For the first two minutes of Frank Ocean’s “Futura Free,” a slow, half-drowned beat runs beneath Ocean’s voice and piano. It’s taken from Gang of Four’s “Love Like Anthrax,” recorded in 1979 for the band’s début album, “Entertainment!” The sample comes from the point in the song right after Andy Gill toggles a two-note alarm on his guitar. His tone softens and lifts up to make room for the entrance of Dave Allen’s bass and Hugo Burnham’s drums. Gill’s guitar has been groaning and screeching, like a fender pulled across a bollard, for ninety seconds, but with deliberation, as if his noise were fulfilling a single purpose. The rhythm section starts playing a figure that sounds like dance music with some bits removed, spinning off its center like a dryer full of wet bath mats. The song is bright and awake and not like any music that came before it, not really.
All three instruments are there in the Frank Ocean sample, apparently, but you can only hear the drums. “I couldn’t hear our bit but pretend that I do when anybody asks,” Burnham told me a few days after Gill died, from a respiratory illness, in London, on February 1st. “I love Frank Ocean.”
It is proper that one of the most recent appearances of Gang of Four’s music is in a song by Frank Ocean, someone who has melted and reshaped what a pop star can do and say. Ocean inverted the role of the male singer just as Gang of Four inverted the idea of what a guitar band with a vocalist might do. Should a singer talk about feelings or theories? What are electric instruments for? Why is music amplified? Why do songs have so many notes? Why would four people go into a room and play together? Gill’s spoken-word part of “Love Like Anthrax”—one of two simultaneous vocals, inspired by the split-screen dual narrative of Jean-Luc Godard’s film “Numéro Deux”—gives us an answer, a way of understanding the cultural moment and how Gang of Four reimagined it in 1979. “I don’t think we’re saying there’s anything wrong with love,” Gill says in the song. “We just don’t think that what goes on between two people should be shrouded with mystery.”
The day after Gill died, I spoke to the Gang of Four singer and lyricist Jon King. “ ‘Anthrax’ was a breakthrough,” he said. “We felt able to move on from verse-bridge-chorus songs. We had discovered a sound.”
If a Frank Ocean fan, or anyone who doesn’t know Gang of Four, plays “Anthrax,” they will find the essence of Gill, in a performance as important as any other from that time. Eulogizing music is another form of death, so put the song on at a high volume and wait for the nearest person to complain. Feedback isn’t particularly novel now, and it was hardly new in 1979, but “Anthrax” used it in a way that is still astonishing. The song begins with just a guitar, feeding back enthusiastically for a minute with no nods toward a song or any obvious musical frame. It’s a happy and glorious and dangerous noise, and once the rest of the band leaps in it disappears. When Gill’s guitar returns, it’s no more normative. He just keeps squealing. It’s a fabulous guitar song with no guitar part. How’s that for minimalism?
Gill presented his love of minimalism as a guiding principle for Gang of Four, in an interview with Mary Harron for the British weekly Melody Maker, in May of 1979. “Our attitudes have always been to strip down to the bare essentials, or try to,” he said. “Most New Wave groups had a lot of sound textures going on simultaneously. What we’re more interested in is being able to listen to a Gang of Four song and hear every single element—bass, drums, vocals, guitar—separate and equally dominant.”
Making a band legible, from any distance, involves more than a little technical modification. King told me about the band’s collective desire to get away from the “fatness” of valve amps like those made by Marshall, which were popular with English bands in the seventies. Gill used transistor amplifiers made by another English company, Carlsbro, which lent a cold clarity and nakedness to his playing. “That was very much one of Andy’s things,” King said. “It’s very difficult to be naked—it has to be about the thing.”
That thing was very much up for grabs in 1978, when what is widely called the post-punk period was gathering steam in England. Inspired by the self-starters of punk, the second wave of bands had a double remit: love the past and sound nothing like it. The critic Greil Marcus, in the liner notes of “A Brief History of the Twentieth Century,” Gang of Four’s first compilation album, describes this moment: “The Gang of Four acted out, and put into records, a picture of an individual who had discovered that ordinary life—the gestures of affection and resentment one made every day, the catchphrases 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 band’s musical influences were not obscure: Allen loved the Meters; Burnham praised the work of Simon Kirke, the drummer for Free; and all the surviving members of Gang of Four mentioned Parliament and Funkadelic. Of Funkadelic’s “One Nation Under a Groove,” King said, “You just lay down a groove and then you come in and out with something or other.” This describes, precisely, one of the ideas behind “Anthrax,” mapped out on paper by Gill and King in 1977, when they occupied “adjacent rooms in a shitty house” while attending the University of Leeds.
Two major inspirations for Gill specifically were Jimi Hendrix—especially his work on “Voodoo Child (Slight Return),” which King says he and Gill listened to “endlessly”—and Dr. Feelgood’s guitarist Wilko Johnson. He’s not usually mentioned in American arguments about seventies rock, but Johnson is the biggest antecedent for Gill’s playing. If the name rings no bells, listen to Gill’s playing on “Outside the Trains Don’t Run on Time” or, really, any Gang of Four song. Then, watch a clip of Dr. Feelgood playing “She Does It Right,” live on the British television show “Old Grey Whistle Test,” in 1975. Johnson doesn’t play with a pick or use his fingertips like a folkie. He whacks the guitar with the back of his hand, using fingernails but also the hand itself. That attack, combined with his Fender Telecaster, created a sound that is as bracing and harsh as Gang of Four itself. (If you want to keep learning about the band, don’t worry. The rights to Gang of Four recordings were owned by Warner Bros. in the United States, and the label took the song files down when the band could not reach an agreement with the company about a new contract last year. The rights to the recordings have now reverted to the band, and the original recordings should be up on streaming platforms soon.)
