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Damaged Goods: I saw Gang of Four last night, because apparently, I felt I deserved to suffer
03.11.2015
11:35 am
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I should have known better. I rationalized my choice to see Gang of Four (pick your epithet: Gang of Gill, One of Four, Gang of One…) thinking sure, this is in no way actually Gang of Four, but still, I’ll get to see Andy Gill playing guitar, and that can’t be bad. Ooooooh, brother, YES IT CAN.

I’ll backtrack—when the current Go4 tour was announced, I was pretty excited. I’ve seen Andy Gill and Jon King with a no-name rhythm section before, and it was always still a worthy show, despite how dreary most of their new music post-Songs Of The Free has been (how myopically Dunning-Krugerish does a band have to be to name its mediocre comeback single “Don’t Fix What Ain’t Broke?”), because Jon King is a fucking living sparkplug, and even as he aged he remained one of the most kinetic and magnetic frontmen in rock music. So I was amped about the new tour because I somehow missed the news that King exited Gang of Four a few years ago and the band is now effectively Andy Gill and the Pips. But even still, if I was going to see an expensive Go4 cover band, it was a Go4 cover band with Andy by God GILL in it, and it’s been a fair few years since I’ve seen him brilliantly torture a Stratocaster into emitting jagged shards of perfect, poisonous hate-noise, so why not just go anyway? “How bad could it be?,” I thought.

Then I heard What Happens Next, the first Go4 album with new singer John “Gaoler” Sterry. The AV Club‘s Annie Zaleski compared it to Stabbing Westward and God Lives Underwater, and if that’s not enough of an indictment, I don’t know what the hell to tell you. Sterry is a fine singer, and in a band in which he wasn’t a replacement for JON FUCKING KING, he would not offend, but Sterry isn’t actually the vocalist on about half of the record, nor does he even sing on its best material. Guest vocalists are handed a lot of the throat duties, and the best song features German actor/singer Herbert Grönemeyer. But the album’s great crime isn’t that the “band” continued without a crucial member—they lost a lot when they lost founding bassist Dave Allen to Shriekback, but they still managed at least some enduring material—its crime is that it’s tepid and unoriginal, two things nobody ever needed from Gang of Four, but if we’re to be honest, apart from some promising moments on 2011’s Content, tepid and unoriginal are mostly what their studio recordings have delivered for the last 30 years. Go4 have been on cruise control for decades, perpetually trading on the brilliance of Entertainment! and Solid Gold.
 

 

Apologies for the crappiness of my phone camera. I blame Apple.

And yet I went to the show. Because I’m a dumbass. Despite the merits of Sterry’s singing voice, as a frontman he’s all posturing and no charisma. I spent the first half of the band’s set right up front and directly in the line of fire of Andy Gill’s amps, waiting to be fucking perforated by the glorious missiles of angular clamor they’d hurl, but even HE sounded blah. Much credit is due to the rhythm section, especially the drummer, and if he and the bassist should ever decide to move on from the tribute band scene, they could probably do something amazing. But tempos were sluggish overall, robbing the band of all the fiery urgency that was its calling card. Songs that should have brought the house down like “Damaged Goods” and “At Home He’s a Tourist” sounded like early ‘90s shit bands covering those songs in slow-motion. The new material they did could have been discarded—NOTHING about those songs is worthy of the band’s name or legacy, both of which Andy Gill seems bent on narcissistically shitting all over. Had that music been the product of a band by any other name (or any other guitarist), nary a soul present would have cared. This is no new beginning for Gang of Four. This is the violation of Gang of Four’s corpse.

Words I never thought I’d find myself writing: Gang of Four is a fucking awful band. Here’s a reminder of why they once mattered.
 

 
Previously on Dangerous Minds
Entertainment: Gang of Four, live in Zagreb, 1981
Dialectics & disco: Post-punk Marxists Gang of Four get funky on ‘Dance Fever’
Gang of Four’s ‘Not Great Men’ played by Javanese gamelan ensemble

Posted by Ron Kretsch
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03.11.2015
11:35 am
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Entertainment: Gang of Four, live in Zagreb, 1981
08.20.2014
10:20 am
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A blog I will never be able to read recently posted a gleaming gem of a video—professional footage of six live Gang of Four songs, performed in Zagreb, Yugoslavia (now Croatia, of course), around the height of the band’s strength. This was the Solid Gold tour. While that album isn’t quite the stone classic that their debut Entertainment! is, songs like “Outside the Trains Don’t Run on Time,” “Paralysed” and “What We All Want” easily rank with the band’s best work. The performance was recorded at Music Biennale Zagreb in 1981, the first year that long-lived festival featured rock music.

