Jon King of Gang of Four: 'I wanted it to mean something and to try to change the world'

Next month the group, who still feature original members Jon King and Hugo Burnham, will open their UK tour at O2 Academy Leeds, a stone’s throw away from the University of Leeds where they formed Gang of Four with Dave Allen and the late Andy Gill.

King and Gill had first met while they were both pupils at Sevenoaks School and moved up to Leeds to study art.

At Leeds, King was taught by Professor TJ Clark, “a godlike figure of the left” who had been part of the Situationist International. “He was only in his mid thirties and I warmed to him, more over drinks, it was strangely social rather than academic,” he recalls. “We were then in the most radical department probably in Europe. There was Griselda Pollock, who was world famous, Tim Horton, Terry Atkinson, guest speakers from the Art & Language group – blimey, it was pretty good.”

Situationism would later influence many of King’s lyrics for Gang of Four. He says he had been “transfixed by it” since he was a teenager. “When I was twelve or thirteen, there were the Paris riots and that really appealed to me,” he says. “I liked the idea of people chucking bricks at fascist cops at the age of twelve. It was an amazing spectacle to watch a different way of rebelling against boredom, which became a trope of punk rock. One of the great slogans of the Situationists was ‘In exchange for a world in which we don’t die of starvation, we all have a world in which we die of boredom’.

“At Sevenoaks, we used to have things like The Last Whole Earth Catalog and Architecture Now, with these radical ideas that maybe the world could be slightly different, maybe it might not be run by incredibly rich oligarchs for their own benefit. The idea that there might be hope in all the misery was something that appealed to me.”

A trip with Andy Gill to New York in the summer of 1976 introduced the pair to the city’s punk rock scene. “I’d got a research grant from the university to write about Jasper Johns, and Andy asked if he could join me,” Jon recalls. “I’d arranged to stay with Mary Harron, who was then a journalist on the New York Punk magazine, which I hadn’t really heard about. I was a big fan of Dr Feelgood, that was the band that I loved the most at the time. Mary had just broken up with the drummer of the then unknown Patti Smith Group, Jay Dee Daugherty, and she had a flat in St Mark’s Place, on 8th Street in Manhattan, which was only about four blocks from this club called CBGB’s, which was really tiny, but we got in there for nothing and saw Talking Heads, Tom Verlaine, Richard Hell and the Voidoids, The Dead Boys, Patti Smith and The Ramones in a 100-capacity room.

“It was really a pilgrimage because The Velvet Underground was really the marker for me and Andy of what bands should sound like and we came back and thought we’d have a band. Then punk rock came in here. For me, the best place in Britain to see bands was Leeds University. I saw Bob Marley there and Roxy Music. The Who played Live At Leeds in the Refectory, it was the A-list venue for big bands to play. I had lots of friends at Leeds Poly, as it then was, and saw The Clash and The Heartbreakers and The Damned and the Sex Pistols all on one bill for a quid. But the music was quite conservative, it was like speeded-up Black Sabbath with a bit of vocal attitude on it. But I loved all of that stuff, including the Pistols. I think my favourite out of all of that lot was probably The Damned, who were, I think, the most metal band of the lot, those songs are really great hard rock songs, but I didn't want to do that.

“Initially me and Andy wrote songs that were like Dr Feelgood, and Andy and my stage thing was really inspired by Lee Brilleaux and Wilko (Johnson). Wilko famously had no effects pedals whatsoever, and so we set off on that mission. The other thing Andy and I liked was Chicago blues, which was again very naked. We wrote some really terrible songs – some of which we included in the box set, we put a C60 cassette in there – but after a while, you take what you’re doing seriously and you think what is the point of all of this stuff? What I wanted to do was make an intervention in culture. If I was going to abandon my teenage-long desire to be an artist, I wanted to do something that was great and that wasn’t just making a noise. I wanted it to mean something and to try to change the world. I obviously failed completely, apart from as a result of our work there are no longer any oligarchs exploiting people.”

At popular student pub The Fenton, Gang of Four rubbed shoulders with several other bands who were soon to be famous. “At the University was us, The Mekons and Delta 5 and the other ones (such as Soft Cell and Green Gartside of Scritti Politti) were down the road,” King recalls. “It was the back room on the right as you went into The Fenton...It was a neutral place. On the other side, you turned left at the far end a lot of academics were there. For example, Terry Atkinson and lot of academics would talk about semiotics on the left hand side, and on the other side we’d talk about music.”

He adds that he’s “surprised” that the pub does not mark the fact that so many bands used to hang out there. “It’s remarkable, really...There’s nothing in (The Fenton) that suggests it’s played any part in Leeds’s cultural life.

