatted by Spanish anarchists, including veterans of the Spanish Civil War. The Mob were actively involved in both these ventures, as well as the string of squatted anarchy / peace centres which followed on.
The Mob were also actively involved in a spin-off venture - the Black Sheep Housing Co-op. The Mob did not just play benefits for this punk co-operative - they helped rebuild the derelict houses the co-op were given. The Black Sheep Co-op survived until 2002, and some of its houses remain in co-operative ‘multiple -occupancy’ to this day. The survival, against the odds, of the Black Sheep Co-op and its houses has its echoes in the survival, against the odds, of the collective - the tribe - which the Mob were part of and which they helped create.

[@lalalauduncreative2055]

I had this cassette 🥹 thanks for posting this I haven’t heard this version in decades 🫶🏻