Sasha Frere-Jones
In a memoir by Jon King, the Gang of Four frontman looks back on the post-punk band’s formation amid the class struggles of a different era.
To Hell With Poverty! A Class Act: Inside the Gang of Four, by Jon King, Akashic Books, 326 pages, $29.95
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Jon King’s engaging new memoir, To Hell With Poverty!, is titled after a song by Gang of Four, the British band King sang with in the ’70s and ’80s and is performing with now on their farewell tour. (There was a reunion tour in 2005, but another would be impossible now: founding guitarist Andy Gill died in 2020, and bassist Dave Allen died on April 5 of this year, after several years of early-onset dementia.) “To Hell With Poverty” feels like the right reference. That 1981 single is a deathless disco howl, and King’s lyrics, if they mean to be about anything, are about the abstractions of class and money being both real and unreal. Gill played guitar as if he were controlling an ancient source of noise rather than six individual strings that exist in the present; Allen wrote bass lines that were a pure blend of rock and soul; and Hugo Burnham played each drum in his kit with pure disregard for how they had previously been prioritized. Each band member performed his role a few clicks to the left or right, heightening a sense of independence between all four parts.
“Poverty” also feels like the right topic. Born in 1955, King grew up in the Peckham district of London, in conditions Americans might think destitute (though most Brits would go with “working class”): “In the scullery sits a concrete boiler that heats the water for the once-weekly Sunday bath we take in turns in a zinc tub, which hangs weekdays from a hook on a wall freckled with black mould and spotted with condensation, the patterned wallpaper damp and peeling.” That said, King’s book could have been called A Brief History of the Twentieth Century, the name of a Gang of Four compilation from 1990. The events described here could not have happened in the twenty-first. The development of King and this band were analog reactions to an analog world—a material formation from people who thought about material relations.
I worked in a printing plant as a teenager in the 1980s, but that feels like cyberlabor next to King’s teenage gig in a brickmaking factory in 1974. After being encouraged by his bosses not to perform anything visually identifiable as labor, King finagles a way to help arrange the wet clay bricks in massive building-size ziggurats that were formed with alternating layers of charcoal. “A yard into the stack,” King writes, “a stratum of standard bricks is revealed, evenly coloured red, good for building, and closer to the core are seams of gorgeous multi-coloured ‘firsts,’ burned red, blue, orange and gold, the highest grade beloved by hip architects and heritage home owners. The central core, where the heat was intense, can be too hot to touch after two years and reveals glassy, flintlike lumps as hard as granite, cooked coal-black and Prussian blue, which have been deformed by the inferno and will be laid in suburban garden walls.”
This gorgeousness is given to us with considered beats, a Biblical window onto the England that, still steeped in the 1940s of the war and slowly dying of its own fumes in the 1970s, made King King. He wants us to notice the passage of time, telling us the brickyard went bust in 1991, and became “a privately owned ‘Site of Special Scientific Interest’ with a geology packed with fossils, especially ammonites.” Some of the fossils in the Gang of Four’s story include gun-toting managers (not English, to be clear), orange-juice bottles full of piss, experimental film, and even the great art historian T. J. Clark, who teaches the young King, majoring in fine art at Leeds University in the mid-’70s.
King was a jovial mid-century lad, into motorbikes and wanking and avoiding violent teachers, those men who had been “psychologically damaged in the last war and have carte blanche to use violence and corporal punishment as they see fit, because it’s character building.” It is an unexpected thrill to discover that Gang of Four (officially formed in 1977) did not dismantle rock by intending to, not entirely. King and his schoolmates went to plenty of meat-and-potatoes rock gigs—especially by Dr Feelgood, whom they loved and emulated—and even saw blues masters Sonny Terry and Brownie McGhee, though the blues were the enemy at the heart of the rock-and-roll status quo they fought.
These stakes were not theoretical, at least not to everyone in the band. At a 1981 gig in the former Yugoslavia, Gill and Allen, both heavy drinkers, are “off their tits, rolling on the floor, fists flying.” The catalyst? King writes that “Gill had accused Dave of being ‘rockist’—because he’d put a foot on the monitor!—and Dave saying, ‘FUCK YOU! It’s not YOUR band! It’s—NOT!—YOUR!—FUCKING!—BAND—YOU—FUCK!’”
Their successes and challenges were also entirely twentieth-century. Witness how the BBC struggled with their single “At Home He’s a Tourist,” from the band’s debut, Entertainment! (1979). King tells us the title and the concept were lifted from Heidegger: “the anxiety about what it is to be in the world.” The song ends up being eligible (through arcane exceptions) for “performance” on the most important pop-music TV show, Top of the Pops, where acts lip-synch to their chart entries, a then-common TV ritual that is no longer common. The band, though, is told that the line about “rubbers” is “inappropriate for a family audience.” King offers to change it to “packets,” and the BBC agrees. There is also a Musicians’ Union rule (brace yourself) that “acts can only fake a performance on the show to an authentic original recording, and any variation from version one—like dropping in a substitute word—demands a whole new recording that must be approved by the MU to ensure the re-recorded track employs the same session musicians as the original.” Kafka begins to rustle his papers. But wait—the band does as they’re told only to find, on the day of taping, that the show’s producer now thinks this change (previously approved) “is so obvious people might notice and conclude that the BBC has censored our song, which it would never dream of doing!” They are told to rerecord it yet again and use the word “rubbish,” which sounds more like “rubbers.” Does this work? It does not. “He’s told to go fuck himself, and we’re kicked off the show,” King tells us, and forty-odd years later, I am still proud of the fellas.
King ends up riding a motorbike that is “burbling with happiness” with his “hot wife” (his longtime flame, Debbie) on the back (that story ends in an accident, not fatal), and we are happy for our hero. American success, even, seems to be on the table when they sign to Warner Brothers in 1980. But their manager manages in such a classically managerial way that, after their final American tour in 1983, King flies home to the UK with “exactly two hundred and fifteen dollars.” It’s hard to have much faith in a business that sees a band as perfect as Gang of Four and mishandles their case so cruelly. We are lucky to have the few records the original band made, and King’s memoir is an apt ending to their saga. To hell with being a rock star—try reading, the original analog resistance.
Sasha Frere-Jones is a musician and writer from New York. His memoir, Earlier, was recently published by Semiotext(e).