Gang of Four comeback
Posted: Mon Jan 24, 2005 8:54 amfrom the NY Times
After Postpunk? Post-Postpunk by the Gang of Four
January 24, 2005
By JON PARELES
LONDON, Jan. 23 - Clank. Clank. Clank. Clank. Jon King,
lead singer of the Gang of Four, was methodically bashing a
metal rod against a microwave oven that he found at a
recycling dump. Each blow added a dent; paint chips went
flying.
It wasn't petulance; it was the introduction to "He'd Send
in the Army," a bleak, brittle song from the Gang of Four's
1981 album "Solid Gold." Stubbornly slow, with Hugo
Burnham's drums, and Dave Allen's bass stopping and
starting, and Andy Gill's guitar shrieking across the
spaces, it is one of the band's most rigorous and
unforgiving songs, and one of its favorites.
On Friday night at the Montague Arms, a packed pub in the
scruffy New Cross neighborhood of South London, about 200
latter-day punk fans greeted the song with a curiosity that
quickly turned into cheers. The four men, now in their late
40's, were playing their first show together since 1981.
They immediately reclaimed the meticulous ferocity that
made the Gang of Four one of postpunk's most influential
bands. Its old blend of the cerebral and the visceral was
in full force as Mr. King sang lyrics like "Fornication
makes you happy/No escape from society" with hips pumping
and hands in the air. Afterward, one sweaty patron in his
20's said, "I hadn't realized how much all the bands I like
sound like them."
It's exactly the right moment for the Gang of Four to
reappear. The sound of postpunk - the smart underground
rock from the late 1970's and early 80's that followed
through on punk's iconoclasm, noise and eccentricity - has
made a startling comeback. Though few postpunk bands
breached the Top 40, they left their mark on musicians a
generation younger. In Britain and the United States, bands
like Franz Ferdinand, the Rapture, Radio 4 and Bloc Party
have latched on to the jumpy, clattery beats and combative
guitars of the Gang of Four and its contemporaries. Members
of the Gang of Four hear themselves echoed in their
children's album collections.
Reunited postpunk bands like the Pixies and Mission of
Burma have found eager young audiences on tour, and now the
Gang of Four is headed for the road. "The goal is to be as
incredibly intense as we were the first time around," Mr.
Allen said. "What we have to do is leave them with their
tongues hanging out again. If not, we don't retain our
authority in the musical canon. There's no excuse that
we're 23 years older."
Mr. Burnham added, "I realized that we could do it because
we all still had our hair."
This week the Gang of Four is playing five shows at
2,000-capacity clubs around Britain, and it starts a United
States tour with an appearance in California at the
Coachella Valley Music Festival, which runs from April 30
to May 1. Last year the Pixies probably set the gold
standard for reunion tours by barnstorming festivals and by
selling out 3,000-seaters for eight months. The Gang of
Four's music was far more ascetic than the Pixies' songs,
and its reunion is more modest, with the band members
returning to day jobs between stretches of touring. But if
the band's first show was any indication, it should
galvanize a new audience.
Formed in 1977, the Gang of Four came up with what would
soon be called punk-funk.
The band was conceived by Mr. Gill and Mr. King, high
school friends and fellow art students at Leeds University.
They visited New York in the summers of 1976 and 1977 as
punk, primitivism and art-rock were conspiring at CBGB. "It
suggested the possibility that anything could happen," Mr.
Gill said. (The band's sardonic name came from the radical
leaders in China who fomented the Cultural Revolution.
These days Mr. Gill uses a cigarette lighter shaped like
Mao's Little Red Book.)
The music Mr. Gill wanted to make was like paintings he was
doing at the time: precise black grids with blotches of
paint smeared across them. "It would be the juxtaposition
of tight, fixed patterns that were very physically
energizing and relentless, which would largely be supplied
by the bass and drums, and the guitar, which would
sometimes completely go along with that, and sometimes
not," he said. "If you took one of these elements out and
made it ordinary, the whole thing would lose its
authenticity. Every part of it had to be radical. It was
building musical tension in a precise way."