“Think how interesting that group was. Simon Best, who was The Mekons’ roadie for a while, ended up becoming one of the professors who cloned Dolly the sheep. The six degrees of separation between The Mekons and cloning animals was one of their roadies at the time. Andrew Eldritch from Sisters of Mercy, he was a roadie for a while for us all, then there was Jacqui Callis, whose brother Jo was in The Human League, she was in that group as well. So there was quite a lot of this and that going on.”

Damaged Goods, Gang of Four’s debut EP, came out on Bob Last’s Fast Product label, whose stable of artists also included The Mekons and the Human League. King remembers: “I was slightly annoyed at the time because The Mekons had used all of our equipment and Bob Last decided to sign them up first to his new label.

“The recording cost, it was done in Cargo Studios, was I think £80, it was number one in the indie charts, but he never paid us any money. So when people talked about why did you sign to EMI, at least EMI paid us… That said, (Fast) was a stepping stone, we were delighted to be on it. I remember hearing The Mekons on John Peel’s show and they were on there first as well; I shared a flat with (Andy) Corrigan and Mark (White) at that time. Fast had the Scars and the Human League, who were both from Sheffield, then it was The Mekons and us. Then Bob and Rob Waugh went on to manage The Human League.”

Given the band’s political outlook, it was perhaps a surprise at the time that they signed to the major label EMI. Yet King says: “We were very unhappy with the way that we’d been treated by Fast. It struck me that this corporate record company business and then there’s this indie record company business. Some of them, like Creation or Factory Records or Rough Trade were very altruistic and wanted to do the best by the bands; it wasn’t the case with us.

“In terms of the politics of it, I remember talking to Green Gartside about it and he and I unusually agreed. They had been on Rough Trade then moved on to Virgin. I think if you want to get your music across to large audiences, then you need people who can do that effectively. Our current label in the US is brilliant because they know how to manufacture and distribute stuff but if you were really a cottage industry you end up with all of the shambles of it and also the lack of accountability.

“So I didn’t think (signing for EMI) was too political because we weren’t anarchists. You could look at other examples and it might be the band themselves who were trousering all the cash or it might be the label or somewhere in between. It didn’t bother me because I wasn’t really sure what I thought about it. I had a motorbike which was manufactured by the Honda Motorcyle Company which didn’t bother me, and I watched TV.

“I think my politics were in the Situationist camp and you accept that you are part of the spectacle and you are part of this exchange mechanism and you’re trying to find some way of navigating your way through it that does something interesting but knowing what’s going on. It’s not irony, but you know that everything is done with inverted commas around it.”

The band covered a lot of ground lyrically on their first two albums, Entertainment! and Solid Gold. King says his intention was to “try to do something that was interesting”.

“I think what is remarkable is the narrow range of subjects that people decide to adopt when they write music,” he says. “Over the years people have pressed their demo tapes on me and asked me what I think about it, and overwhelmingly I would say I don’t think I’ve come across one with unusual lyrics.

“Compared to say folk music, which talks about death and disease and illness and tragedy, or blues music, the subject matters are boring most of the time. I’m sure that’s why a lot of rap music is so successful because the best of it does talk about things that you recognise are really ‘real’ in people’s lives.

“So I was trying to find the thing. It’s not didactic, I never have been a member of any political party, but obviously I am a socialist. At that time I felt, like a lot of people, great hostility towards organised people of the Left. British politics was so toxic and irrelevant, like it is at the moment. And knowing that you’re immersed in the contradictions of it all yourself, it’s very difficult to embrace things when you know that you’re consuming stuff that you have an issue with.”

To this day, he says he is “never quite sure” what his songwriting process is. However, he recalls that one of Gang of Four’s best-known numbers, At Home He’s a Tourist, sort of became “self-writing” after the title appeared in his head.

Cheeseburger, on Solid Gold, “came from playing pool with some drunk American truckers”.

“We were in a place called Barney’s Beanery in Los Angeles, which is a pool hall near the legendary Tropicana Motel where all the bands used to stay. Tom Waits would be up the back and The Police would be there. These guys were terrible at pool and pretty p***ed and Andy and I were pretty good and we were playing them for money. They paid to stay at the table. I thought they were hustlers at first because they were so bad then realised they just wanted to play and didn’t care, but what they were saying – and I was making notes in my memory – was ‘I move from one place to the next, I hope they keep down the price of gas’, ‘I shoot the best’, ‘Are you talking dollars?’ was one of their lines, so it became a kind of collage, and when you think about it afterwards, it’s the loneliness of being a truck driver without writing that kind of heroic thing like Creedence Clearwater Revival.”

