Rip It Up and Start Again

by Simon Reynolds

  Leeds University’s fine-arts department, which spawned Gang of Four and its sister groups the Mekons and Delta 5, encouraged this conceptual approach. Theory was considered inseparably intertwined with artistic practice. T. J. Clark, the department head, had been a member of the short-lived British chapter of the Situationist International. Terry Atkinson, the studio-painting tutor who wandered around discussing the students’ work, had once belonged to the ultra-rigorous movement Art and Language. Drawing on Marxism and hard-core aesthetic theory, Art and Language created works that combined visual material with text (political posters, philosophy, even musical scores) and for a while even abandoned art production altogether for criticism. The Mekons’ Tom Greenhalgh enjoyed Art and Language’s sarcastic, combative approach, the way they ripped into other critics for being “wooly-minded and promoting the mystique of Art.” Absorbing this sensibility, the Mekons and Gang of Four created a kind of metarock, radically self-critical and vigilant.

  Leeds actually had an unusual density of art students. In addition to the university, says Greenhalgh, “Leeds Polytechnic had its own excellent art department, where a lot of work with performance and video was going on. And there was Leeds College of Art.” Factor in all the nonart students in Leeds, and you had the recipe for considerable town-versus-gown tension. “It was a Northern working-class city with a bunch of students dumped in the middle, most of them not from Yorkshire,” says Hugo Burnham, Gang of Four’s drummer. “‘Fookin’ students!’ was an expression you heard rather frequently!”

  The tension was heightened by the not entirely unfounded perception that the students bummed around doing “fook all” courtesy of the government’s undergraduate grants, getting drunk every night on dirt cheap subsidized beer in their college bars. Meanwhile, ordinary people either worked hard or, increasingly, subsisted on meager unemployment benefits. In the industrial parts of Yorkshire, the jobless figures more than doubled between 1973 and 1978 as the traditional heavy industries declined. As prospects for youth narrowed, the far Right prospered. Leeds became the Northern stronghold for the crypto-fascist National Front, while explicitly neo-Nazi organizations like the British Movement and the League of St. George were also active in the area. “Our very first gig, skinheads came looking for a fight,” recalls Burnham. “There was real tension. The skins were taunting Andy Gill and then he smacked one of them in the face with his guitar.” Ironically, the crop-headed Burnham often got mistaken for a skinhead himself. “They’d see me with my short hair, Doc Martens boots, and braces, and approach me and ask if I was a fan of Skrew-driver, the Oi! group.”

  Burnham was actually studying drama at Leeds, oscillating between trying to set up a radical theater group and playing rugby, a game that suited his stocky physique. “I gravitated toward this fine-arts drinking crowd, they seemed like the most interesting people around.” The center of the scene was a pub called the Fenton, which was strategically located midway between the university and the polytechnic. A long-established hangout for radicals and nonconformists, its patrons mixed several generations of bohemians: bearded sixties relics, gays, anarchists, and “the new breed” in their leather coats and Doc Martens boots. “It was totally crowded, people squashed together and just raving it up,” recalls Greenhalgh. As much as Leeds’ fine-arts department, it was the Fenton’s beery ferment of argument that shaped Gang of Four and the Mekons.

  Gang of Four thrived on friction. “Andy had really mastered the art of the put-down,” says Burnham. “He would bait you. You get that sense from his guitar playing, it’s very prickly.” Drawing on the jagged, choppy rhythm-as-lead style developed by Wilko Johnson of pub rock trailblazers Dr. Feelgood, Gill chipped out flinty harmonics and splintered funk, making the listener flinch from the shards shooting out of the speakers.

