Gang Of Four - L’intrattenimento al vetriolo

2006: the opening shot of Sofia Coppola's film "Marie Antoinette". The Queen of France, played by a mesmerizing Kirsten Dunst, smiles at the viewer, languidly stretched out on a chaise longue. But the glossy, erotic luxury of the scene is shattered by the off-screen music, a pounding, neurotic drive. It's a man shouting lines like “non c’è fuga dalla società/ la natura non c’entra niente/i vostri rapporti sono di potere/ tutti abbiamo buone intenzioni/ ma tutti siamo manovrati”.

It's Gang Of Four.

1979: after a decade of union struggles and strikes that seem to paralyze England, Margaret Thatcher, leader of the Conservative Party, is elected prime minister. It marks the end of the Labour Party's dominance, and the start of the gradual dismantling of the welfare state and the gains won by the workers' movement.

Today: on the turntable, an old record that's come back into fashion, everyone quotes it, everyone copies it, Flea of the Red Hot Chili Peppers says in an interview that it's really cool. The cover looks promising, the title is "Entertainment!"...

The story of this record begins more than thirty years ago, in the summer of 1977, when Dave Allen answered an ad placed by three guys who, like him, attended the University of Leeds and were looking for a bassist for a "fast r'n'b band". The four of them christened themselves Gang Of Four, after the ruling clique that succeeded Mao in the Chinese Cultural Revolution, and split up the roles as follows: Jon King on vocals, Andy Gill on guitar, Dave Allen on bass, Hugo Burnham on drums.

On the radio, the Sex Pistols are everywhere, with songs that brand History a "mad parade" and mock the anniversary of the British monarchy; the rules of the music world have changed, and there's room for anyone with ideas and nerve to speak their mind, even without perfect instrumental technique.

The imagination of the four, however, goes beyond the provocative, disruptive nods to Situationism and anarchy found in Mc Laren's group, bringing together Manet's painting, Jean-Luc Godard's films, the r'n'b of George Clinton (Parliament-Funkadelic), and the climate of everyday violence into which the clashes between left-wing demonstrators, the National Front and the police degenerate on the streets of Leeds.

It is precisely in the year of Thatcher's election that Gang Of Four make their debut with what would become one of the most eloquent manifestos of political commitment applied to rock.

Entertainment! is that, but also much more. Had the album been a jumble of slogans and half-digested ideology dressed up as rock, a "neo-marxist funk", as one review put it, History alone, with that date stamped on the cover, would have been enough to wipe it from collective memory with a sneer of ironic pity. Instead, the album had the strength and the ideas to withstand the shock of Thatcher, and to reach the castaways of global neo-liberalism in the 2000s like a shard of harsh, unforgiving clarity — a lesson that still stings.

Opening the dance is "Ether", a true programmatic incipit: the martial, geometric rhythm of bass and drums is torn apart by the cutting interventions of a guitar capable of obsessive, minimal riffs as well as softer, more menacing passages. Two voices answer one another, revealing an uncomfortable truth: “Sporco dietro al sogno/ il finale felice/ è alla fine dell’arcobaleno”. Beyond the shining facade of the capitalist dream, propped up by the media and political propaganda, lies a reality of exploitation, of power relations between masters and servants, an illusion everyone conforms to rather than be cast aside. The tension of the track subsides and then explodes again, like a cold, destructive energy kept under control at great cost by reason. When the mechanical, obsessive riff of the following "Natural's Not In It" picks up the thread, the musical coordinates of the record become clear enough: new wave steeped in a hard, frozen funk, at once compelling and without any concession to easy danceability.

This is funk made by white musicians, like that of New York's Talking Heads (who had debuted two years earlier with "'77"), but while Byrne's band portrays urban, street-level neurosis, the new Babel of rhythms, the music of Gill and co. is designed to stage a conflict: the clash between body and reason, between hope and despair, between illusion and devastating clarity.

