That’s ‘Entertainment!’: Q and A with Jon King of Gang of Four | Entertainment

Gang of Four stormed out of Leeds, England in 1976, rewiring punk rock with a Molotov cocktail of jagged guitar, danceable rhythms, and intellectual political critique. The group remains one of the most innovative bands to emerge on the post-punk scene.

Its original lineup featuring vocalist and lyricist Jon King, guitarist Andy Gill, bassist Dave Allen, and drummer Hugo Burnham fused angular riffs, a funk-infused pulse, and provocative language that challenged capitalism, consumer culture, and political apathy on the group’s first two albums, 1979’s “Entertainment!” and 1981’s “Solid Gold.” 

King served as the intellectual and ideological heart of Gang of Four. This year, he released “To Hell With Poverty! A Class Act: Inside the Gang of Four,” a hybrid memoir and group history that explores its origins, context, and lasting impact.

Gang of Four has moved on after the loss of Gill, who passed away in 2020, and Allen, who died last year. The band embarked on a “farewell” tour last year featuring a lineup that included King, Burnham, bassist Gail Greenwood and guitarist Ted Leo, centered around live performances of “Entertainment!” in its entirety. But King never ruled out occasional short tours and one-off performances, such as their appearance Friday at Wilco’s Solid Sound Festival in North Adams, Mass. In addition, King will be featured in a “Book Talk” about his new memoir Friday at 4 p.m. at the R&D Store at MASS MoCA.

We spoke with King recently on a Zoom call from his home in Bath, England.

VN&M: I’ve been a fan of you and your band for many, many years. In fact, I saw Gang of Four about 45 years ago in a little club in New Jersey. I think you were on the “Solid Gold” tour, and there was an obscure, little-known band from Georgia opening for you called … what was it, oh yeah, R.E.M.

JK: (laughing) Yeah, whatever happened to those guys? They kind of just fell out of style. U2 opened for us, too, and that was a band that obviously went nowhere else. The Specials didn’t do very good business, either, after us, and the Red Hot Chili Peppers … so much promise unfulfilled.

VN&M: R.E.M. frontman Michael Stipe cites Gang of Four as one of his band’s chief influences, as did Kurt Cobain and Nirvana. The Chili Peppers are another band that was influenced by you, and of course they later worked with Andy Gill on their first album. There’s many others that were influenced by your band, including Helmet, Mission of Burma, Franz Ferdinand, We Are Scientists and Bloc Party. You’ve got to be very proud that, to this day, bands like that tout you as an influence.

JK: Yeah, well, everybody stands on the shoulders of giants, don’t they? And you get turned on by someone or something that excites you. If I’m ever in doubt, I listen to a Robert Johnson track or Muddy Waters or whatever. You listen to stuff, and it can stimulate you to try and reach their peak. I, like a thousand other people in bands, when I first heard Velvet Underground, you go, well, you don’t actually have to play your instrument very well to be in a band. But they created a sound that was really inspiring. I think it’s wonderful that people find something in what we’ve done that still is relevant.

VN&M: Your debut album “Entertainment!” is incredible and still remains timely and relevant to this day. Do you take a lot of satisfaction from that or do you find it kind of sad how some of those themes are still very relevant today? 

JK: Both, I guess. And it is really sad. The songs on “Entertainment!” took a microscope to society. “5.45” – on which I sing, “How can I sit and eat my tea with all that blood flowing from the television?” – was about the evening news. Every household had been sent a “Protect and survive” pamphlet because of the threat of nuclear war: “Guns Before Butter” tapped into that paranoia, but it was so ludicrous, like, “If you’re outdoors and you see a mushroom cloud, lie down in a ditch.” Yeah, that’s really gonna help. 

“At Home He’s a Tourist” came from the Jean-Paul Sartre-type idea that the defining sensation of modern life is to feel uncomfortable. Then our bandmates Dave Allen and Hugo Burnham had the hilarious idea of making it a disco song, because we all loved Chic. It charted at No 58, but because we refused to change the word “rubbers” (or condoms) to “rubbish,” the BBC wouldn’t allow us on “Top of the Pops.”

“Entertainment!” was recorded with no effects, so at the playback the record company thought it was a demo. But over the years it has inspired so many musicians. Whenever we play the songs now, I’m almost depressed that they’re still relevant, but I’m proud that “Entertainment!” has become an outsider classic. Nobody makes a record like that for the money.

VN&M: What are your thoughts about the value of music during this period of socio-political strife? When you performed during recent Gang of Four tours, you had Black Lives Matter, LGBTQ, and anti-fascist action flags draped behind you. Did you feel a sense of renewed relevance for the music given the times we live in? And why don’t you think more musicians aren’t addressing those issues?

JK: I find it puzzling. In the 1960s, I was only a kid then, but the biggest country western star in America, Kenny Rogers, released a track, “Ruby Don’t Take Your Love to Town” about a Vietnam War veteran paralyzed from the waist down returning home, who can’t do the deed with his wife anymore, and she goes out to get lucky. It’s hard to imagine a patriotic country and western act writing a song like that now. Elvis Presley had a massive hit with “In The Ghetto.” The Supremes had a massive hit with “Love Child.” And of course, Bob Dylan, who was clearly on the folk music, protest side of things, had “Masters of War” and “The Times They Are A-Changin'” and “Blowin’ In The Wind.” But you also had Jimi Hendrix playing “The Star Spangled Banner” on guitar at Woodstock. Actually, there was a movement to make him lose his American citizenship for playing that song on a guitar.