Though Gang of Four were on the rise at this time, they were also near the end of their original lineup. In a change from which the band wouldn’t ever recover artistically, bassist Dave Allen would soon leave to form the more dance-oriented Shriekback. In a dismal irony, Go4 themselves would become a markedly tamer, more accessible, dancier band after Allen’s departure. (Mind you, that incarnation of the band STILL slayed in concert—hell, singer Jon King was still an electrifying frontman even in Go4’s why-did-they-bother mid ‘90s resurrection attempt.) But in this Zagreb footage we can see the band still riding their initial burst of ferocious, jagged, Marxist-inspired salvos against leisure class complacency and economic injustice. God damn, they were glorious.
 

 
Previously on Dangerous Minds
Dialectics & disco: post-punk Marxists Gang of Four get funky on ‘Dance Fever,’ 1982
Entertainment: complete Gang of Four show, 1983

Posted by Ron Kretsch
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08.20.2014
10:20 am
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Dialectics & Disco: Post-punk Marxists Gang of Four get funky on ‘Dance Fever,’ 1982
05.30.2014
12:43 pm
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Ohhhhhhh, this clip of Gang of Four doing their biggest “hit” on that most mainstream of American pop TV programs of the 1980s, Dance Fever, is good but ultimately it’s best considered an occasion for a little “what if” speculation. If you squint your eyes just so, you can imagine the punk-funk art school Marxists up there doing “At Home He’s a Tourist” or “To Hell with Poverty,” or, perhaps even, “Capital (It Fails Us Now)”—can’t you just picture that shit??

Goddamn, that would really have been something seeing and hearing their jagged-edge critiques of Western culture beamed all across Reagan’s America! (Although “I Love a Man in a Uniform” was less politically strident than many of their songs, it was banned by the BBC during the Falklands War in 1982.)

But still, seeing them introduced by fuckin’ Denny Terrio does have its charm…
 
Gang of Four
 
Of course, it would be even better if they weren’t lip-syncing…. I half-suspect that Jon King intentionally did a shitty job with the sync as a subtle nod to the diehards, but it may just be his natural intensity and enthusiasm. Sara Lee’s prominent bassline in this song makes the groove unstoppable. There’s a reason “I Love a Man in a Uniform” got them invited to be on Dance Fever and it’s that bass.
 

Posted by Martin Schneider
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05.30.2014
12:43 pm
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Entertainment: Complete Gang of Four show, 1983
05.15.2013
02:36 pm
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Some kind soul uploaded Gang of Four’s full appearance on German music television show Rockpalast from 1983. Why it wasn’t uploaded in a single YouTube video, I don’t know. But it’s a wonderful treat nonetheless. This is the incarnation of the group that saw bassist Sara Lee (formerly of Robert Fripp’s new wavey League of Gentlemen group) replace Dave Allen who had by that time left to form Shriekback with XTC keyboardist Barry Andrews.

“We Live as We Dream Alone”:

 
“The Republic”:

 
More of Gang of Four after the jump…
 

READ ON
Posted by Tara McGinley
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05.15.2013
02:36 pm
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Mind Your Own Business: Socialist post-punk funksters Delta 5
04.18.2013
09:56 am
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Socialist post-punk dance-floor agitators, Delta 5 were closely aligned with the Gang of Four, another Leeds-based group who mixed music and leftwing politics. Their thumpy, double bass guitar-led funk attack, slashing guitars and flat, bored female vocals made them sound like a tighter version of the Slits mixed with the Gang of Four’s razor-sharp guitar lines. Both Delta 5 and the Gang of Four were associated with the Rock Against Racism movement. Delta 5, with three women in the group, also played several benefits to fight the Corrie Bill, an anti-abortion statute.
  
In late 1970s, the racist British Movement, an National Front offshoot that was unashamedly Nazi organized in Leeds and enlisted some local yobs to form skinhead groups to harass the “Communist” bands and to counter RAR. The concerts they organized were called Rock Against Communism (The notorious Screwdriver came out of this milieu). One night Delta 5-member Ros Allen was recognized in a pub by eight British Movement members who called her a “Communist witch.” The members of Delta 5 were followed outside and beaten. Vocalist/bassist Bethan Peters told Greil Marcus in 1980 that the sight of skinheads doing “Sieg heil” salutes was common at their gigs and how she once grabbed one of them and repeatedly smashed his head into the stage.
  
Delta 5 didn’t last that long, just one album and some singles before they split in 1982. Their reputation was obscure for several decades, but in 2006, the Kill Rock Stars label released some early Delta 5 material called Singles & Sessions 1979-81, which saw renewed interest in the group.
  
Their best song (in my opinion): “Mind Your Own Business”:
  

   
“You”:
    

    
Delta 5 in 1981 on Oxford Road Show:
    

Posted by Richard Metzger
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04.18.2013
09:56 am
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Gang of Four’s ‘Not Great Men’ played by Javanese gamelan ensemble
12.05.2012
12:15 pm
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Well this is fun: A Javanese gamelan ensemble called Sekar Melati playing Gang of Four’s “Not Great Men.”
 

 
With thanks to WFMU

Posted by Tara McGinley
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12.05.2012
12:15 pm
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