Yesterday Andy Gill , the guitarist from Gang of Four died, aged just 64. I bought the first Gang of Four single, a three track ep on Fast Records, from the tiny record shop that briefly appeared in my little former mill village in Lancashire in the late 1970s.The shop came and went like my teenage self's own version of Brigadoon. It had a box of punk and post-punk independent singles on the counter. Many of them are now in a box in our spare room. I loved the three songs, but also the cover, especially the back, which playfully deconstructed how such sleeves are made. They made some great singles, and – I’d argue – one of the best albums ever in Entertainment!
When I was 16 a bunch of us from school, the overcoated Penguin Modern Classics-in-our-pockets types who put other people off bands like Gang of Four, went to see them play in Liverpool, a bill which also had Pere Ubu and Delta Five on it. Minds were blown. (And we saw Pete Wylie holding court, a bonus at the time.) When some of us formed a band the following summer, we took our name (too terrible to repeat) from some lyrics of ‘Love Like Anthrax’. We tried for that mix of theory, feedback and groove and failed, (miserably, in all senses of the word) but so it goes.
There was a long spell when I was puzzled by the lack of influence of Gang of Four beyond the books of Greil Marcus and Simon Reynolds, and then the turn of the century brought it in spades, some of it produced by Gill himself. I never saw them live again, but the records remained vital, exemplary in their engagement and rigourous irony. The habit of seeing the world and its structures and the structure of that seeing, of rhythm, pulse and absence, stuck with me.
I once even adapted this paragraph from Greil Marcus's essay on post-punk to the brave new poetry world of the 1990s, and it's guided a lot of my approach since, for good or ill:
These records…. Were energised by the desire to communicate shared social facts, and they were bent on testing a form called ‘rock ‘n’ roll’ – as music, culture and commerce – whilst still maintaining a wary distance from it. This music wasn’t aimed at a mass audience, and it didn’t seem likely to reach one. It did speak with a disoriented passion and an undisguised critical intelligence strong enough to lead new audiences to identify themselves with it; ideally, audiences sufficiently passionate and critical to keep the musicians questioning their work.’
Last year I started Longarmstapler, a personal side project of making 55 55-second recordings whilst I am 55. (Part of my own everyday creativity, the name being a reference to my first attempt at ownership of the means of production.) Today that turned into a homage to Andy Gill, Gang of Four and specifically the track Love Like Anthrax. This is the text in the right channel of 55 Seconds #14:
It’s weird isn’t it, to be upset when someone that you don’t know dies? I can see it’s ridiculous but still it’s true, the same way that Andy Gill’s guitar sound is inside and outside of itself. I can see his eyes when he’s making that metallic ringing sound, and he’s inside and outside of that sound. He taught me you could do two opposing things at once. That you could do something by stopping doing something, solo by silence. You could fret at your own actions at the same time as being devoted to them. Like all powerful influences he was also maybe a bad influence that has never gone away, all of which I have perhaps proved here.
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