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CHAIRMEN OF THE BORED - UNCUT september 2000 Simon Goddard on GANG OF FOUR's hallmark 1979 debut, Entertainment! The year is 1978, the place - The Pagoda Club, Carlisle. Gang Of Four, an unsigned punk band from Leeds (named after the renegade communist faction led by Mao's widow, who staged a 10-day leadership coup in China two years earlier), have managed to get a booking at what is still the most insalubrious nightspot in the so-called "Great Border City". Upon arrival, to their disgust they discover that in the crudest traditions of the provincial northern variety circuit they've been hired to play on the same bill as a stripper. While it might be all right for The Stranglers to dabble in glorified misogyny, Gang Of Four - who would later achieve notoriety by forfeiting a chance to play Top Of The Pops because they refused to alter a lyric referring to rubbers - begin voicing their disapproval. At which point the unfortunate peeler herself turns to the group asserting, "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 nine to-five job." However innocuous a meeting this may have seemed, it became something of a pivotal moment in Gang Of Four's history, scalding itself deep into their creative consciousness. First immortalised as an almost incoherent murmur lost in the mix of "Love Like Anthrax" - part of 1978's Damaged Goods EP on the Fast label - the sleeve also carried a press clipping of a female matador with a typed letter from the band explaining how they would like her to have a superimposed speech bubble containing the stripper's very same quotation. The bull she goads is meant to reply, "I think that at some point we have to take responsibility for our actions." It seemed only logical that when it came to choosing a title for their debut album released the following year, the group should again return to the same source, finally deciding with no shortage of irony on christening it Entertainment! While the class of '76 are still the primary focus in terms of post-modern theorising and broadsheet debate (last year's Clash revival, this year's Sex Pistols documentary), punk's most frequently name-checked innovators in terms of recognisable musical style still tend to be those who evolved from its second wave. As journalistic shorthand for such influential pioneering, Joy Division, The Fall and Wire have become all too familiar reference points. However, the latter's cursed inability to escape critical proximity in the same sentence as Elastica could so very easily have been the fate of Gang Of Four. The guitar style of Andy Gill alone has been mimicked by fellow late-Seventies punk-funk terrorists The Pop Group, and you can hear distinct echoes of his singular style in the frantic string scraping of The Edge and Graham Coxon, As Flea from The Red Hot Chili Peppers commented in the liner notes to Entertainment!'s 1995 CD re-issue: It made me laugh to hear that guy from U2 talk about his guitar influences being old bluesmen. I thought, 'Hey, you dipshit, what about Andy Gill' What indeed. Gill's playing took the aggression of punk and the more rhythmic jangles of funk guitar to their most absurd, bitter extremes. His instrument spat out chords like sparks, as irregular as if he were persevering with a faulty jack plug. Add to this the impenetrably solid rhythm section of bassist Dave Allen and drummer Hugo Burnham combined with the vocals of Jon King - a man whose bombastic vernacular more often than not came in one-syllable short, sharp shocks(" Your kiss so sweet, your sweat so sour") - and in Gang Of Four you had a sound as distinct and original as anything the late-Seventies British New Wave had to offer. Swiftly signed to EMI following the success of Damaged Goods, their first major label release - "At Home He's A Tourist" - spawned that now legendary Top Of The Pops feud, one which at the very least highlighted the sincerity of Gang Of Four's ideological convictions. The Clash aside, most part-time punks were more than happy to pipe themselves into the nation's living rooms in between Abba and Wings every Thursday night on BBC1. Were it not for the apparently risque refrain of "The rubbers you hide in your top left pocket" proving too much for Auntie's censors, Gang Of Four may even have joined them. The fact that a John Peel session had already been broadcast on Radio One, where they actually used the brand name of Durex, went unnoticed. Featured on the ensuing album, "At Home He's A Tourist" was typical of a set which scrutinised and dissected the mendacity of modern life with an