  Love of Dr. Feelgood—the stripped-down sound, the aura of barely contained violence—united Gill, Burnham, and singer Jon King. But somewhere between their first gig in May 1977 and their first record, October 1978’s Damaged Goods EP, a drastic transformation took place. Recruited via an ad that described the group in Feelgood-like terms as a “fast rivvum & blues band,” bassist Dave Allen pushed the group firmly into the punk-funk zone. An accomplished player who’d done session work, Allen had been looking to make music “like Stevie Wonder but heavy” before he met Gang of Four. In turn, the Gang trained their bassist to play more sparsely, using just “a quarter of the number of notes he was actually capable of playing,” according to Burnham. Gang of Four kept their music stark and severe. Andy Gill shunned sound-thickening effects like fuzz and distortion, while Burnham eschewed splashy cymbals. Avoidances defined the band’s style as much as positive choices. “Instead of guitar solos, we had anti-solos, where you stopped playing, just left a hole,” says Gill. The very fabric of the band’s sound was abrasively different. Valve amplifiers were verboten, says Gill. “Valves are what every guitarist today wants—they’re the prerequisite for a ‘fat’ rock tone, the ‘warmth’ that people talk about. I had transistorized amps—a more brittle, cleaner sound, and colder. Gang of Four were against warmth.”

  Gang of Four also shunned the heat of rock spontaneity, the intuitive looseness of letting songs emerge “organically” out of jams. “No jamming—that was the J-word,” says Gill. “Everything was thought out in advance.” Burnham worked out unusual drum parts that inverted or frustrated the usual rock modes of rhythmic motion, like the mechanistic drum loop of “Love Like Anthrax,” and what Burnham calls the “continuous falling-down-the-stairs flow” of “Guns Before Butter.” Instead of stacking the instruments for a layered wall of sound, Gang of Four gave each of them room to breathe. Guitar, bass, and drums existed on more or less equal footing. In their most thrilling songs—the taut, geometrical paroxysm of “Natural’s Not In It,” for instance—everything worked as rhythm, just like in James Brown’s funk.

  This egalitarian balance between players embodied the group’s collectivist beliefs. “It’s democratic music, where we don’t have a ‘star’ thing,” Jon King declared. Dave Allen insisted, “Gang of Four doesn’t believe in the individual, and we believe that whatever you do is ‘political’ with a small p.” These ideals permeated every aspect of the group’s existence, from the way the music was jointly composed to the four-way split of publishing rights to the constant, fiery debates about internal affairs and external issues. And every member of the group and its entourage got paid the same wage (thirty pounds), except for the roadies, who got double during tours.

  In the early days, the Mekons were an extension of this sprawling collective. “Without actually having headed notepaper to prove it, Gang of Four and Mekons were virtually a cooperative, sharing equipment and a rehearsal space,” says Burnham. “We did gigs together, taking turns to headline.” The Mekons’ version of democratized rock differed from Gang of Four’s, though. It was less disciplined and clenched, more shambolic and sloppy. Guitarist Kevin Lycett listed the group’s founding principles: “that anybody could do it; that we didn’t want to be stars; that there was no set group as such, anybody could get up and join in and instruments would be swapped around; that there’d be no distance between the audience and the band; that we were nobody special.” Founding member Mark White had never played bass before and at their first jam used a door key to pick the strings. Lycett played a battered secondhand guitar that cost ten pounds. Exuberantly mixing informality with ineptitude, early Mekons gigs were “complete art noise chaos,” recalls Burnham. “They opened for Gang of Four at our second show ever and they had a sofa onstage representing a spaceship. It had the word ‘spaceship’ painted on it. It was genius and hilarious.” Lyrics, read off a piece of paper, devolved into improvised gabble. Friends wandered on and offstage. At another gig, the set disintegrated because the set list had been inadvertently written out in a completely different order for every band member.

  Taking the punk ideal of “anyone can do it” even more seriously than Swell Maps, the Mekons oug
ht to have gone nowhere. Amazingly, they had a record deal by their second show. They were supporting Scottish pop-punk outfit the Rezillos at the F-Club, Leeds’s leading New Wave club. Bob Last was in the audience and decided that the Mekons would be the perfect group to kick-start his still productless Fast Product. Slightly put out at being so swiftly overtaken by their seemingly less serious brethren, Gang of Four were mollified when they soon got signed to Fast Product, too.

  A stumbling juggernaut of crude guitar and caveman drums, “Never Been in a Riot,” the Mekons’ debut, was a sonic argument in support of the proposition that rock, in the words of Melody Maker’s Mary Harron, “is the only form of music which can actually be done better by people who can’t play their instruments than by people who can.” Not everybody bought the argument initially. Rough Trade literally didn’t buy it, refusing to take any copies of the single, saying it was just too incompetent. “Shortly thereafter, though, it was made Single of the Week in NME,” recalls Last. “And everybody wanted it, including Rough Trade.”

