Rip It Up and Start Again (11 page)

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 Heil
ing 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 Free 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.”

Gang of Four inspired many groups in the U.K. to embrace hard funk as the “sonically correct” format for politically conscious postpunk music, but their greatest long-term legacy lay in America. Over the last twenty-five years, countless bands—Pylon, the B-52s, Romeo Void, Red Hot Chili Peppers (who enlisted Gill to produce their debut album), the Minutemen, Fugazi, Big Black, Helmet, Rage Against the Machine, Girls Against Boys, the Rapture, and many more—have seized on aspects of the Gang of Four style, finding inspiration in the possibility the Leeds group opened up for a new form of rock that’s aggressive and violent without being oppressively macho. But none have rivaled the stunning originality of the Gang’s total sound and vision.