The big time didn’t really suit a group based around amateurish charm. All the life was sucked out of the Mekons’ debut LP, The Quality of Mercy Is Not Strnen, by its being recorded in Virgin’s topflight studio, the Manor. By the end of 1979, the group seemed hopelessly confused, denying in interviews that they’d ever made a virtue out of ineptitude (“we were always desperately trying to play well,” Greenhalgh told Melody Maker). They’d gradually reneged on their early impractical principles (no photographs, no personality cult), yet were too self-effacing to really seize the possibilities of fame. “When we first started, our only reason for existing was that we’d made this appalling record that should never have been a record but was,” Greenhalgh said. “And we were a group that never should have been a group but were. Now we’re at the stage where those sort of reasons for existing are irrelevant. So it’s a question of what actually are we?” It would be five years before the Mekons discovered a new and brilliant purpose for themselves, after a painful, fitful process of self-reinvention.
While the Mekons struggled to promote Quality of Mercy, Gang of Four released their debut major-label single, “At Home He Feels Like a Tourist.” The lyrics obliquely critiqued leisure and entertainment as surrogates for real satisfaction and stimulation. Lyrically opaque, the song was sonically Gang of Four’s starkest and most compelling yet. Gill’s backfiring guitar slashed across the robotic/hypnotic mesh of drums and bass, which sounded like “perverted disco,” in Jon King’s words. But a verse in “Tourist” about discotheques caused the group’s first setback. Boosted by frequent evening play on Radio One, the single cracked the lower end of the U.K. Top 75, at which point the group was invited to appear on Top of the Pops, a golden opportunity to penetrate the heart of mass culture. Exposure to an audience of ten million would almost certainly propel the single into the Top 30 the next week. But on the day of the show, the producers objected to the line “the rubbers you hide in your top left pocket,” part of a verse about discos making their profits through selling sex, or the promise of it. Gang of Four offered to change the coarse slang term for condoms to the more neutral and ambiguous “packets.” Top of the Pops insisted the word be changed to “rubbish,” because “packets” sounded too obviously altered and they didn’t want anyone to know there’d been censorship. After agonizing debate, with minutes to go before recording was due to start, Gang of Four refused.
“At Home He Feels Like a Tourist” continued its rise anyway, and TOTP extended the invitation again, but on the same terms. “We stuck to our guns,” says Burnham. “We were all as one on that decision, and it felt great. But in retrospect, walking off Top of the Pops essentially killed our career.” Burnham is convinced that the single would have shot into the Top 30 after the group’s dynamic performance. “Plus we would not have lost the support of a large number of people at EMI like we did. The exasperation on the promotions man’s face when we announced we wouldn’t do Top of the Pops!”
Entertainment!, the debut album, did reasonably well critically and sales-wise, but by Gang of Four’s own standards it was an intervention that had fallen short, given their ambition to infiltrate the mainstream. Taken as an art object in itself (and considering its long-term impact), Entertainment! was anything but a failure. One of postpunk’s defining masterworks, every aspect of the record (lyrics, music, artwork—the famous cover image of the fooled Indian shaking hands with the cowboy eager to exploit him) is perfectly aligned. The sheer sound of the record—sober, flat, at once in-your-face and remote—stood out. Entertainment! broke with rock-recording conventions by being extremely “dry,” in the technical sound-engineering sense of “no reverb, drums that didn’t ring,” says Burnham. There was no attempt to capture what the group sounded like live, no gesture toward simulating music being played in a real acoustic space. “In retrospect, it would have been nice to hear those songs recorded in a way that was truer to how we sounded onstage,” says Burnham. But this was part of Entertainment!’s achievement, its alienation effect. This was obviously a studio artifact, a cold-blooded construction.