Precision meshed with anarchy via Mr. Gill's guitar, which
touched down in funk rhythms only to veer into defiantly
dissonant lines, glassy harmonics and wails of feedback.
"On the surface it looked like a rock band," Mr. Allen
said. "But the idea was, 'How can we turn this whole thing
upside down?' "
The Gang of Four's lyrics were equally astringent. Although
they were quickly classed as political, few of the band's
songs were direct protests. "What we were trying to do was
understand the way things worked," Mr. Gill said. The
lyrics were bitterly analytical, infused with theories from
Marx, Adorno, Baudrillard and Godard, and the band was
determined to puncture pop romance with the consciousness
that people are manipulated by power, economics, media and
marketing. "Why not write about ideas?" Mr. King said.
"This band had something to say, and it had this really odd
guitar sound," Gordon Moakes, the bassist of Bloc Party,
said by telephone from Glasgow. "People picking up the
guitar now are interested in that very percussive guitar
approach, which the Gang of Four did like no other band
did. The Gang of Four pretty much covered that whole area,
so anyone who tries it sounds like them."
The band has returned to its most significant lineup. Its
members recall the group's glory years as contentious.
"This time around, everyone has even stronger opinions and
there's even less backing down," Mr. Allen said.
Mr. Allen quit the band in 1981, exhausted from touring,
and he had not had any contact with Mr. King until last
year. Mr. Burnham was fired in 1983. "I think they wanted a
duopoly rather than a triumvirate," he said.
Mr. King and Mr. Gill retained the Gang of Four name for
later, more conventional albums, working together on and
off until 1995. But the reunited Gang of Four is the one
that made its indelible 1979 debut album, "Entertainment!,"
along with "Solid Gold." With some satisfaction, Mr.
Burnham said, "Those are the albums that matter."
The band doesn't plan to write new songs. But it has
recorded a new double album to be sold on tour and online:
15 old songs redone with better equipment, and a second CD
of remixes by old fans including Franz Ferdinand, Massive
Attack, Bloc Party and Futureheads. The band had been
determinedly austere on "Entertainment!," recording without
overdubs. "It's not dated by any particular production
technique because it didn't have one," Mr. Allen said with
a laugh. Mr. Gill half-jokingly compared the difference
between the old and new versions of the songs to the
difference between Giotto and Michelangelo: "the skinny
primitivism of the original text as against the muscular,
beefy, luxuriant 2005 version."
Mr. Gill is the only band member continuing his recording
career, writing soundtracks and producing bands including
Killing Joke and the Jesus Lizard. Mr. Burnham, who worked
as a band manager and recording-company executive after
leaving the Gang of Four, teaches at the New England
Institute of Art in Brookline, Mass. The other two members
have followed the band's media critiques with media jobs.
Mr. King is the chief executive of World Television, which
produces news reports, Webcasts and corporate video for
clients from Greenpeace to Nestlé. Mr. Allen lives in
Portland, Ore., and works in digital-music distribution and
brand marketing with his company, Pampelmoose.
The band members had to shape up for the tour. Mr. Burnham
hadn't played drums since 1985; he started exercising with
his wife, a Pilates trainer. Mr. King, who is still lean,
teased the other band members with e-mail messages about
the "celebrity fat club." But as they started to relearn
the songs, old reflexes came back.
"The blueprint was still in my body," Mr. Allen said.
On
the 9-foot-by-18-foot stage of the Montague Arms, Mr. King
flailed and twitched, dropped to the floor and leaped up
like a funky scarecrow, as hyperactive as he was a
generation ago. "It's the tragedy of old age that people
stop doing stupid things," he said before the show. "When
you're young, you're reckless and oppositional, and that's
what you should be your whole life. Why should you not take
a risk?"