overwhelming sense of late 20th century nihilistic ennui. Their contempt for the weekend disco mating ritual, for them a political issue ("They make their profit from the things they sell to help you cob off") would reverberate throughout Entertainment! In "Contract", sexual relationships are a recipe for unresolved grief ( "Our bodies make us worry"), while in "Natural's Not In It" they're a cold, marketable commodity ("Repackaged sex keeps your interest"). More vitriolic still is "Anthrax" (re-recorded, its title abbreviated), which casually likens love itself to a fatal virus as Gill's guitar gargles in a bedlam of feedback like an audible bacteria. Entertainment! is an album born of frustration, of being boxed in, trapped, imprisoned and socially rejected. "I'm so restless, I'm bored as a cat, " King repeats during "Glass". On "5.45", even watching the news is an excruciating ordeal: "How can I sit and eat my tea with all that blood flowing from the television". The sense of disgust is as profound and intense as that found in the pages of Jean-Paul Sartre's existentialist bible, Nausea, hallucinating to the point of delirium ("the red spot in the egg that looks like all the blood"). It's this very frustration both in the lyrics and the spiked, tautness of the music - that gives the record its unique edge, Entertainment! is a compound of the despair one feels the moment before furniture is smashed and windows broken, as opposed to the more insular angst of Joy Division's Unknown Pleasures released the same year. Never wallowing in its own negativity, it constantly demands a response, lines crying out like unavoidable 50-foot Situationist billboards: "The problem of leisure, what to do for pleasure?" Entertainment ! is a jab in the ribs, a boot up the listener's apathetic arse, a catalyst to absorb, to consider and then react to. That Gang Of Four aren't necessarily the first point of reference when exposing the second-hand ideas of today's plagiarists is perhaps down to their subsequent career, one which ultimately failed to match the achievement of their debut. King would later retire from the industry altogether, while Gill was last heard on Michael Hutchence's solo album released posthumously in 1999. In short, Entertainment! was an impossibly hard act to follow. Yet if it's any consolation, in the 21 years since it was first released, few bands have been able to boast such a near flawless first offering in terms of bite, spontaneity and bloody-minded courage. Gang Of Four's debut is, even by today's standards, an unparalled sensory assault. It still sneers. It still rages. God forbid, it still entertains. The Gang Of Four Greil Marcus, July 1990 The Gang Of Four - Dave Allen, bass, Hugo Burnham, drums, vocals ("It's Her Factory"), Andy Gill, guitar, vocals ("Anthrax," "Paralysed"); and Jon King, vocals and melodica -played their first show in the summer of 1977 in Leeds, England. Burnham, Gill, and King were middle-class graduates of Leeds University: Allen was a working-class musician who answered a bassist-wanted ad for a fast R&B band. They were one of countless groups to spring up in the wake of the promise people heard in the Sex Pistols' "Anarchy in the U.K.": the rules have changed. Now anything you want, anything that's on your mind, can be made into pop music. It's your move. There was something on the Gang of Four's collective mind, picked up from books, painting (Manet's especially), movies (notably Jean-Luc Godard's Numero Deux), not-so-fast R&B (George Clinton's Parliament-Funkadelic), and Leeds street politics (marches against the neo Nazi National Front party that ended with police violence; violent attacks by Front goons on pubs frequented by the likes of the band and their pals the Mekons and Delta 5). What was on their mind was the notion that everyday life-wage labor, official propaganda, the commodity system, but also the way you bought a shirt, how you made love, the feeling you had as you watched the nightly news or turned away from it-was not "natural", but the product of an invisible hand. It was an interested construction, someone else's project, a rulers' project. Some of the rulers were dead, some were living, but all held power. "The attitudes and beliefs that people take as being natural," King said early on, "have been inherited through the social structure they're brought up in. An example is the man who believes that women are by definition more suited to working in the home than to making decisions. The belief in the natural puts all this outside the realm of debate - and unless you have an awareness of your