Entertainment! was dry in the emotional sense too, using the scalpel of Marxist analysis to dissect the mystifications of love, “capitalist democracy,” and rock itself. The songs depicted relationships and situations in a diagrammatic fashion. Even though Jon King often sang in the first person, there was an element of depersonalization, a sense of the song’s human actors being buffeted by impersonal social forces. As Greil Marcus, an early champion of the group, suggested, the characters in their songs often seem to be on the brink of seeing through “false consciousness” and apprehending the structural realities that govern their existence, but they never quite make it. And so “Contract,” one of Entertainment!’s most unnerving songs, recasts matrimony in terms of a business arrangement, “a contract in our mutual interest.” It shifts from the concrete specifics of a malfunctioning partnership—disagreements, disappointing sex—to the scripted nature of the unhappily married couple’s conflict: “These social dreams/Put in practice in the bedroom/Is this so private?/Our struggle in the bedroom.” Recoiling from consumerism’s “coercion of the senses,” “Natural’s Not in It” similarly insists there’s “no escape from society.” “Not Great Men” challenges history written from the standpoint of powerful leaders like kings and generals while ignoring the little people who build palaces and fight wars. In Sounds, Garry Bushell sourced the song in Brecht’s famous poem “A Worker Reads History,” which concludes with the lines “Every page a victory/Who cooked the feast for the victors?/Every ten years a great man/Who paid the bill?”
Then and now, political songwriting generally posits the singer and the audience as exempt from the evils being castigated. Whether it’s finger-pointing protest or wry social comment, the problem is over there. Rather than cozily dividing the world into a righteous “us” versus a corrupt “them,” Gang of Four’s songs implicated listeners (and themselves) in the very processes being critiqued. But that didn’t mean there weren’t sides worth taking or enemies worth fighting. In spring 1979, Gang of Four participated in Rock Against Racism’s monthlong Militant Entertainment Tour, a series of gigs across the country involving some thirty bands in rotating lineups. The main target of this immense campaign was the National Front, which was running candidates in every single parliamentary seat in the impending May 1979 general election, thus earning the right to a certain number of free political broadcasts on national television. The backdrop was the seemingly inevitable downfall of Callaghan’s Labour government and its replacement by the Conservatives under the leadership of Margaret Thatcher.
In a January 1978 TV interview, Thatcher had expressed concerns about immigration, using the metaphor of “swamping” to describe the impact of multiculturalism on the British “character” and way of life. In response to a question about the National Front, she said that while most people didn’t agree with the organization’s stance on immigration and repatriation, “at least it’s talking about some of the problems.” In contrast, David Widgery, a key spokesperson for Rock Against Racism and the Anti Nazi League, imagined a multicolored coalition of workers and minorities uniting to build a hybrid British culture. “She thinks we’re being ‘swamped’ by it,” he told NME, “but I want it to swamp her.”
Leeds was on the front line of this culture war. In part because of the large student population, it was one of the first cities in Britain to found a local branch of Rock Against Racism. But some of its working-class youth felt the pull of extremist right-wing groups. The National Front launched what it called the Punk Front in Leeds, attempting to recruit members at the F-Club. Leeds was also the birthplace of Rock Against Communism, involving local right-wing punk bands like the Dentists, whose songs included “Kill the Reds,” “Master Race,” and “White Power.” Fascist thugs attacked racial minorities, homosexuals, and students who looked obviously left-wing, on one occasion even invading the Fenton. “It was like a Wild West saloon, chairs flying
everywhere, people getting hit, glasses getting smashed,” recalls Andy Gill. Gangs of skins would come marauding around the university campus. “There’d be the occasional pitched battle—people lobbing stuff at each other.”
Fascist skinheads also regularly materialized at gigs by Gang of Four, the Mekons, and their allies, starting fights in the audience, throwing abuse and projectiles at the bands. Delta 5’s lineup—two guys and three women, dressed in the unisex feminist style of the day—seemed to particularly offend the goon squad. Bassist Ros Allen was denounced as a “communist witch” at one gig. The girls gave as good as they got, though. At another show, Bethan Peters—Delta 5’s other bassist—grabbed a Sieg Heiling youth and slammed his head against the stage.
Although the movement against “political correctness” hadn’t quite blossomed, Malcolm Bradbury’s The History Man, his 1975 novel satirizing British academia, helped fuel the increasingly widespread view of higher education as a hotbed of leftist troublemakers. As far as conservative fogies were concerned, theory mongers were running rampant over traditional liberal shibboleths of objectivity and balance, truth and beauty, with their repugnant rabble of isms (racism, sexism, classism, ageism, etc.). Indeed, in the seventies political culture that shaped Gang of Four, the Mekons, and Delta 5, people would use expressions like “ideologically sound” without the slightest whiff of irony. “When I write I try so hard to make sure the words are sound, that there’s nothing sexist in them,” the Mekons’ Mark White told Sounds earnestly. “So a lot of the early songs were written wimpy on purpose.”