The song In The Ditch was inspired by the then government’s Protect and Survive pamphlet, which contained advice on what to do in the case of a nuclear attack. “In Protect and Survive there was a thing saying in the event of a launch of Scud missiles from East Germany I think there would be about 20 minutes before they hit all the different targets in Britain, and you should whitewash the windows, fill up big black binliner bags with clothes, get under the table, fill the bath with water and if you were out of doors and see a flash, you should lie down in a ditch. So that song came from that,” Kings says. “Again, it’s black comedy, I suppose. It’s funny and absurd. Of course, the anxieties that people feel now, as I do as well, over global warming were at least as intense then as they are now, and I guess that feeling comes through.

“As a writer, I wanted to write about things that I talked about with my friends and that interested me. Generally, I didn’t talk very much about romance with my friends at all.”

King might have sidelined his artistic ambitions to become a musician, but designing many of the band’s record sleeves at least satisfied some of his early cravings. “On Entertainment!, I did the outer sleeve and Andy did the inner sleeve,” he recalls. “That was crucial to me. To EMI’s credit, they weren’t very interested in what we did, there was no point at which anyone said ‘don’t do this or do that’. I remember they were a bit surprised by the cover, they thought it was quite empty. I had traced a photograph of a very successful TV series based on the books of Karl May, the German cowboy writer... Winnetou was the Native American character who was befriended by this alienated cowboy wandering the West, a bit like Tonto in The Lone Ranger. I’ve always thought that contract between the ‘cowboy’ and the American Indian, to use that traditional term, you knew that the moment there was a handshake, it was a disaster for the Native American. Every time there was a handshake betrayal and extermination came.

“We were always trying to find that point of maximum contradiction between what you say and what you do, which of course included me. If you could find the maximum contradiction then it seemed interesting. If you heard Andy’s voice, he wrote those bits. In Ether, I do the bit about living in this wonderful world, and because a report had just come out about torture in Northern Ireland, Andy would then contrast the other with the other.”

By 1981, the band’s original line-up had fragmented. Dave Allen left and was replaced by Sara Lee on Songs of the Free. Burnham departed in 1983 before the release of their fourth album, Hard. Although they proved to be their most commercially successful recordings, King felt there were “all these internal contraditions about what the band was up to”.

“I think a way of dealing with it at the time was to make it all about me and Andy and Sara,” he says. “The Hard record is terrible. I co-wrote the songs but I regret having made it. But I really like those first three records, and after that we made some really nice records (in the 1990s) but (Hard) was I just think a creative disaster. There’s not a song on there that I would care to ever perform again. I know some people like some of the songs on it, but not me.”

In 2004, 20 years after they split, the original line-up of Gang of Four briefly reunited. “Andy and I had not had any kind of relationship for about 10 years before that but his manager, Jazz Summers, acted as a kind of intermediary, getting in touch with everybody to say all these bands from Radio 4 and Franz Ferdinand were acknowledging their musical debt to what we’d done. Red Hot Chili Peppers had had great success out of mining our work, and mostly in America there was a big interest in the band getting back together, and Jazz Summers acted as the honest broker, and also Rob Waugh who was our original manager and a friend of both Andy’s and mine. So we decided to do it with the four original members.

“After leaving the band, Dave Allen had joined Shriekback and then had an extraordinary music career at Warner Bros and as head of artist relations at Beats International. That’s why when Frank Ocean wants to use a sample from one of our songs, or Run The Jewels, they knew Dave and phoned him up to say do you mind if we use tracks from some of your stuff on our thing. It was great to get back together and do that and we had an extremely successful coast to coast sold-out tour of the US and dates in the UK and Europe.”

Today, King is taking things one step at a time with the band. “We’ve got this tour coming about, which I’m really excited about and we’ll see how that goes, it’s going to be a fantastic thrill to do that,” he says.

But there’s also the tantalising prospect of new music. “I’ve got on tremendously well with David Pajo, he’s coming over to stay with me and we’re going to write together in my studio and see what happens,” King says. “Sara and Hugo are coming over for two weeks, so we’re going to be having a go together to come up with stuff.

“Because the band’s got integrity and it’s got Sara, Hugo and me, it’s the genuine article, with this brilliant new voice in it. But it depends how that work comes up; it can only make sense if it’s really great, there’s no point in doing anything if it’s just good.”

Gang of Four’s UK tour starts at O2 Academy Leeds on September 30.