Gang Of Four.

The one who was a fan of Steve Martin.

LOL. Any child inheriting surnames like Evans or Jones should be named Octavius or Zebedee, etc.

huge RIP. by far the best post punk band

Andy Gill always acknowledged Dr. Feelgood as an influence, Wilko primarily, I mean just look at how he holds his guitar and moves on stage, not to mention his guitar technique

Alexis P made this point rather well in the Guardian, I thought:

https://www.theguardian.com/music/2020/feb/02/andy-gill-gang-of-four-genius-guitarist-who-burned-a-route-out-of-punk

I like the notion that Gang of Four took influences from pre-punk stuff (the Feelgoods, funk) and made out of them music that was a route out of punk for those bored by it. Almost as if they leapfrogged punk entirely. I've seen ppl on twitter trying to claim Gill for punk but I think he was much smarter than that.

in the loudersound interview* that josh links, it's interesting to me that gill cites the visual and physical aspects of wilko's performance -- wilko's someone i think has been quite shortchanged in the recording (which is a little bit why he's dropped down the ranks in our sense of who matters) and gill seems to have found a way to transfer something like this full audiovisual sensibility purely into the sound**: plus he found a way to persuade his bandmates to organise their lines so as to intensify the value of the guitar even at its most minimalist (which is actually not a very "funk" thing to do but that's a different discussion)

*which incidentally took me abt 20 mins longer than necessary to read, it was extremely fkn glitchy to scroll through >:(
**not that gill didn't have a visual dimension onstage also but it's the least interesting part of it his work and certainly not needed as a focus for the requisite qualities

I wouldn't be surprised if Gill was downplaying the influence of punk, it's what people have been doing since about 1978 after all. Apart from Green Gartside, he always fesses up to it.

I was looking at some Go4 live YouTubes and there was one song in particular that was just blatant Dr. Feelgood but I'm not good on their song titles.

he found a way to persuade his bandmates to organise their lines so as to intensify the value of the guitar even at its most minimalist (which is actually not a very "funk" thing to do but that's a different discussion)

this is otm, and I think a relevant point to make about Prince circa 1979-1981.

iincludes digression on farting) (Tom D.) at 7:30 3 Feb 20

I wouldn't be surprised if Gill was downplaying the influence of punk, it's what people have been doing since about 1978 after all. Apart from Green Gartside, he always fesses up to it.

I was looking at some Go4 live YouTubes and there was one song in particular that was just blatant Dr. Feelgood but I'm not good on their song titles.

yeah I definitely get a bullshitty vibe from a lot of guys from that era who seem to want to discount punk

also don't discount the New York bands influence, Gill and Jon King went there in 76

also as far as his guitar style I'd wager reggae and Nile Rogers figure in too

I thought I mentioned that specifically re: the conversation I posted between Gill and Jon Langford. Both of them say a lot of UK punk didn't really interest them - Langford and Gill both claim to have not even bought the Pistols record or seen them when they played Leeds because the music was too macho or heavy metal; Langford says he and his friends played a lot of the first Clash album, but he thought it all sounded a bit "weedy" - but they were still massively influenced by the *idea* of punk. (They mention a pal whose picture ended up on the front of the paper with a tampon earring or something dangling from his ear, described in the caption as "punk," but their friend had never heard the term before.) And Gill does specifically cites his trip to NY as formative, because the people he met there were a lot less macho and aggressive and flamboyant than the gob-target UK crew; I recall a story of the Voidoids playing their first shows in the UK, and Robert Quine being surprised than pissed off that people kept spitting on his guitar.

Anyway, this is perhaps the very gist of post punk as a concept. That is, music that would not necessarily been likely *pre*-punk but which punk allowed or encouraged, whether or not the band itself sounded "punk." Gang of Four, Wire, Joy Division ... these groups were driven by ideas and concepts that punk allowed them to explore, even if none consistently sounded like what one might play someone who wanted to know what "punk" sounded like.

When I was first listening to this stuff in 1979, to my roommates "punk" was anything with less-than-virtuoso musical skill and compositional ability. Sex Pistols and Gang of Four and Wire were not Led Zep or Todd Rundgren or Genesis, therefore they were punk. I think B-52s may have been one of the first records I subjected them to that was so unusual that they thought of it as "new wave" or something other than punk.

What did they think, if anything, of stuff like Roxy Music?

without getting too het up abt two of my bugbears (ancient: "stop saying influence and use better words please", less ancient: "no one called it post-punk at the time and its use now is distorting") the move in the UK to move BEYOND PUNK was strongly afoot as early as 1977, when sounds ran their themed double issue called new musick (also a bad name lol but way better than "post-punk" sorry if this offends), featuring (from memory) kraftwerk, devo, the residents, throbbing gristle, siouxsie and the banshees, plus essays on dub and disco (possibly also pere ubu and cabaret voltaire?)*

i think the notion of a split within punk is just utterly basic to its sense of identity: it was always about forcing splits within a movement, not just the counterculture at large as a movement, but within punk as a movement -- and in some ways within ourselves. identify the contradiction and make it the hook! so it's less a "bullshitty vibe" really than a basic element in the make-up of many of those drawn to it -- we were always drawing paradoxical lines and insisting on impossible definitions, it was our thing! i wish the loudersound interview had called gill out on that a bit -- half his statements seem to me to be screaming "call me out on this! it'll be fun! open for a surprise!"