The women in Delta 5, in contrast, often wrote from a standpoint of defiance, aloofness, self-assertiveness, and unapproachable autonomy. “Mind Your Own Business,” their debut single, was hilariously coldhearted and standoffish, resolutely barring entrance to someone craving intimacy and involvement. “Can I interfere in your crisis?/No! Mind your own business!” “You,” the second single, was funnier still, a series of accusations and recriminations. “Who left me behind at the baker’s?/YOU, YOU, YOU, YOU!/Who likes sex only on Sundays?/YOU, YOU, YOU, YOU!” Like Gang of Four, Delta 5 built distancing effects into the songs. As hostile as these songs about soured relationships were, they didn’t exactly feel confessional, something accentuated by the lack of gender specificity in the lyrics and the fact that many of the vocals were doubled. Delta 5 firmly believed in the personal-is-political approach. “Personal relationships are like a microcosm of the whole world and in that way we are commenting on things in general,” Bethan Peters argued.
Genealogically, Delta 5 formed as an offshoot of the Mekons. Ros Allen had been the latter’s original bassist, and Bethan Peters and Julz Sale were both “Mekons girlfriends.” Mekons drummer Jon Langford did the great artwork for the first two Delta 5 singles. Even the name Delta 5 came from the Mekons, via the Mekong Delta. But sonically Delta 5 were closer to Gang of Four’s punk funk, with funk rather narrowly understood as clipped, scratchy rhythm guitar and hard-driving bass riffs that took on the melodic role. Delta 5 went one better than Gang of Four and featured two bass guitars—Peters’s more trebly, Allen’s a low growl.
Another hard-riffing agit-funk band with a mixed-gender lineup and songs that scrutinized sexuality with an unforgiving eye was the Au Pairs. “They were in a different city, Birmingham, but they were definitely part of our thing,” says Hugo Burnham. “We played a lot of gigs with the Au Pairs, they came on a Gang of Four tour.” Their most famous song, “Come Again,” depicts an egalitarian couple who is trying to achieve orgasmic parity. Sung as a duet, it’s a microdrama in which Paul Foad plays the eager-to-please man earnestly frigging his long-suffering partner, Lesley Woods. “Is your finger aching?/I can feel you hesitating,” she wonders, as the likelihood of orgasm fades to zero. By the end, despite everyone’s progressive intentions, she’s simply discovered “a new way to fake.”
“Everything is political, everything you do in life, the way you relate to people around you is political,” Woods declared. Feminism’s focus on attitudes, language, the thousands of micropolitical interactions that make up day-to-day behavior, meant that being “aware” involved being constantly self-aware. “There was definitely a politicization element to relationships,” recalls Burnham. “The women amongst our social circle were much healthier in terms of the male-female power dynamic. We were all into reexamining how you conducted your life, the things you took for granted. On our second tour of America, I wore an ERA T-shirt in support of the Equal Rights Amendment. At the same time, though, it didn’t mean we didn’t try to get laid at every opportunity. There was nothing puritanical about Gang of Four! There was a very hedonistic attitude with alcohol, but it wasn’t in a way that was destructive of other people’s dignity or space. The only dignity that suffered was our own!”
Gang of Four certainly liked a beer or two, or twenty. Hard drinkers who enjoyed nothing more than a chance to flex their powers of reason in a close, discursive combat, the Gang of Four, for all their antisexist rhetoric, were a rather masculine bunch, and repressed in ways that were both typically English and characteristic of the hard Marxist Left, which tended to fetishize rationality while disdaining the emotional. Gill in particular was your classic bottle-it-all-up Brit. “Of all the people I worked with, he was the only one I never saw cry,” says Burnham. “Unless he was so fucking drunk he’d hurt himself!” There were occasional glimpses of fragility in Gang of Four’s music, such as the restless desolation of “Glass” and the supine despondency of “Paralysed.” The spoken lyric to “Paralysed” (the opening track on Gang of Four’s second album, Solid Gold) was taken by most reviewers as the lament of a man laid low by being laid off. According to Gill, who wrote and recited it, it’s actually much closer to the blues in the original sense.
