Jon King of Gang of Four: 'When you’re living in difficult times, that’s the time to put your head up'

“(Andy was) a wonderful guitarist and was my soul brother, but I wouldn’t put a record out as Gang of Four on my own, I don’t think that’s right – any more than Johnny Marr would put out a Smiths record or one of the Gallagher brothers would’ve put out an Oasis record on their own. And I don’t think there’s a Gang of Four record to be put out without me and Andy, I wouldn’t do that, but there is a record to be put out that’s me in some way.”

Such an album would, he says, continue a theme from his new memoir, To Hell With Poverty! “When you’re living in difficult times, that’s the time to put your head up,” he says. “This is not a time to put your head down and think it’s the end of the world as we know it – to quote dear old Michael (Stipe); it’s time to stand up, put your chin out and do something.”

Back in 1976, when King and Gill formed Gang of Four with fellow University of Leeds student Hugo Burnham and bassist Dave Allen, “standing up” to what they saw as the ills of the class system and the capitalist establishment was the raison d’etre for ground-breaking post-punk albums such as Entertainment! and Solid Gold.

In King’s book, which chronicles his life up until Gang of Four first split up in 1984, he relates how growing up in the 1960s and 70s, there was a feeling of looming apocalypse. In post-war London, where he was born, there were still bomb sites, while at primary school in Kent, he and his classmates had duck-and-cover exercises on what to do in the event of a four-minute warning of nuclear war. “I felt that the end of days was something that humans always have, but I certainly had it and it was very uncomfortable,” he says.

Later, while he was a student in Leeds, households were issued with a pamphlet called Leeds And The Bomb. “It says that if a one megaton bomb explodes over Leeds Town Hall, the best place to be is right near there – but you’ve only got four minutes to get there,” he recalls. “I was really pleased that my flat was right in the middle of it. The worst bit was between Bradford and Leeds because Bradford would be zapped, and Leeds, but the bit in the middle was where your options were dying of starvation or radiation sickness.”

Being one of the few pupils on a state scholarship at the fee-paying Sevenoaks School opened his eyes to privilege. “I come from a poor working-class background, my dad was an electrician, my mum was what was then called a housewife and we didn’t have a record player at home, we never listened to music, we had electric bar fires, we didn’t have any hot water except on a Sunday,” King says. “At the time I just thought that was normal and then I went to this extrordinarily privileged school. My dad was a Cockney but I must have lost my accent in an hour or something, my daughter now thinks I talk posh but I resent that, I’d say I’ve got an Estuary accent.

“I didn’t have any money at all, really. I’d never had music lessons because we couldn’t afford it and I never went on school trips. But I did go to school six days a week and I was in this incredible machine for the privileged and you see, as it says in the Bible, to him who has everything, everything will be given; to him who has nothing it will be taken away.

“The other thing was you see a different world, the vocabulary is different. Up north people still say supper for dinner but down south it’s only posh people who say supepr for dinner. They also have lunch. All of that thing, the character armour of being in one type of class and then the good fortune if you were a clever boy, you could really get immersed in culture and as soon as you land in a place where culture is a central thing, it’s almost how you competed with each other, about the book you read and all of that type of stuff, and then taking music seriously.

“I remember an English class where the teacher got out a record player and played Ruby, Don’t Take Your Love To Town, which is Kenny Rogers’ great masterpiece and a song that now probably would’ve been banned – it’s about a Vietnam veteran paralysed from the waste down whose wife is going out to have some fun and probably get laid, (in the song) he wants to kill her which is not a reasonable thing to do, but it’s a really moving story and when we talked about it, I was really taken by it. And the first time I heard a lyric to a Rolling Stones song which was ‘Every time I kiss you baby, it tastes like pork and beans’ I thought it was amazing and I got the original blues record by Alvin Robinson and that was so different to A Walk in the Black Forest by Russ Conway or Stranger On The Shore by Acker Bilk, which were hits records at the time, so I was taken by that. And, of course, hearing Bob Dylan because the boys were allowed to music, the 17 and 18-year-old boys in 1966 were playing Highway 61 Revisited and Blonde on Blonde and it was like a lightning bolt.”