  NME’s seal of approval was all the more significant because it came courtesy of the paper’s resident punk rocker Tony Parsons, who took the lyrics of “Never Been in a Riot” as an inspired lampoon of the Clash’s street-fighting-man posturing (“White Riot,” the allusion to “sten guns in Knightsbridge” in “1977,” etc.). According to Greenhalgh, the song is closer to an admission of vulnerability. “That you might be in a riot and be scared. Being open about that kind of weakness rather than trying to put on a front.” This was all part of the Mekons’ self-effacing and humanizing project—a refusal to be larger than life. Later in 1978, Tony Parsons interviewed the group as part of an NME special feature on the Leeds scene. In keeping with their ideals, the Mekons insisted on “no photographs, no surnames. We don’t want to push ourselves as individual personalities!” Says Greenhalgh, “We didn’t want to be photographed for NME, so we made this puppet creature and put a guitar around it.” Photographer Steve Dixon sneaked a snapshot of them anyway.

  While the Mekons upturned both traditional rock heroics and its punk successor (the Clash’s guitarist-as-guerrilla shtick), Gang of Four gradually acquired a reputation as a sort of new, improved Clash, agit-punk with a proper grounding in theory. “Damaged Goods,” the title track of their debut EP, showed the group had done its Marxist homework and knew about things like “commodity fetishism” and “reification.” “Damaged Goods” uses the language of commerce and industry as a prism offering disconcerting insights into affairs of the heart. With grim wit, the song represents a breakup in terms of refunds and emotional costs: “Open the till/Give me the change you said would do me good…you said you’re cheap but you’re too much.”

  The EP’s other standout track, “Love Like Anthrax,” was an even more heartlessly cold dissection of romance. The music was estrangement enough by itself. “There’s this bizarre, totally robotic drumbeat matched with a weird two-bar-loop bassline, so that the emphasis in both drums and bass falls entirely in the unexpected place,” explains Gill. “And then my guitar comes in with random free-form noise.” In 1978, feedback hadn’t been heard in rock for a long while. Gill’s howling cacophony was nothing like Hendrix’s controlled yet orgiastic use of feedback to smear melody lines, or Velvet Underground’s tidal waves of white noise. In rock’s Romantic tradition, feedback typically signified the engulfingly oceanic, a swoony rush of Dionysian oblivion. In Gill’s hand, it just sounded like migraine, which totally suited “Anthrax”’s theme of love as a debilitating brain fever, something any rational person would avoid like the plague. In the lyrics, King bemoans feeling like “a beetle on its back.” He’s paralyzed and literally drained, his lovesick thoughts trickling “like piss” down the gutter.

  “Love Like Anthrax” is constructed as a sort of Brechtian stereophonic duet. King wails the stricken lover’s lament from one speaker; Gill recites dry-as-dust details about the recording process from the other. Burnham once compared “Anthrax” to the split-screen techniques in Godard’s 1975 movie Numero Deux, where everyday life in a working-class French family is juxtaposed with more dissonant, private scenes of the same characters. Gill and King ran Leeds University’s student film society, so they’d have been familiar with Godard’s work: the deliberately exposed means of production (like the clapper board that flashes into view every so often in La Chinoise); the disjointedness (continuity lapses, incorrect eye line matches, jump cuts, lack of congruence between images and sound); characters breaking the fourth wall to address the audience; and all the other stylistic tics designed to make the viewer conscious of film as artifact and contrivance. Gang of Four and Godard both maintained a wary and vigilant stance toward the seductions of their chosen art forms. Godard described cinema as “the most beautiful fraud in the world,” and saw his films as a form of active criticism. A veteran contributor to the journal Cahiers Du Cinema, he wrote, “I’m still as much of a critic as I ever was. The only difference is that instead of writing criticism, I now film it.” Both Godard and Gang of Four inevitably faced similar accusations from traditionalists: too much concept and theory, not enough emotion, sensuousness, warmth.