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/01/24/arts/ ... 4ac189cf8b
After Postpunk? Post-Postpunk by the Gang of Four
January 24, 2005
By JON PARELES
LONDON, Jan. 23 - Clank. Clank. Clank. Clank. Jon King,
lead singer of the Gang of Four, was methodically bashing a
metal rod against a microwave oven that he found at a
recycling dump. Each blow added a dent; paint chips went
flying.
It wasn't petulance; it was the introduction to "He'd Send
in the Army," a bleak, brittle song from the Gang of Four's
1981 album "Solid Gold." Stubbornly slow, with Hugo
Burnham's drums, and Dave Allen's bass stopping and
starting, and Andy Gill's guitar shrieking across the
spaces, it is one of the band's most rigorous and
unforgiving songs, and one of its favorites.
On Friday night at the Montague Arms, a packed pub in the
scruffy New Cross neighborhood of South London, about 200
latter-day punk fans greeted the song with a curiosity that
quickly turned into cheers. The four men, now in their late
40's, were playing their first show together since 1981.
They immediately reclaimed the meticulous ferocity that
made the Gang of Four one of postpunk's most influential
bands. Its old blend of the cerebral and the visceral was
in full force as Mr. King sang lyrics like "Fornication
makes you happy/No escape from society" with hips pumping
and hands in the air. Afterward, one sweaty patron in his
20's said, "I hadn't realized how much all the bands I like
sound like them."
It's exactly the right moment for the Gang of Four to
reappear. The sound of postpunk - the smart underground
rock from the late 1970's and early 80's that followed
through on punk's iconoclasm, noise and eccentricity - has
made a startling comeback. Though few postpunk bands
breached the Top 40, they left their mark on musicians a
generation younger. In Britain and the United States, bands
like Franz Ferdinand, the Rapture, Radio 4 and Bloc Party
have latched on to the jumpy, clattery beats and combative
guitars of the Gang of Four and its contemporaries. Members
of the Gang of Four hear themselves echoed in their
children's album collections.
Reunited postpunk bands like the Pixies and Mission of
Burma have found eager young audiences on tour, and now the
Gang of Four is headed for the road. "The goal is to be as
incredibly intense as we were the first time around," Mr.
Allen said. "What we have to do is leave them with their
tongues hanging out again. If not, we don't retain our
authority in the musical canon. There's no excuse that
we're 23 years older."
Mr. Burnham added, "I realized that we could do it because
we all still had our hair."
This week the Gang of Four is playing five shows at
2,000-capacity clubs around Britain, and it starts a United
States tour with an appearance in California at the
Coachella Valley Music Festival, which runs from April 30
to May 1. Last year the Pixies probably set the gold
standard for reunion tours by barnstorming festivals and by
selling out 3,000-seaters for eight months. The Gang of
Four's music was far more ascetic than the Pixies' songs,
and its reunion is more modest, with the band members
returning to day jobs between stretches of touring. But if
the band's first show was any indication, it should
galvanize a new audience.
Formed in 1977, the Gang of Four came up with what would
soon be called punk-funk.
The band was conceived by Mr. Gill and Mr. King, high
school friends and fellow art students at Leeds University.
They visited New York in the summers of 1976 and 1977 as
punk, primitivism and art-rock were conspiring at CBGB. "It
suggested the possibility that anything could happen," Mr.
Gill said. (The band's sardonic name came from the radical
leaders in China who fomented the Cultural Revolution.
These days Mr. Gill uses a cigarette lighter shaped like
Mao's Little Red Book.)
The music Mr. Gill wanted to make was like paintings he was
doing at the time: precise black grids with blotches of
paint smeared across them. "It would be the juxtaposition
of tight, fixed patterns that were very physically
energizing and relentless, which would largely be supplied
by the bass and drums, and the guitar, which would
sometimes completely go along with that, and sometimes
not," he said. "If you took one of these elements out and
made it ordinary, the whole thing would lose its
authenticity. Every part of it had to be radical. It was
building musical tension in a precise way."