ideas as political manifestations, you won't believe you can change them." "If you're not aware of the processes and thoughts by which you arrive at a statement about a situation", Gill said of the bands songs, "If you're not aware of that, you probably can't sufficiently analyse the situation". Highfalutin stuff, even after the Sex Pistols had pinned history itself as a "mad parade" and the Royal Family as a theme park, but when I first saw the Gang of Four I didn't catch a word and could have cared less. They were opening for the Buzzcocks in San Francisco in 1979; they'd just released their first album, Entertainment!, in the U.K.: no one in the audience had heard it. They took the stage and held it as if all bets were off. I couldn't take my eyes off Gill, scared, tense, but ready, he looked like an extra from a British end-of-the-world movie suddenly forced to carry the film. I saw the Gang of Four play many times after that night - in England, in Los Angeles, again in San Francisco, after Busta Jones and then Sara Lee replaced Dave Allen, after Gill and a drum machine (on record) and Steve Goulding (on stage) replaced Hugo Burnham - and the shock of that night, its displacement, was always present. Jon King was hurled around the stage as if by an unseen puppetmaster, as instruments dropped out, leaving holes in the sound, as the wrong man plugged them, leaving holes of his own, you could almost see the puppet's strings being cut, you could certainly hear them. As King jerked, Andy Gill attacked him; Dave Allen upended both of them. Hugo Burnham hammered at all three like a judge. I walked out of that first show before the Buzzcocks came on; I didn't want to know what they had to say. I didn't want anything to break the confusion, the delicious horror, of what the Gang of Four had done. What had they done? Always, they were talked about as some kind of rebel-rock or agit-prop ("neo-Marxist funk" as one treasured review put it), or as a band bent on the deconstruction of all received ideas, including all received ideas about rock 'n' roll. Even the band members occasionally said such things, but that wasn't exactly it. The Gang of Four acted out, and out into records, a picture of an individual who had discovered that ordinary life - the gestures of affection and resentment one made every day, the catch phrases one spoke every day as if one had invented them - is in fact sold and bought as grease for shopping and silence, for the accumulation of capital and passivity. The person who has made this remarkable discovery begins to re-examine his or her life, and it begins to look different: "Natural's Not in It." History - "Not by Great Men." A woman in the home: "It's Her Factory." Life looks different, but it doesn't change. The Gang of Four pursued their subject's discoveries not as if they might lead to some grand general strike, some revolutionary epiphany ("it's a good name," a fan told them, not likely thinking of China's Maoist Gang of Four, "because there are four of you"), but as if, once recognized, those discoveries would remain trapped in the prison of familiarity. Playing everyman on stage, Jon King was never free. He was an explosion of doubt. He dramatized a glimpse of liberation, but simultaneously the wish to conform, to be at home in the only home available, not matter how false. When Hugo Burnham sings "It's Her Factory", he speaks conversationally about a news item he's encountered; he's sardonic but direct. When Andy Gill recites the theory behind "Anthrax" or the monologue of "Paralysed" when he momentarily takes over "Damaged Goods" or any of the other tunes in which he's immediately evident (his grainy voice has none of King's wail in it), he's no less naturalistic. Both men get to the point, and both are a bit forbidding. But King is the Gang of Four's patsy - and the world's. In almost every song, you can hear a very specific struggle: the struggle of the person who has heard the bad news to love it. He always fails. He realizes everything he does is second-hand, a waking dream, a dream someone else has dreamed for him - when he walks into a pub and greets friends with a line he's half-consciously lifted from last night's sit-com, he's an advertisement. He hears himself and he feels tricked, humiliated, so he smashes into his friends, into the other members of the band, as if he's never seen them before but knows they mean him no good. Screaming, he insists that he's happy. Dave Allen, Burnham, and Gill work as the singer's bad conscience. Most pointedly it is Gill, along with King co-author of almost all of the band's