Officer! is either Mick Hobbs alone or Mick Hobbs with friends. Now recognised as a key figure in the tangled history of London’s DIY underground, the mercurial Hobbs cut his teeth in the RIO scene of the late ’70s and early 1980s, initially as guitarist in The Work (alongside Bill Gilonis, Rick Wilson and Tim Hodgkinson), and subsequent related groupings The Lowest Note, The Lo Yo Yo, and The Momes. During this time he became closely associated with This Heat and their Cold Storage studio in Brixton, working with the likes of Flaming Tunes, Catherine Jauniaux and Zeena Parkins. The Officer! project formally surfaced in '82 with Eight New Songs By Mick Hobbs: it marked the arrival of a singular writer and improvisor, with a gift for plangent melody, ingenious arrangement and lyrics at once pointed and allusive, playful and profound. The Cold Storage-recorded Ossification arrived a year later; Megaphone Records, responsible for the LP’s recent 30th anniversary reissue, describe it as “one of the most unusual, pleasurable and character-filled ‘pop’ records anyone has heard…songs that contain the spirit of pop, rock, medieval, avant-garde, R.I.O., The Work, Family Fodder, This Heat, Look de Bouk, Legendary Pink Dots, Henry Cow…a timeless anomaly in the history of recorded music.” Two further Officer! albums followed in the 1980s (Cough and Yes Yes No No Yes No Yes), before a lengthy hiatus. In 1995 Hobbs, by now a member of Jad Fair’s Half Japanese, cut one last Officer! album in Baltimore and London, but it was shelved, for reasons no one seems able to remember; this “lost” album was finally issued by Blackest Ever Black nineteen years later, in 2014, under the title Dead Unique. Having returned to the stage for BEB’s fifth anniversary celebration at the ICA last year, Officer! will perform at Oto as an extended ensemble, with Hobbs joined by a sprawl of longtime fellow travellers and special guests, including Mary Currie (Flaming Tunes), Benb Gallaher, Joey Stack and Rick Wilson.