From here on the band proceeds by antithesis: it's funk, but you can't dance to it; it's a jarring physical energy, but it never fully breaks free, caged by reason; it's fun, but not mere entertainment — above all, it's meant to raise doubts. Here lies the greatness of Gang Of Four: they preach nothing, offer no certainties, but let everyone know that the curtain of illusions has been torn, and that resisting it means first waging a battle with oneself, in order to stay clear-eyed. Even the reward for that effort, as we'll see, will prove ambiguous.

It is a desperate vitality, to borrow Pasolini's phrase, that drives the four young iconoclasts in the conscious fury of their debut album, systematically dismantling shared certainties and illusions with the weapons of word and music: there are no Marxist harangues here, only the lucid awareness of the struggle taking place behind the placid facade of consumerism. The first dogma to be debunked is that "Natural's Not In It": nature has nothing to do with it; rather, as their exegete Greil Marcus put it, "wages, official propaganda, the consumer system, but also the way you buy a t-shirt, make love, watch the evening news or look the other way, is not natural, but the product of an invisible hand. It is a self-interested construction, somebody's project, a project of power".

"The behaviours and beliefs that people consider natural," says Jon King, "have been inherited from the social structure one grew up in." What is staged on Entertainment! is the drama of a man who has realised this and tries to resist — both individually and within the family — the sirens symbolised by the television sets depicted on the album's inner sleeve, designed to make him believe the system works in his interest, towards a future of progress, when in fact it exploits him and uses him for its own ends.

The music embodies the conflict through an alternation of pauses and outbursts, almost of panic or suppressed rage, courtesy of Gill's guitar, the true star of the show, able to slide with great fluidity from funky rhythms to lacerating, distorted noise passages and even psychedelic quotations. Meanwhile the bass, linear and powerful, at times energetic and at others solemn, holds the discourse together, reining in with its own rigour the derailing energy of guitarist and singer. The latter instead delivers genuine spoken-sung passages, at times hysterical, mournful or frozen, leaving room for melody in the highly effective choruses. The mechanical, obsessive guitar slashes of the second track accompany him into his hallucinatory closing slogan, "this heaven gives me migraine": this false paradise gives you a headache, it's a marketplace where everything has a price and everything is a con, where even passion becomes "repackaged sex" in order to "hold the attention" — or rather, to divert it.

"Not Great Men" is more measured, tempering the fury of the first two tracks, taking aim at History itself: not the product of great men's deeds, as the history books claim, but of the masses — not a stage for the exploits of leaders, but for everlasting oppression: "The poor still weak, the rich will always rule". But it's "Damaged Goods" that raises the stakes, over another compelling rhythmic lock: love is reduced to a depersonalising physical transaction, just as men themselves are alienated into the status of objects: if they no longer work ("Damaged goods / send them back, I can't work, I can't produce"), they can be discarded, safe in the knowledge that the supermarket slogan "a change can do you good" applies to them too.

"Return The Gift" presents a moral tale over a sinuous bassline broken up by the robotic chorus: a woman has won a prize in a contest, and it's her words that King repeats obsessively ("please send me evenings and weekends") that reveal how simply accepting the gift means being enlisted in the consumerist dream. There's only one solution: "Return The Gift".

After the convulsive "Guns Before Butter", we arrive at the album's one melodic oasis: the compelling, lyrical pop-rock of "I Found That Essence Rare", which takes aim at the heart of the televised dream, the Fifties utopia of well-being, only to discover that "you see the girl on TV dressed in a bikini / she don't think so but she's dressed for the H-Bomb". Only the deluded can still believe politicians will put their votes to good use; only by looking at the world through rose-tinted glasses can one hope that "things will get a whole lot better for the working classes" — though here at least the pessimism of reason is softened by the irony of the joyous chorus.