lyrics and co-designer of their hilarious sleeve art. On stage he was by far the most intense and willful of the actors. He remains the locus of danger in the songs. While King splatters himself across the music, Gill is watchful, the man who knows too much; he communicates terror because he has an idea what's coming. As a guitarist he is also the narrator, to the degree that the Gang of Four, their words not much less cut up than their sound, used one. The rhythm section can frame the singer's absurdities, but not keep up with him; Gill is the musician who communicates the value of form, of one-thing-leads-to-another, even when what has to be said demands that ordinary narrative be abandoned, demands that the urge to speak, or the impossibility of making oneself understood, be dramatized rather than any message or thought. Allen, Burnham, and Gill may be the singer's bad conscience because as they play they make irrevocable choices, and fix their value; he can't. You could see this happen on stage, and you can hear it in the music; you don't have to follow any lyric sheet. From "At Home He's a Tourist" to "Capital (it Fails Us Now)" to "I Love a Man in a Uniform" the Gang of Four's music was always about resistance, but it was not the resistance of the rebel against the ruler. It was about the resistance of the rebel against him or herself. Most of the time, most intensely, most dramatically, the struggle ends with a raging acceptance, a rage that can't find its target: that's what happens in "Damaged Goods" with its many puns echoing off THE CHANGE WILL DO YOU GOOD, a supermarket slogan, the promise of a new life summed up in a few pennies less for eggs and cheese; that's what happens in "To Hell with Poverty" and "The History of the World." Occasionally, as with the quiet mumbled "Paralysed" a person faces oblivion, in this case what unemployment is so chillingly called in the UK, "redundancy". Rage becomes meaningless, and the acceptance you hear takes on a new form: self-hate. The Gang of Four offered no anthems, no tunes of right and wrong. They were interested in constructing a drama in which each listener found his or her place as a new historical subject, set free from all certainties, all forms of common sense and obvious conclusions set free in a convulsion you can hear in so many of the numbers on this disc, perhaps most fiercely in "Return the Gift". It's a little tale about how an individual shrinks - how one becomes not a subject but merely an object of history -when he or she wins a radio give-away contest. It's a song about the way the winner exchanges the multitudes of a unique personality for Capital's reductive prize, fear. That terrible chant from the winner's psyche: "Please send me evenings and weekends/ Please send me evenings and weekends ..." in King & Gill's voices and the stuttering beat of the band you hear the fear that, having accepted a symbol of a good life (evenings and weekends to the contrary, the top prize in "Return the Gift" seems to be an inside shower) as a substitute for the confusions of your own self, you will cease to exist. In this fixed game if you win you are the king, your home is your castle, but at home you 1 feel like a tourist. Return the gift, the song is shouting, give it back before it's too late! It's always too late in the Gang of Four's songs of acceptance: you know perfectly well that nothing in "Return the Gift" is going back. But even when the band insisted on refusal, they reached the same pass; there is a way in which everything the Gang of Four did is caught in "We Live As We Dream, Alone," from their third album, Songs of the Free, released in 1982. Here there is no acceptance, but also no rebellion, only isolation. To see through the mystifications of the natural is to be free; it is also to face a kind of exile, to be exiled among everyone else, everyone who passes by a supermarket, sees the banner shouting "THE CHANGE WILL DO YOU GOOD" and doesn't get the joke. The Gang of Four played their last show at a college north of San Francisco in 1984. They got the joke, they made a brief career out of it. Sometimes, though, the career they made out of the joke, the show they put on, was so violent that when Jon King jumped all out s body, as Andy Gill aimed guitar notes at him, as Hugo Burnham refused to let anyone stop, ve Allen twisted the story far beyond their chance to understand it - his head hit the eiling of the nightclub where, on that night, the show was on. You couldn't hear the words, he people in the crowd had already learned them. The crowd moved like a centipede on its back.