  Behind the director-provocateur and the agit-funk group lay a common source, Bertolt Brecht’s antinaturalistic, unabashedly didactic theater. What Brecht called “epic theater” confronted the spectator with an arbitrary and absurd reality. Instead of feeling that the protagonist’s woes were in accord with the ordained nature of reality (and therefore, as in tragedy, somehow noble), you were meant to feel that “the sufferings of [the protagonist] appall me, because they are unnecessary.” Brecht’s “alienation effects” dislocated the viewer from his “natural responses,” cutting through so-called realism to offer a glimpse of the deep structures that organize our lives. Brecht’s imperative—“what is ‘natural’ must have the force of what is startling”—dovetailed with another Marxist thinker, Antonio Gramsci, whose work was being rediscovered in the 1970s. In his view, the ruling class exerted “hegemony” by making the ways of the world seem like simple “common sense.” Radical critique, argued Gramsci, should unmask every obvious-seeming piece of common sense as man-made, a “truth” built to serve somebody’s interest.

  A Brecht fan to the point of having Bertolt’s picture on the wall of his Edinburgh flat, Bob Last incorporated alienation effects into the artwork of Damaged Goods. “The group sent me a letter that was very precise about what they wanted on the cover,” he says. Enclosed was a newspaper clip with a photograph of a female matador and a bull, along with a caption of dialogue. The matador explains, “You know, we’re both in the entertainment business, we have to give the audience what they want. I don’t like to do this but I earn double the amount I’d get if I were in a 9 to 5 job.” The bull grumbles in response, “I think that at some point we have to take responsibility for our actions.” In the end, Last ignored the Gang’s wishes and designed a different cover, but reproduced the letter and the untidily snipped-out newspaper clipping on the back sleeve. “This didn’t exactly mollify the group,” recalls Last. “But I’m sure they recognized that, to the extent they were interested in deconstruction, this was an unassailable gesture!”

  Released in the autumn of 1978, Damaged Goods was hailed as a breakthrough. Here was a group that had found a totally new way of negotiating the thorny danger zone of politics in rock. Abrasive but accessible, Gang of Four avoided both Tom Robinson–style preachy protest and the forbidding didacticism of avant-gardists like Henry Cow. The form was as radical as the content, and yet it rocked. You could even dance to it.

  After Damaged Goods, Gang of Four, encouraged by Last, made a then controversial decision to abandon the independent sector and sign to a major label. The idea of reaching the largest number of people possible made sense given the group’s propagandizing impulse. It also chimed with one of the group’s major subjects, entertainment. It was much more provocative to intensify the implicit contradictions by operating right at the hear
t of the rock leisure industry. Whereas other politicized bands agonized over being connected to multinational conglomerates, Andy Gill and his comrades felt that the Pop Group’s and the Slits’ dream of “escaping Babylon was bollocks hand-wringing, as much as we loved both those groups. The point for us was not to be ‘pure.’ Gang of Four songs were so often about the inability to have ‘clean hands.’ It just wouldn’t be on our agenda to be on a truly independent label, as if such a thing could even exist.” Several majors courted them, but EMI emerged as a favorite, precisely for its sheer monolithic size and bland image. Along with its globe-spanning muscle, EMI offered them a surprising degree of creative control. According to Gill, it was almost a production-and-licensing deal, with Gang of Four handing over the finished album tapes, which they produced themselves. The group also designed their own album sleeves, posters, press ads, and badges.

  The Mekons’ second single for Fast Product, the indie smash “Where Were You?” was released toward the end of 1978 and quickly sold out its 27,500-copy first pressing. But the Mekons, too, were eventually persuaded to step up to the major leagues and sign with Virgin. “Bob Last convinced us there was nothing morally superior about signing to an indie label,” says Greenhalgh. Ambushed by success, the Mekons had inadvertently ended up with a career on their hands, arriving at a level of gigging activity that needed the sort of funding only a major could provide. The group’s rise peaked in March 1979, when they were featured on the bill of what was semijokingly dubbed the gig of the century by the music papers, a showcase at London’s Lyceum venue of “new music” that included Gang of Four and another Fast Product band, the Human League, along with the Fall and Stiff Little Fingers. But not long after this show the Mekons’ attempt at infiltrating the mainstream went awry.