Perhaps the "rare essence" King joyfully found is just a way of fighting the system with its own weapons, much like titling an album "entertainment" while presenting, right from its catchy, colourful cover, a little scene of deception. And if marriage turns out to be a contract ("Contract") far removed from the scenes dreamed up while reading magazines, the conflict shifts within the very walls of the home: "At Home He Is A Tourist". The track, another peak of the album, opens solemnly, driven by a booming dub bassline, before plunging into a new obsessive chorus and a break-down for rhythm section alone, until it explodes into a fresh storm of guitar disturbance. What collides here are the desires of the verses against the cynicism of the chorus: the character who has "caught on" tries to defend himself by stuffing his head with culture, but ends up estranged from society, out of place even in his own home. Meanwhile, the entertainment industry anaesthetises people, cashing in on their urge to be distracted — "down on the disco floor they make their profits".

The new entertainment on offer is "5.45", where the quintessentially English ritual of tea is overlaid with televised images of violence and horror from every corner of the world, reduced to background noise and stripped of any power to provoke outrage or reflection: "guerrilla war struggle is the new entertainment".

The album closes with the guitar-holocaust of "Anthrax", where Gill recites over a slow rhythm, caught between flashes of psychedelic feedback from his own guitar, proposing the ultimate sacrifice for the cause: even love is compared to an infection and discarded in order to "control what I do to my mind".

Every value of musical entertainment is thus overturned and reaffirmed at the same time; by the end of the record you feel drained and shaken, yet not without pleasure or the urge to start all over again.

The CD reissue of the album also includes a few tracks originally released on an EP. "Outside The Trains Don't Run In Time" tries out new variations on the hammering rhythmic framework of the LP, "He'd Sent In The Army" offers a string of pauses led by Gill's sobbing guitar building to a crescendo of atonal disturbance, while "It's Her Factory" conjures a softer, more sinister atmosphere, punctuated by a disorienting accordion, to tackle the condition of women: the home as woman's factory.

The story of Gang Of Four continues with another excellent album, Solid Gold from '81, which follows the same coordinates as the debut but with a more polished production. What stands out most is the dramatic, chilling spoken delivery of "Paralysed", which gives voice to one of the many unemployed of Thatcherite England, one of those people made "redundant" by a system that has discarded them, drained of life, paralyzed. The drama always plays out within the individual - these aren't songs about abstract politics, but about people and their feelings, which is why their impact remains relevant today, not to mention the deflation of Blair's cool Britannia in these 2000s, which have seen the specter of a new recession loom even over England.

"What We All Want", on the other hand, shows the band at the peak of its physical power, with an overwhelming rhythm section and a literally devastating Gill, caught between rhythmic obsessions and searing flashes of noise. "In The Ditch" is propelled by a funk- and jazz-derived rhythm, over which unfolds a cold, monotone sung/spoken vocal.

Compared to the debut, the songs generally feel more measured and less ferocious, yet without losing any tension - if anything, the icy tone of these new excursions adds a sense of lucid despair to the album's overall atmosphere. The guitar remains as sharp and relentless as ever, but it also manages to build genuine soundscapes of great emotional depth, thanks to Gill's use of effects and his unconventional technique. Just listen to the sequence of sobs and screeches that accompanies "Capital (It Fails Us Now)".

The tone of the lyrics generally turns darker, examining the role of women in "Hole In The Wallet (Stay In Bed Or In The Kitchen)" or criticizing the American system ("sometimes I think money is my only goal") in "Cheesburger".

Certainly, though, the band doesn't match the incisiveness of the Pop Group, who in 1980 released the masterpiece "How Much Longer Do We Tolerate Mass Murder?" and who, starting from similar musical and ideological premises, arrived at far more extreme and apocalyptic results, including in terms of rhythmic experimentation.

Gang Of Four still manage to score a few hits with the danceable, infectious "To Hell With Poverty", included on the EP Another Day, Another Dollar, built on a slapped bass and scratchy vocals for a sarcastic litany on the state of things ("To hell with poverty we'll get drunk on cheap wine").

