Gang Of Four

(Translated from my old Italian text by Nicholas Green)

Gang Of Four formed in Leeds at a time when punk was at a fever pitch, but factional trends were starting to form. They ended up becoming the forerunners of one of these trends: funk reframed in the sloppy and provocative style of punk.

If Dave Allen's dub and funk basslines were the group's trademark, the highly syncopated rhythms of Hugo Burnham's drums and Andy Gill's atonal guitar playing were no less effective in accompanying the Marxist sermons emphatically declaimed by singer Jon King.

It is these sharp jolts of guitar that stand out on the EP Damaged Goods (Fast Product, 1978), thanks in part to a frenzy that is still imbued with the spirit of punk (Damaged Goods, Armalite Rifle, Love Like Anthrax). On the other hand, it is the dub rumblings of the bass that propel At Home He's A Tourist, released the following year. Outside The Trains Don't Run On Time completed their trifecta of experimentation with drum loops and chanting vocals.

The group's subversive energy, which was still concealed behind their musical experimentation, came resoundingly to the fore on their first album, Entertainment (EMI, 1979 - Warner, 2005). This sort of "manifesto" of funk in the punk era - packed with Glenn Branca-esque metallic dissonance (Ether), Pop Group-esque blues-funk (Not Great Men), Talking Heads-esque hallucinatory tribalisms (Natural's Not In It), and Jimi Hendrix-esque galactic glissandos (Anthrax) - rages against capitalist society according to a classic agit-prop strategy. Even in songs designed for mass consumption, such as Return The Gift (to be danced to in the disco) and I Found That Essence Rare (to be whistled on the street), the group injects lethal doses of sarcasm against Western civilization. It's Her Factory sets up a highly evocative harmonic blend with virtually no melody, but only with rhythms (even that of an intermittent accordion) that build a claustrophobic atmosphere. Together with the Mekons and Delta 5, Gang Of Four became the spokesmen for the politicized lumpenproletariat of industrial England.

Paralysed and What We All Want derail the band's follow-up Solid Gold (WB, 1981) towards far more ferocious riffs and rhythms, a trend that the most demented track of their career, Cheeseburger, only serves to make even more sinister. On the single To Hell With Poverty, however, what stands out is once again the interplay of sounds, alternating between small dissonances and war dances, between satanic screams and pop refrains.

Recorded after Allen's exit, who went on to form Shriekback, Songs Of The Free (WB, 1982) turned out to be much more polished in its arrangements, oriented toward high-class disco music, creative and challenging, but not too hostile. I Love A Man In Uniform (with gospel choir) and We Live As We Dream, Alone lead the way, but two woozy harmonies, I Will Be A Good Boy and History Of The World - built on random sounds and irregular tempos - once again dominate the show. It is impressive how smoothly the group can move from lockstep rhythms to free-form structures. Hugo Burnham is the real star of this new sound: his drumming style imitates drum-machine fills.

Hard (WB, 1983) on the other hand, is a mediocre record, from which a certain compositional weariness is most evident. The blatant attempt to imitate orchestral soul with Is It Love weighs like a curse on the rest of the record.

1991 saw the release of Mall (Polydor), which is essentially an album by King and Gill (the latter fresh out of service in the Red Hot Chili Peppers and Miracle Legion) with different supporting musicians. Gill's guitar artistry - comprised of percussive riffs and atonal bursts - is at the forefront. Cadillac and Hey Yeah rehash their well-known stylings, Satellite is a bit more commercial than average, and F.M.U.S.A. experiments with rap and sampling; but winning out in the end once again is a "noisy" track, the tour de force World Falls Apart.

Shrinkwrapped (Castle, 1995), is even more disappointing, trying in vain to recover the sound of the band's early days. Avoiding stumbling on the aestheticism of the previous record, Gill and King strive to give substance to The Dark Ride; but the single Tattoo, precisely because it has its own dignity, makes one long even more for the Gang Of Four of yesteryear.

100 Flowers Bloom (Rhino, 1999) is an anthology of their career.

Too theoretical and not artistic enough, Gang Of Four must be credited above all with having intuited how funk, "black" dance music, could be transformed into music for agit-prop skits, thus supplanting the antiquated stereotypes of the protest song. But they could never match the Pop Group, which produced far more masterful works from those same premises. If the Clash and Stiff Little Fingers were the voice of anarchist-inspired urban guerrillas, Gang Of Four were the voice of leftist intellectuals, with all the merits and flaws thereof.

Some of the band's classics were re-recorded on Return The Gift (V2, 2005).

King and Gill reformed Gang of Four for Content (Yep Roc, 2010), but very few of its songs (She Said You Made a Thing of Me, Who Am I) even remotely evoked the neurotic atmosphere of the 1970s.

Andy Gill died in 2020.