*with the exception of the banshees all these folks pre-existed punk, this is one (small) reason why i dislike "post-punk"

And I feel like Siouxsie is "of punk," yet not punk.

The roommates liked Bowie, so Roxy circa Siren was okay by them. Although I don't think they liked Ferry and Co. nearly as much. xp

Not punk but of punk is a good distinction. Pre-Pistols, but post-Ramones - say, 1974-1975 - were there any acts in the UK that fit the loose definition of "punk," or is that where pub rock (a la Feelgood, Brinsley Schwarz, Chilli Willi et al.) fit in?

sounds ran their themed double issue called new musick (also a bad name lol but way better than "post-punk" sorry if this offends), featuring (from memory) kraftwerk, devo, the residents, throbbing gristle, siouxsie and the banshees, plus essays on dub and disco (possibly also pere ubu and cabaret voltaire?)*

it seems important that literally everything listed here with the exception of souixsie predates uk punk

feelgood if you amp up wilko's bug-eyed oddness maybe, the rest of the pub rock was raucous 12-bar pop and country

doctors of madness for sure, a bit earlier the groundhogs, the edgar broughton band, the pink fairies

tbh ums there may have been others included that were more recent, i haven't set eyes on the relevant pages for 43 years -- but the people who argued for the issue and wrote and edited them were jon savage and jane suck, two of the key punk writers at the paper, so it wasn't *just* a retrogression (and was not at ALL presented as one rhetorically)

mark otm on influence + post punk. People describing "Pink Flag" as post punk always makes me chortle.

Has anyone read the "Red Set: The History Of Gang Of Four" bio? Any good?

Simon Reynolds on Andy Gill

https://pitchfork.com/thepitch/remembering-gang-of-fours-andy-gill-who-ripped-punk-to-shreds/?fbclid=IwAR0vQfhHnaSzNltWQcdFHWVnXS8DNnxh2-24V3BWge1RCtNNIZErID3RhOo

x-post-- Am curious about the "Red Set: The History Of Gang Of Four" book too. I see there was also a 33 1/3 book on the Entertainment album, but the one review excerpt thing I read about it online just says that the 33 1 /3 book author Kevin Dettmar focuses heavily on (and "beats one over the head with") the Situationist and Marxist aspects of the lyrics

So when Gill and King went to NYC in fall 1976, they were on a university grant, stayed in NYC with critic/filmmaker Mary Harron, and visited Moma by day (from an online blurb about the Red Set book about Go4)

Wow

Nice work if you can find it.

harron became a film-maker later obviously but she wasn't one in 1976

also i only just discovered that she dated tony blair at oxford lol

I can see how Gill was struck by the distressing and "misuse" of familiar elements in the music of Beefheart, maybe especially as a guitarist---also, if he's serious about The Band--or not---certainly the sense, especially on Music From Big Pink, of what xgau called the music's "sprung"quality: something to the effect that if you took away one piece, the whole thing would go flying apart: ah, those self=taught hillbilly mechanics! (My Granpaw, who attended a mechanics' school in St. Louis, started by Henry Ford, went home to the hills and found he had all kinds of competition from consumer-hackers). Prob not really---the Hawks/Band were always known for their chops, and Garth for one was formally educated), but Go4 tapped into that sense of suspenseful tumult under the hood.
And yeah the first times I read about "punk" (in Creem, natch), Bangs was already agitating for distress, misuse, extension of the term: he tried applying it to James Taylor, Helen Reddy, and saying why they were that.
A kid wrote in to say he considered punk not only to be the Seeds and the Dolls, but listening to Sun Ra while doing orange sunshine, and Eugene Ormandy with Dubonnet on ice: Bangs agreed; "The chief criterion is excitement." Surely the 60s roots-continuity-ongoing lives of Patti Smith, Televsion, Voidoids, Joey Ramone (the former Jeff Starship) was had to do with the spirit, not the letter of punk (also all the young geezers Mark cites below), before the rise of Taliban hardcore.
without getting too het up abt two of my bugbears (ancient: "stop saying influence and use better words please", less ancient: "no one called it post-punk at the time and its use now is distorting") the move in the UK to move BEYOND PUNK was strongly afoot as early as 1977, when sounds ran their themed double issue called new musick (also a bad name lol but way better than "post-punk" sorry if this offends), featuring (from memory) kraftwerk, devo, the residents, throbbing gristle, siouxsie and the banshees, plus essays on dub and disco (possibly also pere ubu and cabaret voltaire?)*

i think the notion of a split within punk is just utterly basic to its sense of identity: it was always about forcing splits within a movement, not just the counterculture at large as a movement, but within punk as a movement -- and in some ways within ourselves. identify the contradiction and make it the hook! so it's less a "bullshitty vibe" really than a basic element in the make-up of many of those drawn to it -- we were always drawing paradoxical lines and insisting on impossible definitions, it was our thing! i wish the loudersound interview had called gill out on that a bit -- half his statements seem to me to be screaming "call me out on this! it'll be fun! open for a surprise!"