The following album, Songs Of The Free (1982), sees these concessions to easy listening expand further, with a glossier sound and a marked softening of tone. Worse still, Dave Allen is let go in favor of Sara Lee. "Call Me Up" is a pop song of unbearable lightness.

What remains is the anti-militarist, anti-sexist sarcasm of "I Love A Man In A Uniform" with its female backing vocals, the atmospheres Gill conjures on "I Will Be A Good Boy" and "The History Of The World" through scattered bursts of noise, and above all the poetry of "We Live As We Dream, Alone". The latter, built on a slapped bass and a heavy rhythm, constructs a genuine elegy of social and individual defeat: “L’uomo non è nato per vivere in isolamento/ ma a volte sembra così… per rompere il guscio ci mischiamo agli altri/ alcuni flirtano col fascismo/ altri riposano tra le braccia degli amanti/ viviamo come sogniamo, da soli”.

The final step of Gang Of Four's first phase is the even more bland Hard (1983), marked by the pop sound of tracks like "Is It Love?", on which the band is simply unrecognizable.

Given its starting point, the Leeds outfit's trajectory could never have become a career in the pop sense of the term, and so it turned instead into a "cult" story, with sporadic returns to the scene - one in the Nineties, also marked by new albums (Mall, 1991, featuring rap interludes, and Shrinkwrapped, 1995) - and a more recent one in 2005 (with the old classics re-recorded on Return The Gift and a handful of shows in which John King apparently threw himself around, jumping like a man possessed, just like in the old days).

Their status as a legendary band is secured by their undeniable influence on subsequent indie rock (Gill produced the debut album of the Red Hot Chili Peppers, while Peter Buck has also admitted the Gang's influence on early R.E.M.) and by the acclaim of new generations of musicians (how many bands in recent years have you read described as having Gang Of Four-style rhythms?).

What remains is the fascination of a record that belongs as much to its own era—a dive back into 1979—as it does to ours, an unmissable lesson in artistic and intellectual integrity.

Gang Of Four will play in Italy for the first time on 2 August, at the Indie Rocket Festival in Pescara, bringing on tour the best of their back catalogue along with a preview of their new, highly anticipated album.

After more than twenty years, the band's original lineup—the one that recorded Entertainment!—will reunite.

In 2011 it's time for a new reunion, whose outcome goes by the name of Content. It opens with the jittery guitars and fractured rhythms of "She Said You Made A Thing Of Me" and "You Don't Have To Be Mad", steeped in new wave echoes, in line with the historical cycles currently back in fashion. It seems like a good start, but before long the first cracks begin to show.

Soon enough we run into tracks that struggle to stand on their own, such as "I Can't Forget Your Lonely Place", further worsened by an over-produced sheen that leaves it far too glossy, or songs with choruses so irritatingly catchy (take a listen to "Who Am I") that the result sounds like Duran Duran well past their sell-by date, a comparison made via a link to Duran Duran. On "You'll Never Pay For The Farm" they instead come across as clones of the vibrant early Simple Minds, while "I Party All The Time" conjures the ghost of Bowie amid glam, Roxy Music-style haloes.

They try to salvage things at the last minute with the indie ballad "A Fruitfly In The Beehive", smeared with delay and reverb, but everything still comes across as terribly anaemic. And the worst is yet to come, courtesy of the following "It Was Never Going To Turn Out Too Good", electro trash in which Jon King duets with a robotic vocoder, never managing to conjure the apocalyptic atmosphere he was evidently aiming for. The remaining tracks fare a little better, but they don't turn the album's fortunes around. If anything, "I Can See From Far Away" drags things back down with a chorus that starts out sounding like Kiss's "I Was Made For Lovin' You" (which might not even be such a bad thing) and an endlessly repeated riff that apes the one Slash plays on Michael Jackson's "Black & White"!

It's unlikely that, thirty years from now, whoever recounts the band's artistic trajectory will cite Content among the group's essentials; it's far more likely to be remembered as the record that seriously undermined the English quartet's reputation.

