Mark Wilson turns up in Richard North's "Punk Warriors," the NME piece of 19 February 1983 that named the whole positive punk scene, not as a musician making a point but as a look: "Mark from The Mob, an anarcho-renegade, with his bleached dread hair."
It's a fair shorthand for a band that never quite fit the scene it kept getting filed under. The Mob formed in Yeovil, Somerset, in the late Seventies as straightforward anarcho-punk, moved to London, and spent the early Eighties orbiting the Crass collective without becoming a Crass tribute act. In 1980 they started their own label, All the Madmen — named, with a directness typical of the band, after a David Bowie song — and used it to put out records by themselves and by like-minded strays who didn't fit anywhere else either.
Let the Tribe Increase, their only album, was recorded across four days in December 1982 at Spaceward Studios in Cambridge.
The sleeve lists the Freedom Press bookshop's Whitechapel address as contact information, because Mark Wilson, Curtis Youé and Josef Porter were, between them, living in squats and housing co-ops with no fixed address of their own to print. "Dance On (You Fool)" carries the album's clearest hook, bass-heavy and danceable under vocals that arrive more shouted than sung; "Raised in a Prison" strips that back into something colder, guitar run through enough effects that it reads as synthesiser on first listen. Maximum Rocknroll later called the record "a subtle yet affecting album's worth of political pop ditties," which undersells how bleak it gets — Sounds, reviewing it at the time, said the lyrics confronted "the utter depression and degradation of modern life" without blinking.
It reached number three on the UK independent chart, which is about as far as a band with no fixed address and a hand-run label was ever going to get.
The Mob split before the end of 1983 and stayed apart for twenty-eight years, until Mark Wilson found out in 2011 that a tribute act had been booked to play his own surprise birthday party and decided, reasonably, that he would rather do it himself. The original lineup has toured on and off since, releasing new material as recently as 2013's Rise Up!, but Let the Tribe Increase — now reissued as a limited pressing through the Dublin vinyl manufacturer Rotator Vinyl — remains the one document of a band that spent its first life proving a genre didn't need a fixed address to mean something.
