Be Reasonable, Demand the Impossible
Jon King's To Hell With Poverty
By John Foster
1979 was a banner year for British records. But Gang of Four’s Entertainment! might top them all.
Joy Division’s Unknown Pleasures, The Fall’s Live at the Witch Trials, and Wire’s 154, to name some of the most obvious examples, are all excellent, true classics of the post-punk genre. But Entertainment! transcended it.
Made by university students from the Leeds scene, Entertainment! is truly mind-blowing.
Bassist Dave Allen and drummer Hugo Burnham produced pummeling, minimalist funk rhythms, while Andy Gill’s angular, dissonant guitar licks created a level of tension that was borderline unbearable.
Presiding over it all was vocalist Jon King. His approach to music shouldn’t have worked, but it did. Sometimes singing, sometimes speaking in a tense monotone, King delivered Situationism-infused critiques of consumerism, sexism, political oppression, and narcissism.
Good politics tend to inspire bad art, while good art is all too often alloyed with bad politics. Yet King and his bandmates somehow achieved an optimal combination of the two.
The release of Entertainment! was not the end of the story. King and Gill would produce six more records together before King exited their partnership in 2011 and Gill’s death from pneumonia in 2020. Their story is a long one, brilliant in places and tragic in others.
Until now, people seeking to understand the ins and outs of the band had two excellent resources: Kevin Dettmar’s Gang of Four’s Entertainment! (2014), and James Dooley’s exhaustive history of the band, Red Set: A History of the Gang of Four (2018).
Now there is a third: Jon King’s passionate, beautiful, and tragic To Hell With Poverty – A Class Act: Inside the Gang of Four. Where Dooley provides history in a professional, narrative form, King allows his readers to experience the textures of life in postwar Britain through the story of one of its most important bands.
Jon King was born on 8 June 1955 in London. He grew up in the Kentish sprawl, a lower-middle-class kid in a time of profound cultural change in Britain. Although not old enough to experience the full flowering of the counterculture personally, the 1960s and early 1970s shaped his political sensibilities.
King was precociously bright, managing to secure entry into Sevenoaks, a public school—what Americans call a “private” school—with a reputation for fostering creativity and critical thinking.
There, he met Andy Gill, who was a year behind him. Gill was gregarious and social, while King was bright and bookish. Together, they would create a partnership that would be much greater than the sum of its parts.
King's early interests extended beyond music, strongly drawn to the visual arts, film, and literature.
It was almost certain that King would end up studying art. As Simon Frith and Howard Horne explain in their excellent book Art Into Pop (1987), that educational track provided support to a virtual who’s who of figures in Britain’s postwar music scene, including contemporaries of King like Mick Jones, Joe Strummer, Howard Devoto, Pete Shelley, Colin Newman, and Ian Dury.
At Leeds University, which had one of the most advanced and radical art programs in the UK, King was exposed to critical theory, especially the Marxist and Situationist ideas that would become central to his later creative work.
Andy Gill joined him there a year later. The two bonded over their shared frustration with the perceived complacency of popular music and their fascination with avant-garde art and thought. They were particularly influenced by thinkers such as Guy Debord and the aesthetics of Dada and punk.
In 1976, King and Gill spent a month in New York. Rather than studying art—King had received a grant to study the work of Jasper Johns—they frequented CBGBs and chatted with many of the major figures of the burgeoning punk scene. They soon decided to form a band of their own, which would enable them to integrate political critique into popular cultural forms.
After returning to England, the duo recruited Allen (bass) and Burnham (drums), both students at Leeds Polytechnic. They began developing a distinctive sound that combined sharp, angular guitar riffs with stripped-down, danceable rhythms and politically charged lyrics.
Before their first official recording, Gang of Four honed their material on the live circuit in Leeds and London, gradually building a reputation for intense, confrontational performances.
Many histories of the British underground scene in the 1970s focus on London or Manchester, and rightly so. Both cities had vibrant music scenes. Manchester gave the world the likes of the Buzzcocks, Joy Division, the Fall, and Durutti Column, while London produced the Sex Pistols, the Clash, the Slits, Siouxsie and the Banshees, the Damned, and a host of others.
One of the key elements of King’s narrative is the scene that arose in Leeds, comprising the Gang of Four, as well as the Mekons and Delta 5. Although stylistically very different, they composed part of a coherent artistic community in which creativity blended with radical politics.
The first two-thirds of To Hell With Poverty take the story up to the release of Entertainment!. King’s treatment of the later period (and he really only goes through the release of Hard in 1983) is less detailed. In part, this is due to the increasing fragmentation of the band. Allen quit in 1981 before going on to found Shriekback. Burnham was fired in 1983 (at the insistence of management).
The underlying narrative of the latter part of the book is King’s increasing creative and personal differences with Andy Gill, sadly unreconciled at the time of Gill’s death. It’s a wound that won’t heal.
King’s book is a pleasure to read. Where Dooley’s Red Set is linear and often slightly dry, King’s writing is powerful, impressionistic, and emotionally engaged. His self-deprecating tone is a welcome relief from the self-aggrandisement all too common in the autobiographies of artists.
King also has a genuine sensitivity to the changes he has lived through. Often, he inserts details about the buildings where things took place, what happened to them, and what now stands in their place. This adds immeasurably to the texture of his story.
But the most decisive thing that King conveys is the way that art and politics can function together. One struggles to think of another lyricist who could explore the implications of thinkers like Guy Debord or Jean-François Lyotard in a way that makes for compelling art.
This would have been a bridge too far for practically anyone else. But the motto of the Gang of Four could have been drawn from the Situationists of 1968: be reasonable, demand the impossible.
To Hell With Poverty is the story of a band struggling with that contradiction. If the end of the story is overshadowed by tragedy, the artefacts of that journey are works of art that continue to inspire.
Photograph courtesy of Guido van Nispen. Published under a Creative Commons license.