Precision meshed with anarchy via Mr. Gill's guitar, which
touched down in funk rhythms only to veer into defiantly
dissonant lines, glassy harmonics and wails of feedback.
"On the surface it looked like a rock band," Mr. Allen
said. "But the idea was, 'How can we turn this whole thing
upside down?' "
The Gang of Four's lyrics were equally astringent. Although
they were quickly classed as political, few of the band's
songs were direct protests. "What we were trying to do was
understand the way things worked," Mr. Gill said. The
lyrics were bitterly analytical, infused with theories from
Marx, Adorno, Baudrillard and Godard, and the band was
determined to puncture pop romance with the consciousness
that people are manipulated by power, economics, media and
marketing. "Why not write about ideas?" Mr. King said.
"This band had something to say, and it had this really odd
guitar sound," Gordon Moakes, the bassist of Bloc Party,
said by telephone from Glasgow. "People picking up the
guitar now are interested in that very percussive guitar
approach, which the Gang of Four did like no other band
did. The Gang of Four pretty much covered that whole area,
so anyone who tries it sounds like them."
The band has returned to its most significant lineup. Its
members recall the group's glory years as contentious.
"This time around, everyone has even stronger opinions and
there's even less backing down," Mr. Allen said.
Mr. Allen quit the band in 1981, exhausted from touring,
and he had not had any contact with Mr. King until last
year. Mr. Burnham was fired in 1983. "I think they wanted a
duopoly rather than a triumvirate," he said.
Mr. King and Mr. Gill retained the Gang of Four name for
later, more conventional albums, working together on and
off until 1995. But the reunited Gang of Four is the one
that made its indelible 1979 debut album, "Entertainment!,"
along with "Solid Gold." With some satisfaction, Mr.
Burnham said, "Those are the albums that matter."
The band doesn't plan to write new songs. But it has
recorded a new double album to be sold on tour and online:
15 old songs redone with better equipment, and a second CD
of remixes by old fans including Franz Ferdinand, Massive
Attack, Bloc Party and Futureheads. The band had been
determinedly austere on "Entertainment!," recording without
overdubs. "It's not dated by any particular production
technique because it didn't have one," Mr. Allen said with
a laugh. Mr. Gill half-jokingly compared the difference
between the old and new versions of the songs to the
difference between Giotto and Michelangelo: "the skinny
primitivism of the original text as against the muscular,
beefy, luxuriant 2005 version."
Mr. Gill is the only band member continuing his recording
career, writing soundtracks and producing bands including
Killing Joke and the Jesus Lizard. Mr. Burnham, who worked
as a band manager and recording-company executive after
leaving the Gang of Four, teaches at the New England
Institute of Art in Brookline, Mass. The other two members
have followed the band's media critiques with media jobs.
Mr. King is the chief executive of World Television, which
produces news reports, Webcasts and corporate video for
clients from Greenpeace to Nestlé. Mr. Allen lives in
Portland, Ore., and works in digital-music distribution and
brand marketing with his company, Pampelmoose.
The band members had to shape up for the tour. Mr. Burnham
hadn't played drums since 1985; he started exercising with
his wife, a Pilates trainer. Mr. King, who is still lean,
teased the other band members with e-mail messages about
the "celebrity fat club." But as they started to relearn
the songs, old reflexes came back.
"The blueprint was still in my body," Mr. Allen said.
On
the 9-foot-by-18-foot stage of the Montague Arms, Mr. King
flailed and twitched, dropped to the floor and leaped up
like a funky scarecrow, as hyperactive as he was a
generation ago. "It's the tragedy of old age that people
stop doing stupid things," he said before the show. "When
you're young, you're reckless and oppositional, and that's
what you should be your whole life. Why should you not take
a risk?"
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/01/24/arts/ ... 4ac189cf8b