gangof4history

CHAIRMEN OF THE BORED - UNCUT september 2000

Simon Goddard on GANG OF FOUR's hallmark 1979 debut, Entertainment!

The year is 1978, the place - The Pagoda Club, Carlisle. Gang Of Four, an unsigned punk band from Leeds (named after the renegade communist faction led by Mao's widow, who staged a 10-day leadership coup in China two years earlier), have managed to get a booking at what is still the most insalubrious nightspot in the so-called "Great Border City".

Upon arrival, to their disgust they discover that in the crudest traditions of the provincial northern variety circuit they've been hired to play on the same bill as a stripper. While it might be all right for The Stranglers to dabble in glorified misogyny, Gang Of Four - who would later achieve notoriety by forfeiting a chance to play Top Of The Pops because they refused to alter a lyric referring to rubbers - begin voicing their disapproval. At which point the unfortunate peeler herself turns to the group asserting, "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 nine to-five job."

However innocuous a meeting this may have seemed, it became something of a pivotal moment in Gang Of Four's history, scalding itself deep into their creative consciousness. First immortalised as an almost incoherent murmur lost in the mix of "Love Like Anthrax" - part of 1978's Damaged Goods EP on the Fast label - the sleeve also carried a press clipping of a female matador with a typed letter from the band explaining how they would like her to have a superimposed speech bubble containing the stripper's very same quotation. The bull she goads is meant to reply, "I think that at some point we have to take responsibility for our actions."

It seemed only logical that when it came to choosing a title for their debut album released the following year, the group should again return to the same source, finally deciding with no shortage of irony on christening it Entertainment!

While the class of '76 are still the primary focus in terms of post-modern theorising and broadsheet debate (last year's Clash revival, this year's Sex Pistols documentary), punk's most frequently name-checked innovators in terms of recognisable musical style still tend to be those who evolved from its second wave. As journalistic shorthand for such influential pioneering, Joy Division, The Fall and Wire have become all too familiar reference points. However, the latter's cursed inability to escape critical proximity in the same sentence as Elastica could so very easily have been the fate of Gang Of Four.

The guitar style of Andy Gill alone has been mimicked by fellow late-Seventies punk-funk terrorists The Pop Group, and you can hear distinct echoes of his singular style in the frantic string scraping of The Edge and Graham Coxon, As Flea from The Red Hot Chili Peppers commented in the liner notes to Entertainment!'s 1995 CD re-issue: It made me laugh to hear that guy from U2 talk about his guitar influences being old bluesmen. I thought, 'Hey, you dipshit, what about Andy Gill'

What indeed. Gill's playing took the aggression of punk and the more rhythmic jangles of funk guitar to their most absurd, bitter extremes. His instrument spat out chords like sparks, as irregular as if he were persevering with a faulty jack plug. Add to this the impenetrably solid rhythm section of bassist Dave Allen and drummer Hugo Burnham combined with the vocals of Jon King - a man whose bombastic vernacular more often than not came in one-syllable short, sharp shocks(" Your kiss so sweet, your sweat so sour") - and in Gang Of Four you had a sound as distinct and original as anything the late-Seventies British New Wave had to offer.

Swiftly signed to EMI following the success of Damaged Goods, their first major label release - "At Home He's A Tourist" - spawned that now legendary Top Of The Pops feud, one which at the very least highlighted the sincerity of Gang Of Four's ideological convictions. The Clash aside, most part-time punks were more than happy to pipe themselves into the nation's living rooms in between Abba and Wings every Thursday night on BBC1. Were it not for the apparently risque refrain of "The rubbers you hide in your top left pocket" proving too much for Auntie's censors, Gang Of Four may even have joined them. The fact that a John Peel session had already been broadcast on Radio One, where they actually used the brand name of Durex, went unnoticed.