Mostly, though, Gang of Four extolled cold, unyielding reason. Rerecorded for Entertainment!, “Love Like Anthrax” now featured a Gill dissertation on the love song as a staple of pop music issuing from one speaker, while the romance-ravaged King wailed out of the other. Gill ponders why pop groups sing about love constantly, expresses doubt that everyone is capable of this allegedly universal emotion, and concludes, “I don’t think we’re saying there’s anything wrong with love, we just don’t think that what goes on between two people should be shrouded in mystery.” The polemic is spot-on. Propagated by Hollywood and popular song, the myth of romantic love gradually replaced religion as the opiate of the people in the twentieth century. But the aridity of the world that Gang of Four implicitly proposes—something you can taste in the gruff neutrality of Gill’s classless voice—would make most people run back to the arms of that most cherished and consoling illusion, love as seemingly achievable heaven on Earth.
The trouble with demystification is that it kind of takes the mystery out of everything. It strips the world of superstition and sentimentality, but also eliminates intuition and other nonrational forms of perception and awareness. The “unisex” brand of feminism in vogue on the Leeds scene meant that women became tough minded, assertive, and “dry.” The men, however, didn’t have to get any more moist or androgynous. Jon King rejected the notion that men needed to develop their feminine emotional side. “That sort of resort to the emotions is part of the oppression,” he argued. “If all the time you react to things on an emotional level, you’ll never get anywhere.”
Perhaps there was a sense deep down in which Gang of Four feared music itself—its seductive power and primal energy, its invitation to cast logic aside and surrender to mindless bliss—and all the distancing devices they used were self-protective as much as anything else, making two selves: one involved, “inside” the music, the other detached, standing slightly outside. Gill explains how Gang of Four loved the seventies hard-rock band Free “because it was very rhythmic and stripped-down. But then you had Paul Rodgers singing about his car and his woman. So you had to have a bit of suspended belief, you could love Free and yet be completely aware of the idiocy of the lyrics. You could say F
ree influenced Gang of Four, but our approach was to take that bit but leave that other ridiculous bit out, or take that cliché and turn it inside out.” In postpunk terms, this approach was equivalent to a sort of cock-blocked rock, hard but not macho. Onstage the group avoided the stereotypical phallic rock ’n’ roll poses, but as Burnham concedes, “We did have a very quasi-violent stage presence, all the running around and bashing into each other that Jon, Andy, and Dave did. Theatrically, it was very intense, flirting with a violent undertone.” And because Gang of Four’s music “brought together the groove of black music with the hardness of guitar rock,” as Gill puts it, some journalists critiqued it as just a funked-up version of heavy metal.
The band’s rampaging, balls-out rock side got captured on Solid Gold, which was released in early 1981. Sporadically exciting, the album’s live-sounding production was more conventional than Entertainment!’s dessicated starkness. Lyrically, Gill and King seemed to have lost their touch. The songs veered from crude, third-person typology (the protofascist caricatures of “Outside the Trains Don’t Run on Time” and “He’d Send in the Army”) to clumsy satire (the anti-American “Cheeseburger”). The better songs like “Paralysed” and “What We All Want” struck a note of sadness that tapped into the apprehensive mood that pervaded the start of the eighties, as the implications of the Thatcher and Reagan victories began to sink in.
Deemed a disappointment and an irrelevance in the U.K., where pop trends had moved on already, Solid Gold is considered just one notch below Entertainment!’s classic stature in America. In 1980, Gang of Four virtually disappeared from the British scene, touring the United States twice. “Countless times in the States, people would come up to me after gigs and say, ‘I’d read the NME interviews and I thought you’d be really boring,’” laughs Burnham. “They were taken aback because we fucking rocked, rather than standing around in long macs looking miserable like your typical postpunk band. That’s why we did so well in the U.S. The propensity to rock out is more ingrained in the young American psyche than in Europe. It’s the same reason the Clash were so successful in America. And we were the Clash without the cowboy outfits.”
Rip It Up and Start Again Page 10