In the art department, however, he forged lasting friendships, several of which would carry on at the University of Leeds where both Gang of Four and The Mekons formed.

“Kevin (Lycett) and I lived in the same village and it is curious how he became the guitarist in The Mekons,” King says. “He and I were good friends, we both got free places to this very posh school, and there I met Andy Gill, who was in the year below me, and Mark White and Tom Greenhalgh, also two members of The Mekons, Paul Greengrass, who directed the Bourne Conspiracy films and Adam Curtis, the documentary filmmaker, we were all in the same little bunch.

“Going to Leeds, I formed great friendships with Andy Corrigan and he and I shared a flat with Mark White in Cromer House, which was the fulcrum of all our activities. We were in a place in Leeds which was an A-list (music) venue, then there was the polytechnic down the road and we had great friends there, and you could find yourself and also be invisible. At that time no-one went north of Watford to review any shows, so you could develop at your own speed.”

King retains fond memories of Leeds, and still visits the city occasionally. A keen motorcyclist, King recalls trips out of the city into the Yorkshire countryside. “I had a bike there and I would drive out to the moors and is God’s Own Country – places like Blubberhouses. Exploring the wonders of the Yorkshire Moors on a motorcycle, there’s very little that can beat that, so long as it’s not raining,” he says.

While a student, he saw the Sex Pistols’ notoious show at Leeds Polytechnic and his friend Andy Corrigan appeared in a photo on the front page of the Yorkshire Evening Post the next day. “I was very proud of him,” he says. “It wasn’t sold out at Leeds Poly, it was the Sex Pistols, The Clash, The Damned and Johnny Thunders and The Heartbreakers and if you see photographs of the crowd I think about one in very four of them has got a camera on them, there were journalists there taking photographs of the crowd.

“I have mixed feelings about Andy being photographed beneath John Lydon because it said ‘This punk rock fan has a siver razorblade earring’ and that annoyed me because he bought that with the combined food money that me and Andy had, I thought that’s not fair.”

So many bands played in Leeds at the time – King remembers seeing Bob Marley and The Wailers at Leeds University as well as Bootsy Collins, Talking Heads and Jonathan Richman at the Polytechnic, “and of course, I saw them all for nothing because I blagged my way in,” he says. A thread through the book, he adds, is good fortune. “I feel incredible luck, the luck of being in Leeds at that time was phenomenal,” he says.

“You kind of make your own luck, which to some extent is true...but on the other hand, to be born in 1955 as a working-class boy in the only generation that ever saw any social mobility, it’s all gone back to what it was like before – I read only a few weeks ago that 40 per cent of all roles in the creative industries now are from people in private education, which is about six per cent of the population, it’s back to what it was in 1948. So the luck is geography, to be born in a place and a time when your accent didn’t stop you getting on.”

Many of the key themes in Gang of Four’s work from the late 1970s and early 1980s King still finds resonate with audiences today.

“In my lyrics, some of the things that I found quite funny, I don’t think I could necessarily find them funny at all, ‘there may be oil under Rockall’ (from the song Ether) to me was both comedic and sadly true,” he says. “I wish we weren’t going through the times we are now, I wish we weren’t all so anxious – and I count myself included in that, I hoped it would all go away. I think though that’s why people still want to listen to Entertainment! and they still want to listen to Solid Gold and Songs of the Free. I think that somehow that still has a truth to it.

“I was in America last week rehearsing with the band because Hugo now lives in Boston, Massachussetts and we’re going to play Entertainment! track by track and the second set will be the best of the rest and one of the songs on Entertainment! which we’ve almost never played (live) is Guns Before Butter and as we were (rehearsing) it I felt almost ill thinking why does this song sound like it could’ve been written now? I think it’s people still buy it or why musicians or people with some discrimination still listen to what we do, it’s not commercial music, but Guns Before Butter I was a bit taken aback by it, even though I wrote it.”

To Hell With Poverty!: A Class Act: Inside the Gang of Four by Jon King is out now in hardback, eBook and Audio (£25, Constable). Jon King appears in conversation at The Old Woollen, Leeds on April 13. https://www.facebook.com/gangoffour/?locale=en_GB