Featured on the ensuing album, "At Home He's A Tourist" was typical of a set which scrutinised and dissected the mendacity of modern life with an overwhelming sense of late 20th century nihilistic ennui. Their contempt for the weekend disco mating ritual, for them a political issue ("They make their profit from the things they sell to help you cob off") would reverberate throughout Entertainment! In "Contract", sexual relationships are a recipe for unresolved grief ( "Our bodies make us worry"), while in "Natural's Not In It" they're a cold, marketable commodity ("Repackaged sex keeps your interest"). More vitriolic still is "Anthrax" (re-recorded, its title abbreviated), which casually likens love itself to a fatal virus as Gill's guitar gargles in a bedlam of feedback like an audible bacteria.

Entertainment! is an album born of frustration, of being boxed in, trapped, imprisoned and socially rejected. "I'm so restless, I'm bored as a cat, " King repeats during "Glass". On "5.45", even watching the news is an excruciating ordeal: "How can I sit and eat my tea with all that blood flowing from the television". The sense of disgust is as profound and intense as that found in the pages of Jean-Paul Sartre's existentialist bible, Nausea, hallucinating to the point of delirium ("the red spot in the egg that looks like all the blood").

It's this very frustration both in the lyrics and the spiked, tautness of the music - that gives the record its unique edge, Entertainment! is a compound of the despair one feels the moment before furniture is smashed and windows broken, as opposed to the more insular angst of Joy Division's Unknown Pleasures released the same year. Never wallowing in its own negativity, it constantly demands a response, lines crying out like unavoidable 50-foot Situationist billboards: "The problem of leisure, what to do for pleasure?" Entertainment ! is a jab in the ribs, a boot up the listener's apathetic arse, a catalyst to absorb, to consider and then react to.

That Gang Of Four aren't necessarily the first point of reference when exposing the second-hand ideas of today's plagiarists is perhaps down to their subsequent career, one which ultimately failed to match the achievement of their debut. King would later retire from the industry altogether, while Gill was last heard on Michael Hutchence's solo album released posthumously in 1999.

In short, Entertainment! was an impossibly hard act to follow. Yet if it's any consolation, in the 21 years since it was first released, few bands have been able to boast such a near flawless first offering in terms of bite, spontaneity and bloody-minded courage. Gang Of Four's debut is, even by today's standards, an unparalled sensory assault. It still sneers. It still rages. God forbid, it still entertains.

The Gang Of Four

Greil Marcus, July 1990

The Gang Of Four - Dave Allen, bass, Hugo Burnham, drums, vocals ("It's Her Factory"), Andy Gill, guitar, vocals ("Anthrax," "Paralysed"); and Jon King, vocals and melodica -played their first show in the summer of 1977 in Leeds, England. Burnham, Gill, and King were middle-class graduates of Leeds University: Allen was a working-class musician who answered a bassist-wanted ad for a fast R&B band. They were one of countless groups to spring up in the wake of the promise people heard in the Sex Pistols' "Anarchy in the U.K.": the rules have changed. Now anything you want, anything that's on your mind, can be made into pop music. It's your move.

There was something on the Gang of Four's collective mind, picked up from books, painting (Manet's especially), movies (notably Jean-Luc Godard's Numero Deux), not-so-fast R&B (George Clinton's Parliament-Funkadelic), and Leeds street politics (marches against the neo Nazi National Front party that ended with police violence; violent attacks by Front goons on pubs frequented by the likes of the band and their pals the Mekons and Delta 5). What was on their mind was the notion that everyday life-wage labor, official propaganda, the commodity system, but also the way you bought a shirt, how you made love, the feeling you had as you watched the nightly news or turned away from it-was not "natural", but the product of an invisible hand. It was an interested construction, someone else's project, a rulers' project. Some of the rulers were dead, some were living, but all held power. "The attitudes and beliefs that people take as being natural," King said early on, "have been inherited through the social structure they're brought up in. An example is the man who believes that women are by definition more suited to working in the home than to making decisions. The belief in the natural puts all this outside the realm of debate - and unless you have an awareness of your ideas as political manifestations, you won't believe you can change them."

