Post-punk legends Gang Of Four are set to tour the UK for the first time since founder member Andy Gill died in 2020. We caught up with singer Jon King on the eve of the tour, which starts on 30 September in Leeds.
This is your first UK Tour since putting the band back together in 2021. Do you have mixed feelings of excitement and trepidation?
We haven’t toured in England for maybe 12 years, it’s such a long time. I’m really looking forward to it. It’ll be the first time that England will have seen the current line-up too.
What sort of setlist do you have planned?
We will only be doing the old ’77 to ’84 Gang Of Four stuff, so Entertainment, Solid Gold and Songs Of The Free material. There won’t be anything from albums after that. It’s going to be a great set.
On 2nd October you play at the Boiler Shop in Newcastle. This will be your first headlining show in Newcastle in almost 40 years, when you played at the Mayfair. What do you recall about your time up here?
Newcastle is such a great city; I very nearly went to university there. People in Newcastle know how to have a really good time; they are legendary for their enthusiasm. When we played in Newcastle we had a great show and then had a lively aftershow party. It was really great fun and uplifting. My memory of Newcastle was having a great time and then a really miserable time the next day driving up to Edinburgh with a hangover. The Northumberland coast can be bleak in the driving rain with a hangover, but there’s probably no better place to be in the sunshine than the North Eastern coastline.
You performed on The Tube TV programme after that. How important was that as an outlet for live music at that time?
It was fantastic. It was what you could call ‘Zoo TV’. It was quite random and not rehearsed and I remember we were on just after Judas Priest, and I’d never seen Rob Halford singing before and I was amazed. I think The Tube was the only TV show where you could possibly have Judas Priest followed by Gang Of Four on the same bill. Jools Holland was a very charming man, and Andy became friends with Paula Yates through his friendship with Michael Hutchence. It was an amazing thing to have so far away from all that London rubbish. One of the reasons I value living up here in the North, is to be away from London. We only became whatever we became because we weren’t from London. It wouldn’t have worked if we weren’t from up North.
You reformed the band in 2021 after original guitarist Andy Gill’s passing. Why did you decide to do that?
I was producing and designing a box set of our early albums. I wanted to have a book in that set which contained my lyrics. Being the lazy person that I am, I thought I’d only have to go on lyrics.com and cut and paste them in and Bob’s yer uncle. Unfortunately it looked as though they’d been transcribed by an AI bot with a poor command of English, so many of them were wrong. I had to listen back to all of our songs, which is something as a musician I don’t really like doing. I wanted to give as much information as I could about where the lyrics came from, so I had a factoid for a song and a comment from someone who was around at the time, so [original drummer] Hugo Burnham became involved as he knows everybody. Hugo got in touch with people like Michael Stipe from R.E.M. and Henry Rollins for them to add a few comments and we got closer during this process. I spent a lot of time working on the box set, ensuring they were remastered from the original tapes at Abbey Road and cut them onto 180g vinyl including a never-before-released live album done by us in 1980. We also did all the singles and also our original C60 cassette with some of our original recordings. Elevator from that is a great song. Then when the box set came out, everyone was asking when we were going to play, and the first opportunity we had was in March 2022.
Had you thought about rejoining Gang Of Four when Andy was still here?
I’d harboured hopes – and I think he did too – of reconciling, but Andy died at the beginning of the Covid pandemic, so unfortunately it never happened. For a year after his death there was total disruption in the live music industry, so we, along with most other acts, hoped that it’d end before we went bankrupt.
Did you invite Dave Allen, your original bassist, to join too?
Dave decided that he didn’t want to do anything any more, so because of that we got in touch with Sara Lee, who was our bass player from the third album onwards – and she was actually in the band longer than Dave was. Her nickname in the band is ‘Ledge’ because when we play Rock ‘n’ Roll Top Trumps and say for example, “Who has been on Top of the Pops the most?”, it’s invariably Sara that trumps us all. She’s played with Robert Fripp of King Crimson, then she joined us, then she was with the B52’s and The Indigo Girls, and she even auditioned for Bob Dylan, but didn’t get that one. We are all very good friends in the band.
You are joined by new guitarist David Pajo, who himself has had a long career with the likes of Slint, Zwan, Yeah Yeah Yeahs and Interpol. How did David come to your attention?
Before we could do anything we needed to find a guitarist, and I was astounded that one of the greatest guitarists, David Pajo, was just so keen to join us. A mutual friend of Hugo and Pajo’s who worked in production said that David Pajo was the man. That person acted as an intermediary and Pajo was immediately on the phone saying that he wanted to do it, so we didn’t need to audition at all. Pajo has taken on the challenge of taking my lifelong friend and conspirator Andy’s place in the band, and has taken on that great legacy of Andy, not only embraced it but added to it. He’s so respectful to Andy’s work and really nailed getting it right.
What made you feel that he was right for Gang Of Four?
David is an extraordinary technical guitarist and very flexible and has played with everybody. He respects the way Andy played and is perfect for us.
The passing of Andy in 2020, who was ever present in the band right from the start, was a huge blow to the legacy of the band. Can you recall your first meeting?
I can’t remember the first time we met, as we were all in a big gang and we became friends from there, but I knew Andy from school. He was in the year below me and we met in the Art Department, although Andy wasn’t that arty, he was more of an academic, but it was quite a cool place to hang around. After school I had a year off and went to Leeds, then Andy came up and we had flats next door to each other. We became best friends then. When I got a research grant to go to New York in 1976, Andy came over and we would go to CBGB’s and we saw Talking Heads, Television, Ramones, The Dead Boys and The Voidoids in this tiny room. We came back and said we had to start a band just as punk was beginning. We were more like Dr Feelgood at the start, as they were my favourite band. Andy lifted his playing from Wilko Johnson, using that percussive way of playing with no effects. I didn’t really want to be a musician until we went to New York, as I wanted to be an artist.
What do you feel is your enduring legacy as a band?
When I was doing the box set, I thought what a shame it is that the things that I wrote about and cared about are still things that need to be written about and cared about today. What I really liked when we played shows last year was that a large proportion of the audience were in their 20s and didn’t see us the first time around. The songs we did didn’t sound like anybody else. We were quite stubborn in getting what we wanted, so I was adamant I didn’t want any effects such as reverb on there, and I think that’s why we have such a unique sound. We were always an outsider band and was never interested in the commercial side of it all. I was just interested in making great music that might change the world – although I failed dismally on that.
Talking of your box set, will you be selling any of them at your shows?
We haven’t got any left. They all sold out. We made about 5,000 vinyl sets and they sold out in a week in America, and another 1,500 CD box sets sold out too. The box set received great reviews and we were even nominated for a Grammy for it, but George Harrison’s 19CD box set won in the end. I couldn’t even go to the ceremony because of Covid, but it would have been fun to go.
What about the future? What do you have lined up in terms of new music and touring plans?
I’ve been resistant to new music for a while and I didn’t like Andy recording as Gang Of Four in his own right without me, but now that I’ve met Pajo and connected musically he’s coming over to my house to stay for a month to write, and we’ll see what happens. If it’s great then it’s something we’ll carry on. If it’s average then nothing will happen, but we will be working on new music and we’ll see how good it is.
- Gang Of Four play at the Boiler Shop in Newcastle on Monday 2nd October. Tickets for that gig and other shows in the UK tour are available HERE.