So I think it’s not unprecedented for incredibly mainstream acts like Elvis, like Kenny Rogers, to do songs not just about relationships. It’s fine talking about relationships and having fun. We all have relationships, we all have fun. But what is it that people talk about in bars and at home, when they watch the news or go online or listen to the radio? You can see that people are really anxious and nervous and worried. It surprises me that so few musicians are just using that as part of the discourse. The overwhelming majority of songs are so, like, putting your head in the sand.

VN&M: Your sound was so unique back in the late ’70s, early ’80s. Of all the bands that came out of the post-punk, new wave, milieu or whatever at that time, especially from England — Buzzcocks, The Jam, Echo & the Bunnymen — I think your group has remained, especially lyrically, the most relevant today. You kind of fused together these different elements — funk and punk — with those politically minded lyrics. Was that important for you at the time to be really unique and to create something that was different?

JK: Not necessarily to be unique but to have something that is distinctively your own sound and distinctively your own territory. We talked about protest music — James Brown, “I’m Black and I’m Proud” or MC5, “Motor City Is Burning,” about the riots in Detroit and stuff. So there’s that type of music which I was inspired by. I loved that sort of thing. I love funk music. Reggae had sort of two sides to it. One was that kind of “lovers rock” side, and the other side was talking about oppression, like with the Whalers and others, I-Roy, referencing the repatriation anthem Black Starliner and biblical kind of things. “Many Rivers To Cross” by Jimmy Cliff was another protest song.

But what I was really interested in was trying to lose that single-minded authorial voice. The first track of “Entertainment!” (“Ether”) made the record pluggers at EMI/Warner Brothers hearts sink when they heard it. It goes, “Trapped in heaven lifestyle, locked in Long Kesh” (Long Kesh being an infamous prison camp in Northern Ireland during “The Troubles”). The price of our luxury is misery somewhere else, it’s almost inversely proportional. The more we’ve got, the less someone else has got, sometimes the more unfree someone else might be. So I was trying to say something that was a bit complicated.

They never did ban that one because it was never released as a single. But “At Home He’s A Tourist” was banned, and “I Love A Man In A Uniform” was banned on the third album because it mentioned the army. Actually, it’s a really sympathetic view, because I think people with my working class background would say the army is a good career for people, but it was really more to do with the limited options, so I have great respect for people who serve in the forces.

VN&M: How do you feel about your band being swept into that “post-punk” category of the early ’80s?

JK: They needed to call us something, I guess. What came to be called post punk was, basically, bands that came after punk had happened. Punk rock music was really, really conservative. I mean, apart from being loud and threatening, “Never Mind the Bollocks” by the Sex Pistols, which is a great record, is like speeded up Black Sabbath. I actually prefer Black Sabbath to the Sex Pistols, except for the lyrics. Black Sabbath lyrics are atrocious, but the music’s great, while the Sex Pistols lyrics are great, but the music’s sort of ho hum. The best punk rock record was the Ramones’ second album (“Leave Home”) because that was a mix of stupidity and intensity. Songs like “Commando” (with the lyrics) “Third rule is, don’t talk to commies, fourth rule is, eat kosher salamis.” That was genius.

VN&M: You are one of the few rock musicians (another being Joe Jackson) who include the melodica in your arsenal of instruments. Why did you start playing that?

JK: I got that from my love of reggae. August Pablo was the great master of this crappy instrument. I may be the last master of the melodica. They no longer manufacture them, and we have to buy them second hand off eBay and stuff. They are really interesting instruments, but they’re really almost like consumables. They’re just a sort of cut out bit of brass inside this bit of plastic, and after two or three shows, the keys stick or fall off, or the thing cracks, or just jams or rusts or something like that. But they have a great quality.

VN&M: Andy Gill was such a unique guitar player, and Dave Allen, your original bassist, was part of that classic original Gang of Four sound. How difficult, or maybe not, has it been to recapture that sound in this edition of the band?

JK: It’s very lucky, because Andy was not a technical guitarist. He couldn’t play lead guitar riffs, he couldn’t play funk. He didn’t really understand chords, but he found a way of playing the guitar differently to other people, which is brilliant. It was quite remarkable, because he and I used to have rooms in this horrible flat and he would play with an acoustic guitar into a cassette machine and I’d sing, and that’s how we came up with these things at the beginning. But he found this way of playing that accommodated his lack of technical skills.

Sadly, he died, but after the success of the 77-81 box set (released in 2021), which went over really well, there was a demand for us to play, and someone suggested David Pajo (from Slint). And I said, wow, what a great player. He’s a really serious musician. In general, I would say American musicians are better technically than British musicians, they take the craft much more seriously. It was amazing hearing him play exactly like Andy did, and then adding his own thing. And then he decided, for personal reasons, he couldn’t carry on with us, so we found Ted Leo, who is like a genius. I have had the great good fortune to play with two masters of the axe. And certainly it’s been a revelation to play with Ted recently because he comes from that great Northeastern punk rock tradition. So he’s got all that kind of anger and aggression and power, but also total command of the instrument and a total respect for the source material. So I find it to be a great thrill.

For more on the Solid Sound Festival, visit https://solidsoundfestival.com/.