"If you're not aware of the processes and thoughts by which you arrive at a statement about a situation", Gill said of the bands songs, "If you're not aware of that, you probably can't sufficiently analyse the situation". Highfalutin stuff, even after the Sex Pistols had pinned history itself as a "mad parade" and the Royal Family as a theme park, but when I first saw the Gang of Four I didn't catch a word and could have cared less. They were opening for the Buzzcocks in San Francisco in 1979; they'd just released their first album, Entertainment!, in the U.K.: no one in the audience had heard it. They took the stage and held it as if all bets were off. I couldn't take my eyes off Gill, scared, tense, but ready, he looked like an extra from a British end-of-the-world movie suddenly forced to carry the film.

I saw the Gang of Four play many times after that night - in England, in Los Angeles, again in San Francisco, after Busta Jones and then Sara Lee replaced Dave Allen, after Gill and a drum machine (on record) and Steve Goulding (on stage) replaced Hugo Burnham - and the shock of that night, its displacement, was always present. Jon King was hurled around the stage as if by an unseen puppetmaster, as instruments dropped out, leaving holes in the sound, as the wrong man plugged them, leaving holes of his own, you could almost see the puppet's strings being cut, you could certainly hear them. As King jerked, Andy Gill attacked him; Dave Allen upended both of them. Hugo Burnham hammered at all three like a judge. I walked out of that first show before the Buzzcocks came on; I didn't want to know what they had to say. I didn't want anything to break the confusion, the delicious horror, of what the Gang of Four had done.

What had they done? Always, they were talked about as some kind of rebel-rock or agit-prop ("neo-Marxist funk" as one treasured review put it), or as a band bent on the deconstruction of all received ideas, including all received ideas about rock 'n' roll. Even the band members occasionally said such things, but that wasn't exactly it.

The Gang of Four acted out, and out into records, a picture of an individual who had discovered that ordinary life - the gestures of affection and resentment one made every day, the catch phrases one spoke every day as if one had invented them - is in fact sold and bought as grease for shopping and silence, for the accumulation of capital and passivity. The person who has made this remarkable discovery begins to re-examine his or her life, and it begins to look different: "Natural's Not in It." History - "Not by Great Men." A woman in the home: "It's Her Factory."

Life looks different, but it doesn't change. The Gang of Four pursued their subject's discoveries not as if they might lead to some grand general strike, some revolutionary epiphany ("it's a good name," a fan told them, not likely thinking of China's Maoist Gang of Four, "because there are four of you"), but as if, once recognized, those discoveries would remain trapped in the prison of familiarity. Playing everyman on stage, Jon King was never free. He was an explosion of doubt. He dramatized a glimpse of liberation, but simultaneously the wish to conform, to be at home in the only home available, not matter how false.

When Hugo Burnham sings "It's Her Factory", he speaks conversationally about a news item he's encountered; he's sardonic but direct. When Andy Gill recites the theory behind "Anthrax" or the monologue of "Paralysed" when he momentarily takes over "Damaged Goods" or any of the other tunes in which he's immediately evident (his grainy voice has none of King's wail in it), he's no less naturalistic. Both men get to the point, and both are a bit forbidding. But King is the Gang of Four's patsy - and the world's. In almost every song, you can hear a very specific struggle: the struggle of the person who has heard the bad news to love it. He always fails. He realizes everything he does is second-hand, a waking dream, a dream someone else has dreamed for him - when he walks into a pub and greets friends with a line he's half-consciously lifted from last night's sit-com, he's an advertisement. He hears himself and he feels tricked, humiliated, so he smashes into his friends, into the other members of the band, as if he's never seen them before but knows they mean him no good. Screaming, he insists that he's happy.