In early 2015 came the ninth studio album, What Happens Next: of the original lineup only Andy Gill remains, credited with music and lyrics, while the rest of the band is rounded out by bassist Thomas McNeice, drummer Jonny Finnegan and singer John Sterry.

The eleven tracks on the tracklist are almost entirely stripped of the post-punk fire that still echoed through "Content", replaced by an ostentatiously muscular alt-rock occasionally injected with wave inflections ("Isle of Dogs" and "Staubkorn" are also the best of the bunch).

The sense of artificiality is heightened by the impressive roster of guests brought in to give the songs something extra: Alison Mosshart lends her voice to "Broken Talk", a track that wants to be a dancefloor-rock anthem but instead comes off as a caricatured (and amphetamine-fuelled) version of Suede, as well as to the insipid (if less pretentious) mid-tempo "England's In My Bones". More fitting is the contribution of German composer Herbert Grönemeyer, who first declaims "The Diyng Rays" at full volume and then delivers the aforementioned "Staubkorn" in his native tongue. Rounding out the slew of collaborations are Japanese guitarist Tomoyasu Hotei, who stamps his solo on a "Dead Souls" steeped in industrial atmospheres, and Robbie Furze of The Big Pink, who in turn provides vocals on "Graven Image", the track closest to Gill's notion of pop.

In the end, though, nothing sticks in your head: not a riff, not a melody, not a spark, not even a soul. The lyrics deserve a separate mention, since they do remain fully in line with the English outfit's "political" tradition, opening up a dialogue on the meaning (and value) of identity in the globalized world we live in.

Even more political is the scenario painted on the Ep Complicit, released in spring 2018. Three songs plus a remix, for a total of eighteen minutes of music in which Andy Gill, once again sole helmsman, takes aim—bluntly and unambiguously—at Donald Trump and his entourage. The cover features his daughter Ivanka, with the stars and stripes in the background, and she is of course also the subject of "Ivanka (Things You Can't Have)", an art-rock sketch as pretentious in its ambitions as it is flat in its actual results.

"Lucky" is an indictment of capitalism that takes the shape of a postmodern dancefloor meant to come across as a hellish place where everything moves fast and the walls are made of cheap plastic. The industrial close of "I'm A Liar" seals a record that confirms the new sonic direction of a project that by now has nothing left in common with what it used to be.

As further confirmation, a year after "Complicit" and four after "What Happens Next", spring 2019 brought the release of Happy Now. The ingredients are the ones we've come to know by now: a synthetic, synthesized alt-rock that wavers between cold dancefloor ambitions and tones not too far removed from certain industrial territories. All of it seasoned with the by-now-familiar invectives against the Trump administration, a battle that has by now spilled over onto the album covers too—themselves rather questionable, to put it mildly.

What's still lacking is the actual musical substance, which simply doesn't seem to know where it's going. The tracks on the album roll by one after another without a single jolt, a point of interest, a verse or chorus that makes you want to put the record on again, or that even has the merit—so to speak—of staying in your head for more than five minutes. "Ivanka: My Name On It", which is supposed to (perhaps?) represent the record's political crux, crumples into a tangle of electronic sounds without ever giving shape to its four minutes of unfolding. If the intent was to make us thoroughly sick of the American president and his entourage, the mission has probably been accomplished.

Between a clumsy stab at ’80s-style electro-pop (“Alpha Male”), a bland synthetic uptempo number (“Don’t Ask Me”) and an end-of-the-world ballad (“White Lies”), we finally reach the new wave echoes of “Paper Thin”, the unexpected oasis arriving at the end of a long trek. Despite its title, “Happy Now” is another colorless, muddled effort, lacking any clear musical direction. An album that leans on the political slant of its lyrics, but beyond a few invectives doesn't seem to have much else to offer.

Contributions by Claudio Lancia (“Content”) and Fabio Guastalla (“What Happens Next”, “Complicit”, “Happy Now”)

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