D'You Wanna be in my Gang?

Gang of Four at the Bristol Academy 25.1.05
Gang of Four make art. This was raw, uncompromising product, forged in bleak industrial landscapes, still pertinent, still engaging, still challenging two and a half decades on. I found the proceedings compelling. Andy Gill’s fractured, individualistic, spare, fragmented guitar confronted the audience all night. He looked the part too, intense and detached. Jon King’s vocals were haunting and pleading. This was not easy listening but there was an emotional edge to the voice that spilled into King’s at times frantic, at times slightly bewildered stage presence. The songs, of course, were mighty and all the classics were proffered: ‘To Hell with Poverty’, ‘Anthrax’, ‘Damaged Goods’, ‘At Home He’s a Tourist’, ‘I Found the Essence Rare’ and so on. There were few choruses. There were fewer laughs. Angular rhythms and distorted feedback drove the evening. It was wonderful.

The Guardian’s report of the Manchester leg of the tour made fine reading and one sentence in particular had me purring: ‘Clearly, banter is still bourgeois - the band's sole pre-encore between-song chat is a quip about deconstructionism’. Today I discovered that the band’s Andy Gill is not the same Andy Gill who writes music criticism in The Independent. I also found this fine piece about drummer Hugo Burnham, now an Art teacher in Boston who resembled anything but last night in his England football shirt and joggers.