Dave Allen, Burnham, and Gill work as the singer's bad conscience. Most pointedly it is Gill, along with King co-author of almost all of the band's lyrics and co-designer of their hilarious sleeve art. On stage he was by far the most intense and willful of the actors. He remains the locus of danger in the songs. While King splatters himself across the music, Gill is watchful, the man who knows too much; he communicates terror because he has an idea what's coming. As a guitarist he is also the narrator, to the degree that the Gang of Four, their words not much less cut up than their sound, used one. The rhythm section can frame the singer's absurdities, but not keep up with him; Gill is the musician who communicates the value of form, of one-thing-leads-to-another, even when what has to be said demands that ordinary narrative be abandoned, demands that the urge to speak, or the impossibility of making oneself understood, be dramatized rather than any message or thought. Allen, Burnham, and Gill may be the singer's bad conscience because as they play they make irrevocable choices, and fix their value; he can't.

You could see this happen on stage, and you can hear it in the music; you don't have to follow any lyric sheet. From "At Home He's a Tourist" to "Capital (it Fails Us Now)" to "I Love a Man in a Uniform" the Gang of Four's music was always about resistance, but it was not the resistance of the rebel against the ruler. It was about the resistance of the rebel against him or herself. Most of the time, most intensely, most dramatically, the struggle ends with a raging acceptance, a rage that can't find its target: that's what happens in "Damaged Goods" with its many puns echoing off THE CHANGE WILL DO YOU GOOD, a supermarket slogan, the promise of a new life summed up in a few pennies less for eggs and cheese; that's what happens in "To Hell with Poverty" and "The History of the World." Occasionally, as with the quiet mumbled "Paralysed" a person faces oblivion, in this case what unemployment is so chillingly called in the UK, "redundancy". Rage becomes meaningless, and the acceptance you hear takes on a new form: self-hate.

The Gang of Four offered no anthems, no tunes of right and wrong. They were interested in constructing a drama in which each listener found his or her place as a new historical subject, set free from all certainties, all forms of common sense and obvious conclusions set free in a convulsion you can hear in so many of the numbers on this disc, perhaps most fiercely in "Return the Gift". It's a little tale about how an individual shrinks - how one becomes not a subject but merely an object of history -when he or she wins a radio give-away contest.

It's a song about the way the winner exchanges the multitudes of a unique personality for Capital's reductive prize, fear. That terrible chant from the winner's psyche: "Please send me evenings and weekends/ Please send me evenings and weekends ..." in King & Gill's voices and the stuttering beat of the band you hear the fear that, having accepted a symbol of a good life (evenings and weekends to the contrary, the top prize in "Return the Gift" seems to be an inside shower) as a substitute for the confusions of your own self, you will cease to exist.

In this fixed game if you win you are the king, your home is your castle, but at home you 1 feel like a tourist. Return the gift, the song is shouting, give it back before it's too late!

It's always too late in the Gang of Four's songs of acceptance: you know perfectly well that nothing in "Return the Gift" is going back. But even when the band insisted on refusal, they reached the same pass; there is a way in which everything the Gang of Four did is caught in "We Live As We Dream, Alone," from their third album, Songs of the Free, released in 1982. Here there is no acceptance, but also no rebellion, only isolation. To see through the mystifications of the natural is to be free; it is also to face a kind of exile, to be exiled among everyone else, everyone who passes by a supermarket, sees the banner shouting "THE CHANGE WILL DO YOU GOOD" and doesn't get the joke.

The Gang of Four played their last show at a college north of San Francisco in 1984. They got the joke, they made a brief career out of it. Sometimes, though, the career they made out of the joke, the show they put on, was so violent that when Jon King jumped all out s body, as Andy Gill aimed guitar notes at him, as Hugo Burnham refused to let anyone stop, ve Allen twisted the story far beyond their chance to understand it - his head hit the eiling of the nightclub where, on that night, the show was on. You couldn't hear the words, he people in the crowd had already learned them. The crowd moved like a centipede on its back.