*with the exception of the banshees all these folks pre-existed punk, this is one (small) reason why i dislike "post-punk"
Also the split had to do, within factions and some bands and some individuals, between break on through/back to basics.

(and "basics" could incl. several kinds of constriction)

Speaking of distressed knowns/"knowns", David Johnson, host of the invaluable Night Lights, reminds us:
Jazz writer Dan Morgenstern once compared the sound of tenor saxophonist Albert Ayler's 1960s avant-garde groups to "a Salvation Army marching band on LSD." Now that's what I call post-punk.
https://indianapublicmedia.org/nightlights/holy-ghost-albert-ayler.php

x-post-- Am curious about the "Red Set: The History Of Gang Of Four" book too. I see there was also a 33 1/3 book on the Entertainment album, but the one review excerpt thing I read about it online just says that the 33 1 /3 book author Kevin Dettmar focuses heavily on (and "beats one over the head with") the Situationist and Marxist aspects of the lyrics

That reminds me: when I went to see Gang of Four back in 2015 (at a local venue!), during a lull in the performance Andy riffed about French Situationism for a little bit. Also, he was still pretty gorgeous.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wMlhWvIh7U4

Thanks for that Wilko Johnson video.

still intrigued by simon reynolds' claim that gill's and wilko's fingernails are "hardened" -- are (or were) they? how?

Lots of fingerstyle guitar players use artificial nails, not sure if that’s what he is referring to, tend not to think so.

Simon Reynolds doesn't how guitar playing works - shocker!

I've heard stories of particularly bass players using super glue to reenforce calluses.

hardened skin absolutely! i used to play double bass in orchestras so i know exactly how that works -- but i don't think you can't callus fingernails

brb researching nail art, i already discovered tippi hedren is why so many US nail bars are vietnamese-run

gang of four shd write a song abt it tbrr

Maybe he imagines that said nails were gradually vulcanized into steely talons as a consequence of their owners' picking style?
(That's not what happens, no.)

Yes, I believe that is exactly what he thinks

That's not what happens indeed. I love this part in an episode of a Matt Sweeney series, in which James Williams talks about the Fake Fingernail Mojo
https://youtu.be/9OvB-wDt7mA?t=521

rules that legendary stooge james williamson basically confirms my not-entirely serious nail-bar theory

Catherine Mayer, Andy Gill's widow, has a new piece up about his passing. There is a strong possibility -- though as the piece clearly states, no specific evidence -- he was an early victim of COVID-19

https://www.catherinemayer.co.uk/post/2020-vision-14-may-16-00

Many thanks for posting that.

My brother has just texted me, "Respiratory illness after touring Asia". I think I'd hold fire on that one.

― (includes digression on farting) (Tom D.), Saturday, 1 February 2020 21:08 (three months ago) bookmarkflaglink

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/jun/01/spate-of-possible-uk-coronavirus-cases-from-2019-come-to-light

The trajectory of Gill’s illness, which took medics looking after him in January by surprise, is now familiar – sudden deterioration, low oxygen levels and organ failure. He had fallen sick after his band returned from a trip to China in late November. A short time later, his 26-year-old tour manager was taken to hospital in Leeds with a severe respiratory infection.

Knowing what we do now it does seem likely it was covid, although apparently the band cancelled last spring's Chinese dates after he was hospitalised with another chest infection.

MATADOR RECORDS TO OVERSEE CLASSIC
GANG OF FOUR ALBUMS

ENTERTAINMENT!, SOLID GOLD, SONGS OF THE FREE, AND 14 LIVE SHOWS
NOW AVAILABLE TO STREAM

LISTEN TO A CURATED PLAYLIST OF LIVE TRACKS

We are pleased to announce that Matador Records will now oversee a number of key catalog titles by legendary Leeds, UK band, Gang of Four, including the classic albums Entertainment! (1979), Solid Gold (1981), and Songs of the Free (1982).

These records are once again available across streaming services and are joined by 14 live releases capturing performances between 1979 and 1984. Find a curated playlist of highlights from the live tapes.

“Ether,” the introductory track on Entertainment!, was recently sampled by Run The Jewels, who used the song’s core riff to form the backbone of their track “the ground below” on the recently released RTJ4.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mCQtCj39TN0

More to come.

yay!

W/r/t live tracks playlist, the entire Mpls gig used to be up on youtube (seems to have been taken down, natch) and it is a fucking scorcher

Ah-ha, I see the whole show is up already up on the various streaming services, nice, I thought they were just doing the playlist