GANG OF FOUR FACE THE CAPITALIST THREAT

It seems funny now that I thought the Gang Of Four might be an “unpleasant” interview. The band’s image as one of England’s most overtly political groups, coupled with such charmingly sensitive lyrics as “Love will get you like a case of anthrax,” seemed to indicate a gang of four grouchy snot-heads who’d probably make fun of me for liking cheeseburgers. Witness Hugo Burnham, a close-cropped, thickset out-and-out scary drummer who looks like his idea of fun might be pushing young American faces into old American brick walls. And witness the actual name, Gang Of Four, derived from the revolutionary group that tried to take over China after Mao died. Early mentions in the British press as a possible “Communist band.” It all added up to four stone-faced, thoroughly unpleasant individuals who, I thought, would probably be as pretentious as they were contemptuous.

And when I met the band, I told them as much.

Jon King, vocalist of the Gang, considered. “I think ‘pretentious’ is a difficult word to use, actually,” he said. “I don’t think people know what they mean when they say it. ”

America is such a violent society, and everybody seems to accept it. —Jon King

Andy Gill, guitarist, spoke up: “It’s a word that people us e for things that aren’t...”

“Aren’t immediately understandable," . finished drummer Hugo Burnham.

We were in Detroit, in the tour bus. The night before they’d been in Toronto, tomorrow would be Chicago, followed by a hemrowing all-night drive to New York. The bus was parked outside the hotel the Gang was staying in for the few hours they’d be in Detroit./ Immediately after that night’s show, it was back-into-the-bus-again for an all-night drive to Chicago. Here in Detroit,^ though, we were sucking down Canadian beers—and the Gang Of Four’s image, at least for me, was changing rapidly.

“You could be sitting in a corner,” Jon King was saying, “you might actually be having a conversation you’re really interested in with someone, and then a drunken boor comes up and says lOooh, well aren’t we gettin’ all fuckin’ clever in the corner.:.’ That sort of comment. People seem sort of terrified to take on a different subject matter, • something that’s out of the ordinary.

“I think there’s quite a lot of sense of humor to the band. Using the name like ‘The Gang Of Four’ for example. Like you were saying,” he said, which made me think back to what it was I was saying— something about pretentiousness, I think. “If people take the name straight off, ‘Oh, a political title,’ there’s obviously those implications. But I mean it is absurd that four basically middle-class people from England should name themselves after the radical clique that took over China. ”

“I think it takes a lot of nerve, really,” says Andy Gill. '

And so it does. And the fact that the band can laugh about that and other things as well dispelled any lingering notions about fake credibility or false emotion. Which all adds up to one hell of an extraordinary debut for the Gang Of Four. Their LP Entertainment!, released in the U.K. last year (but only last month in America), remains the finest album I’ve heard in months, and the band’s pre-LP material— an EP for the British label Fast Records (now available on the Fast Product sampler) and the even better EMI 45 “At Home He’s A Tourist” b/w “It’s Her Factory”—is equally superb. I’d say they’re the best new band to emerge from Britain in two or three years. At least. And I can’t really explain why because the attraction isn’t totally on a verbal level; it’s a combination of music (stark and danceable), lyrics (stark and memorable) and emotion (stark and almost bearable). In short, there’s nobody really like them.

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I told them so. I also tojd thejn I ended up feeling depressed when I listened to Gang Of Four records.

“That wouldn’t be the desired intention at all,” King said, “What makes you feel depressed?” \

It’s like with the Velvet Underground, I told them. It’s the combination—the incredible music, the words, the dregs of emotion, sardonic and heavily unpleasant. It’s as if I feel myself getting uplifted by the Life Stinks message, which I don’t think is the “desired intention.” It’s a conflict of emotions.

“I think that’s a very interesting parallel, really,” King nodded. “The Velvet Underground really went right against the grain in a number of different areas. The different subject matter—the idea of ‘street life,’ which has now becomes.”

“The norm.” This from the drummer' Burnham, looking out the bus window. King kept talking:

“You look e(t the bios of supposed rock bands—‘He’s a street kid’—the notion of being ‘street’ began with the Velvet Underground.”

That’s where I see similarities, I said. Like them, you guys seerh like normal people singing about normal things.

“We are singing about what’s ordinary,” Gill said. “What’s more interesting than people’s actual lives? What people do and what happens to you in your life, what’s more interesting than that? That’s what we are saying, that’s what’s extraordinary.”