When Gang of Four came to New York in 1979 and performed at Hurrah, they did a version of “Damaged Goods,” which was already enough of an underground hit that the audience sang along to most of it. Included in “The Pitchfork 500,” “Damaged Goods” was the band’s first single, there on the flip side of the first version of “Anthrax,” and it probably remains the band’s best-known song. King likened the sound of it to the first-generation video game Breakout (a bouncing ball chips away at a wall of bricks), which he and Gill played during the recording of “Entertainment!” In “Damaged Goods,” the bass and guitar toss small chords back and forth and then take off in opposite directions, with Allen playing what sounds like the song’s melody and Gill hacking away like a sort of angry, rusty metronome. The demystification of sex and love referred to on the B-side, in “Love Like Anthrax,” had already begun on the A-side: “Sometimes I’m thinking that I love you / But I know it’s only lust.”
While talking about Godard, King described how he approached lyrics for the first album. “Why can’t we make a radical music that talks about alienation and oppression and things like that, but also is really thrilling?” he said. Allen remembers the band writing “Return the Gift” for “Entertainment!” in 1979. King’s lyrics string together promises out of an advertisement—“Go to Scotland no obligation / We’ll send you an invitation / We’ll send you an inside shower”—and end in what might be the pleas of a day worker folded into a mail-order scam: “Please send me evenings and weekends.” “We were rehearsing in a squat,” Allen told me. “It was still a house, and it had a mailbox. In the mailbox was one of those ‘Call this number now for an inside shower’ flyers. That just started us thinking—return the gift. In other words, we wouldn’t want it, even if they sent it to us.”
That “us,” the gang in Gang of Four, was as central as the lack of processing and effects in the band’s recordings. But, at the end of 2018, Gill said, in one of his last interviews, that the notion of a collective was “bollocks.” “Me and Jon were running the show,” Gill said. “We invented it, but we pretended it was all four of us.” Since Gill’s death, this statement has been reproduced in several outlets, so it is worth clarifying. King responded unequivocally. “Gill and I didn’t run everything,” he said. “It was a group effort where everyone contributed something useful.” “It was a co-op, honestly, it was the four of us,” Allen said. “We were all very adamant about things, so it ended up in arguments. I think that’s why ‘Entertainment!’ sounds the way it sounds.”
“Much of our work was built on a groove from Dave and Hugo over which Gill and I could improvise,” King said. “We hardly ever arrived in the rehearsal room and presented a worked up song. We didn’t want the band to be about individuals. We were collectively very intolerant of each other’s failings and always trying to push ideas to breaking point.” This sort of dovetails with Gill’s running-the-show viewpoint. Many bands are staffed with people who all, to the benefit of the group, think that their bit is the most important and the most special. It’s the energy swap replayed by every band, everywhere, all the time.
The momentum of that argument is present in a live recording of “Cheeseburger” included on the EP “Another Day/Another Dollar,” from 1982, but recorded in March of 1981. The combination of accuracy and fury and sonic individuation will make your eyes pop out. In the track, King is on full overload, living the dream of detournément by yelping out more lines from television advertisements: “Fifty-four miles per gallon, estimated highway mileage!” Allen and Burnham seem to be playing in different directions, the drums zinging upward in a slow, atomized drumroll while Allen plays a bass line that is likely the only thing in the song you can hum. Gill? Good luck notating this one. His opening sound is a sort of light-purple cloud of ammonia. After that, he caroms off of Allen and Burnham, hitting harmonics through a chorus pedal, making a high and awful tone that circles the band like an antagonized friend of the song who maybe even knows how it goes. It’s an approach that maintains a sound more than it maintains any melodic or harmonic fidelity. As Gill described his output in a 2017 interview, it’s “the sound of the finger moving along the string, the sound of the pick against the string.” It’s an approach that plays right into Bertolt Brecht’s kind of alienation, making you notice the projector more than the film. Gill’s thorny personhood was balanced by a deep, goofy love of what electric guitars can do, left to their own devices.
A few days after Gill’s death, I e-mailed Steve Albini, the guitarist who did the most with Gill’s sound after Gill. “Andy Gill’s guitar playing was a particular inspiration to me, and it’s fair to say I copied him shamelessly,” Albini wrote. “He would say the same about Wilko Johnson, so we’re even.”
After Allen left the band, there was a conscious effort to write a hit, and that song was “I Love a Man in Uniform,” from 1982, as close to dance music of the time as the band got. The BBC disagreed. In the midst of the Falklands War, even fairly vague lyrics about the military were a bridge too far, and the broadcaster banned the single from radio play. “Andy and I thought we’d written an actual pop single, but it was censored,” King said. Even while intentionally looking for success, Gill could barely contain his sound, and his playing is still recalcitrant and choppy, mixed slightly below a rudimentary bass line. There isn’t a single place where Gill’s guitar feels like the work of a person you could walk up and talk to.
After parting ways with King, in 2012, Gill toured under the name Gang of Four with three studio musicians, who are best left without elaboration. It’s an unfairly rough gig for the three sidemen—imitating living people, but not in a Broadway play, where we would expect and forgive any distinct differences. Bands are appealing because of the eight thousand decisions they make with and against each other, how each player affects the others. Gill’s individual accomplishment was to help launch a collective that swallowed the individual. We miss Gang of Four and Gill partly because of the music they wrote, but mostly because of how they argued.
