The Gang's All Here
Without Gang Of Four there would have been no Franz Ferdinand, Rapture or Futureheads. The band’s legendary guitarist Andy Gill talks about their first album in 15 years.
Peter Murphy, 01 Feb 2011
Alongside Pere Ubu, Wire and Joy Division, Gang Of Four's post-punk/funk fusion became one of the most commonly cited influences of the post-millennial decade. Content, the quartet's first album in 16 years, is a focused and fiery record, the sound of a committed band playing in a room with minimal smoke and mirrors. So did they feel the need to reclaim that very sound from numerous young (The Rapture, Franz, Bloc Party) and sometimes not-so-young (Chili Peppers) pretenders?
"I think so,” says guitarist and producer Andy Gill. “Obviously we’ve taken a very long time to go about doing this record. Possibly a ridiculously long time! I remember the conversation Jon (King, vocalist) and I had three or four years ago, and he said, ‘We’re doing these festival gigs, it’s a lot of fun. But maybe we should do some new things to make our lives more interesting.’ That was the initial motivation. And it didn’t really need talking about, it was a case of doing stuff that came naturally – similar kinds of questions and solutions as when we started off: rhythm is king and the groove is the master and everything is subservient to that thing which gets under your skin.”
Miscegenation is the key. Just as Public Enemy sounded Teutonic, and Afrika Bambaataa sampled Kraftwerk, Gang Of Four were classic post-punk yet couldn’t have existed without dub and funk.
“Me and Jon really liked black American music and also Jamaican music when we were teenagers,” Andy concedes, “but when it came to developing the early Gang Of Four sound, I thought the way people seemed to have to choose between doing groove orientated stuff or white guitar music was a strange thing. My approach to these rhythms was to absolutely invent stuff from scratch. There’s this huge adventure in seeing what happens if you move the snare drum half a beat later or earlier, and it ends up sounding slightly odd and yet completely groovy. How much better is that mechanistically unstoppable groove if it also surprises you and feels like something you haven’t quite heard before?”
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