And so the Gang Of Four sing about failure in the bedroom (“Our bodies make us worry”), failure in relationships (“Sometimes I’m thinking that I love you/But I know it’s only lust”), and “the problem of leisure. ” Capsule pictures of “ordinary” lives: “I watch the news, eating, eating all my food as I sit watching the red spot in the egg that looks like all the blood you don’t see on television/”

What makes you guys think you have anything to offer American kids? They probably don’t even want to think about what you’re singing about.

“Maybe the reason they don’t want to think about it,” King Said, sipping his beer, “is because it’s never been suggested to them thaf there are problems. I mean, America is such a violent society and everybody sort of seems to accept it.”

You realize that a lot of “political” bands from England come over here and have a snotty attitude about America and American kids, don’t you? And you must realize how that makes us feel? Isn’t thefe a little bit of provincialism going on here?

“That’s the thing,” Burnham said, “sometimes here or anywhere outside England people ask ‘How relevant is it to people who aren’t English?’ But people are the same across the board, really...”

Similarities and differences between America and Europe are discussed. King points out that / Europe is becoming increasingly “Americanized” and Gill agrees: “I tnink in a certain way some things are more gratingly obvious in America than they are in Europe. In the sense that America is mord modern than Europe, in the sense that the whole place is designed around the most efficient use of capitalism. It’s designed around that, and people’s lives are affected—more brutally affected—by that. I mean, leisure time is more crassly empty in America than it is in Europe.”

Well hey, how do you spend your leisure time?

“I’m not saying / do wonderful things with my leisure time,” Gill said. “The sense of it is this: when you re working in America, say, you’ve got your job—and when you leave your job you do whatever it is you do. You plug into the prepared entertainment, which could be'the TV, and just fill in the hours.”

Jon King nodded: “There are more facilities, actually, in the United States, for other things. Not more, really, but I think it’s easier to go to the movies, rock concerts or whatever They’re all easy to getto. ”

Then the obvious question: would any of you ever want to live in America?

“Yeah,” King said. And he looked like he meant it.

“Now look,” Gill continued,, “I’m not. being critical of all that at all. When I’m talking about America, I mean it’s more exaggerated, it’s more modern. The whole socio-economic structure is more exposed and taken to its logical conclusion in America. Whereas in Europe, Europe’s got all sorts of incredibly complicated mixtures of backgrounds and previous cultures. It’s all sort of mixed up/ it’s not quite so completely obvious and exposed.”

More beers were opened and we dropped politics to actually discuss music. I noticed a subtle difference in the band’s manner, as. if the political talk kept them slightly on edge but discussion of the music itself came much easier. Favorites of the Gang Of Four: the Velvets (obvious, really; compare “The Murder Mystery” to the Gang’s “Anthrax”), Talking Heads, early Funkadelic, Hendrix, Chic, and, quite surprisingly, the Band. _ •

I told them I could hear anything in their music but the Band.

“Well, the thing about the Band,” King said, “is that they were singing about the whole culture, what it meant to be an American. Greil Marcus wrote that really good article about them [See Mystery Train.— Ed.], and it’s true—their subject matter was about what it is to live with this history. It’s great, it was so completely a new subject and they explored it in such a good way.”

Hmmmm. Did they think any British band has defined the British experience in tfie same way?

“Not in any comparable way,” Andy Gill said. “The whole English culture isn’t so wrapped up in finding yourself. And the American culture is.”

And why do you think that’s so? Because Americans have so much leisure time? Is it necessarily bad?

“No, no,” Gill said. “It has a lot to do with what I was saying earlier about America being such an extreme. It’s like one big gadget, really, a big machine designed around an idea. Filled with human beings who’re trying to figure out where they fit in. ” ☆ ☆ ☆

I fit in rather nicely that night, watching the Gang Of Four perform at Bookie’s Club 870 and realizing that as great as the records are, Jhe band in live performance is even better. There’s rhythm, always rhythm, provided by Burnham’s steady drums and Dave Allen’s absolutely superb funk basswork. And guitarist Gill wrenches hypnotic feedback out of his amplifier as if it was 1967 again, an anachronistic mutation of Hendrix, Blood Ulmer and the Captain Beef heart guitarist we never got to see. King waves his arms .to the rhythms, singing about “white noise in a white room,” playing his melodica—and the mixture of chaos, power, emotion and sheer danceability is unlike anything I’ve ever heard before. And the Gang Of Four call it Entertainment! and I’d call it something else if I could only think of the right words and I don’t think I can.