Gang Of Four
The Gang Of Four really needs no introduction. They are one of the most name-checked bands of all time - every journalist, reviewer and hack in-between has dropped and referenced the Gang Of Four at some point. They are also one of the most influential groups in history. Strains of their sound can be heard everywhere – from rock giants like REM and Red Hot Chili Peppers to new guns like Bloc Party, Franz Ferdinand and countless others. Yet nobody has matched the sheer intensity, energy and power that Gang Of Four possessed. There is an indefinable quality to their music - a magic and chemistry - the difference between the great and the good. Their legacy has stretched from the seventies to the present day without any dilution or loss of potency.
This year the original line-up of Andy Gill, Jon King, Hugo Burnham and Dave Allen reformed to play a series of special shows. It had been 23 years since all four founder members had even been in the same room together. A collective nerve was touched. More shows followed and then at the end of this year the decision was taken to re-record the best tracks from their early records – an effort to do justice to the original material and capture the essence of what Gang Of Four are truly like live.
AU met backstage with the Gang ahead of their extra-special Don’t Look Back performance of their seminal debut album Entertainment! in the Barbican Conference Centre, London. The surroundings are plush, the venue is luxurious. The Gang Of Four have came a long way. We’re glad to be here with them.
AU: How come people were labelling you post-punk while punk was still happening?
Andy Gill: Before punk broke Jon and I lived in a squalid bed-sit in Essex. That was where the first germs of what was to become Gang Of Four originated. We used to sit around with an acoustic guitar - playing chess and coming up with ideas. When the punk explosion came along we loved it - the ‘anything goes’ message that it gave us. You weren’t restricted by having to sound a certain way. We married that ethos with our own ideas and it made all our experimentation feel validated. It meant that by the time we hit the ground and started playing around we were already something different from the wave of punk that came before.
What effect did living in Leeds have on the band?
Jon King: The main effect was that we just got left alone - we didn’t even get a review for two years. It’s a mixed blessing living in a place like London where everyone got a review the first time they played a gig. We had the chance to move from our starting position and absorb a lot of musical vocabularies. From gig one to ten we moved from writing R’n’B songs to writing ‘Anthrax’. The progression was really fast - like a hyperdrive. We were able to drop early material we were doing and move on. It was only two years later in 1978 that we got our first review.
‘Entertainment’ is now recognized as a classic album and touted by countless bands as a major influence. Did you realize the significance of what you were doing at the time?
JK: There must have 10 000 albums released in 1978. I don’t know how many are classics but we really thought we’d done something at the time. We all really cared about it. Each of us are our own worst critics. On that record every time we got to a point where we thought ‘oh this is exactly it’ we’d always try to take it a bit further. We were all totally determined to extract every last little thing out of each song. The whole thing became a mix, even the album cover became a part of the music.
AG: I thought it was really good and I thought it was very powerful, but you have no way of knowing what the future will bring.
You have a clear and distinct sound many have attempted to recreate but few have matched. Was this sound a deliberate creation?
JK: Andy used to always say ‘it’s not that we disapprove of life, but we don’t think that it should be shrouded in mystery’. You want the guitar to sound like a guitar, the bass to sound like a bass and so on. It sounds obvious but the focus was to create this dry, crystalline, brittle thing. It was part of the desire to tell the truth and be authentic. We did not want to do something that was fake. Most music is fake, insincere and irritating.
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