A group of musicians from Leeds, named after a faction targeted in an intraparty coup in Communist China, release a debut record that reimagines punk through fluid shapes and pinprick textures. The guitarist sounds like he’s fighting with his guitar more than playing it, while the rhythm section rides a taut, rubbery groove, and the singer spins up verses about prisoners in Northern Ireland during the Troubles and the commodification of relationships under a capitalist system. The title? Entertainment!
There’s a certain level of irony regarding the name of Gang of Four‘s debut album, something like a “The Aristocrats!” joke for music so heavily steeped in social and political critique. At a remove, Entertainment! carries a whiff of grad-school thesis, something more to be ruminated over than enjoyed. In practice, it’s a riot—not the most purely hedonistic album to come from the early era of post-punk, but certainly not that great a distance from it. It’s philosophical, and you can dance to it.
Take, for instance, the leadoff track “Ether”: Andy Gill jabs away at his guitar with rigid, staccato chops, power chords juxtaposed with percussive scratches and atonal scrape, as Dave Allen’s bass provides the song’s thrumming backbone. Yet Hugh Burnham’s drums evade the expected four-on-the-floor thump in favor of a more fleet-footed approach—agile, frenetic and almost jazz like, rhythmically precise but engaged in their own intricate dance. It’s an unusual tension, deeply—even pleasurably—physical, yet abrasive, the juxtaposition of which is given added spotlight through the back and forth vocal delivery between Jon King and Andy Gill, contrasting bourgeois consumerism with the plight of tortured prisoners in Long Kesh, a prison in Northern Ireland. And it all climaxes with the blowing of a melodica that sounds like the coming of hurricane-force winds.
When Entertainment! arrived in fall of 1979, punk was just barely old enough for there to be a post-. The Cure hadn’t yet fully embraced their dark side, Siouxsie and the Banshees were only a year removed from actively antagonizing their audiences, and Wire were rapidly embracing a fascinating abstraction. The members of Gang of Four had come together just a few years prior as University of Leeds art students, peers of like-minded art-punks The Mekons and Delta 5, interested in both the leftist philosophies of the Frankfurt School and Situationist International as well as the pub rock of Dr. Feelgood.
They were performers, but their politics weren’t necessarily performative. King referred to the British landscape in 1978 and ’79 as the “Winter of Discontent.” As he explained in a statement accompanying their 2021 box set ’77-81, “There were piles of garbage four meters high in the street, people weren’t going to be buried because there was a strike of mortuary workers and grave diggers, there were dozens of IRA terror attacks in mainland UK, there were plotters looking to pull a coup d’etat, plus Russian SCUD missiles in eastern Europe and Americans sending Pershing missiles to NATO, so threats of nuclear attack. … That was the context we were working with.” Add to that fights with uninvited Nazis as punk shows, and the occasional intraband fight over things like whether or not to put your foot up on the monitor onstage, and what results is a volatile combination, but one that still grooves in ways that every punk band up to that point (exception: The Clash) never could.
Though the group’s songs took on a harsher and bleaker outlook on sophomore album Solid Gold, with the sound to match, Entertainment! is more lithe and limber, providing polemic agitation through rhythms that are constantly on the move. King challenges the idea of the lens of history as a monocle against immediate and precise funk-punk guitar slashes on “Not Great Men.” On “Guns Before Butter,” bass and guitar are engaged in a call-and-response dance against Burnham’s frantic and frenentic drums, almost as if it’s a challenge for the other instruments to follow, while King rails against Nazi propaganda (“All this talk of blood and iron/is the cause of all my shaking”). And the most immediate—the most obviously punk—song here, “I Found That Essence Rare” draws a line between the nuclear tests at Bikini Atoll and a slinky two-piece.
Yet most often on Entertainment!, the political and the personal are intertwined, particularly how capitalism and the media serve to manipulate the general public. “Natural’s Not In It” observes love and sex as consumer products (“The body is good business/Sell out, maintain the interest“), while the deep-funk strut of “Contract” interrogates the expectations of sexual performance. The jerky and immediate standout “Damaged Goods” likewise threads ideas of love and commerce, while Gill literally provides director’s commentary beneath King’s sung verses on “Love Like Anthrax,” offering a direct line into the band’s perspective on why writing love songs isn’t something worthwhile for a band like Gang of Four: “You occasionally wonder why these groups do sing about it all the time, piss down a drain.”
From a purely musical perspective, the most radical moment on Entertainment! is the tension-and-release wind-up of single “At Home He’s a Tourist.” Its first minute or so is all rumbling, roiling one-note bass, with Gill’s scratchy, atonal, arrythmic echoes of guitar circling, tumbling overhead, like the sound of ravenous birds ready to plunge at the carcass below. It’s order and chaos aligned in a strange harmony, but it all comes together brilliantly, streamlining into a sharp and direct chorus. Yet the song proved radical in an entirely different way when the BBC deemed the line “And the rubbers you hide/in your top left pocket” unsuitable for broadcast, and requested that they change the line to “rubbish” for their Top of the Pops performance. They refused (Gill said they suggested “packets” instead), and were paid in turn with a rescinded invitation. The group later recognized that this possibly kneecapped them commercially—for all their philosophical threads and unabashed abrasion, Gang of Four could still write a hell of a pop song, and “Tourist,” confrontational as it is, is one of them.
That first listen to “At Home He’s a Tourist” is one that’s hard to forget—until you’ve heard it, you’ve likely never heard anything quite like it, either. And that goes for the whole of Entertainment! Plenty of bands have attempted to nick the group’s formula but most capture little more than the staccato scratch while somehow overlooking the muscular grooves and provocative atonalities. While there are some admirable attempts at Entertainment! worship out there (Franz Ferdinand’s “Take Me Out” takes a similar idea and makes an brazen hit single out of it), and bands that took it further—see The Pop Group’s Y—there are far more misses than hits among them. I can’t help but echo Sleater-Kinney’s Carrie Brownstein during the press cycle for 2005’s The Woods, when she said, “These new bands sound like Gang of Four — if Gang of Four sucked.”
Three years ago, when reflecting on Entertainment!, King said, “Look, in looking back I have decided I really like this sort of troublesome 21-year-old me who wrote these totally un-commercial songs.” He sells himself short in a way. They were provocateurs and abstractionists, poets and noisemakers. But they were also a pop group, and one with chops enough to move a dancefloor full of bodies—just not in a way that anyone attempted before or has pulled off successfully since.
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