Influential guitarist whose dissonant, post-punk sound won a cult following

A‘‘Jagged-plaguedisco-raptorattack-industrialfunk deconstructed guitar anti-hero sonics.’’ Tom Morello of Rage Against the Machine describes Gill’s playing

s a guitar hero, Andy Gill, who has died of pneumonia aged 64, was determined to break the mould. With his band Gang of Four he created a slashing, dissonant, bristling sound that fused the aesthetics of punk with avant-garde theories of situationism and structuralism.

Punk had ‘‘kicked the doors down’’, but Gill set out to take its legacy elsewhere. ‘‘Every part of it had to be radical,’’ he said. ‘‘It was building musical tension in a precise way.’’

Angular yet propulsive, the sound came to be known as post-punk, and the group’s 1979 debut, Entertainment!, won Gang of Four a cult following. When they had finished recording the album Gill told his bandmates: ‘‘We are rewriting the rules. Do you realise this is going to change the musical landscape?’’

It was not so much a boast as a statement of fact, and the group was subsequently namechecked as a seminal influence by REM, Nirvana, U2 and Red Hot Chili Peppers, among others. The band’s song Natural’s Not in It features in Sofia Coppola’s 2006 historical drama Marie Antoinette.

Quite how to describe Gill’s unique style of playing and the fierce intelligence that informed it often defeated critics. Michael Hutchence, whose recordings Gill produced, said it was music that ‘‘took no prisoners’’, in which ‘‘art meets the devil via James Brown’’. Tom Morello of Rage Against the Machine described it as ‘‘jagged-plague-disco-raptorattack-industrial-funk deconstructed guitar anti-hero sonics’’.

Gill had a simpler explanation. ‘‘I’m a bit of an awkward bastard,’’ he said. ‘‘I think that’s why Gang of Four has a specific identity and musical language.’’

The group were associated in their early days with the Rock Against Racism movement, were described and by their U2’s sociopolitical Bono as ‘‘a smart lyrics bomb of text’’. Not everyone approved. When they were invited to perform the scathing single At Home He’s a Tourist on Top of the Pops, BBC producers demanded that the group changed the words ‘‘the rubbers you hide in your top left pocket’’. They refused and the appearance was cancelled. The ironic I Love a Man in a Uniform was banned from BBC playlists during the Falklands conflict.

Gill ensured that the band’s songs were provocative until the end. Where the Nightingale Sings, recorded before the 2016 referendum, was an anti-Brexit song before Brexit. ‘‘It’s about people imagining a golden age where they are all racially similar and hold the same views,’’ he explained.

Their final album, released last year, contained Alpha Male, a song full of digs at Donald Trump who, Gill said, was ‘‘providing so much entertainment it would be foolish, it would be rude, not to take note’’.

Andrew James Dalrymple Gill was born in 1956 in Manchester, where his parents, Sylvia and Stanley Gill had met as university students. His father’s work as a civil engineer resulted in the family moving south in the early 1960s, first to the suburbs of Bexley and then to the leafy environs of Sevenoaks, Kent. His parents separated when he was 11 and he was brought up by his mother.

After winning a direct grant scholarship to Sevenoaks School, he came under the influence of an inspirational and unconventional art teacher named Bob White, whose department became an extracurricular sanctuary for Gill and Jon King, with whom he would later form Gang of Four.

Other contemporaries who found creative inspiration in White’s fertile art department included three future members of the band the Mekons; Paul Greengrass, who directed the Bourne films starring Matt Damon, and the Bafta-winning documentary-maker Adam Curtis.

When Gill was 13 a cousin showed him how to play the Rolling Stones’ (I Can’t Get No) Satisfaction, and he was hooked, building his own guitar and speaker cabinets from parts he bought by mail order.

At 16 Gill and King formed their first band, the Bourgeois Brothers, causing consternation when they performed a reggae version of the hymn Jerusalem in a school assembly. Gill turned down a place at Cambridge to study art at the University of Leeds, where King was enrolled, and in the summer of 1976 both were awarded grants to study overseas. They spent the windfall on a trip to New York, hanging out at the club CBGBs, where they were entranced by the city’s burgeoning punk scene and acts such as the Ramones, Television and Patti Smith.

On their return to Leeds the pair recruited their fellow students Dave Allen on bass and Hugo Burnham on drums, and formed Gang of Four, adopting the name in mockery of the Communist Party leaders who ruled China during the Cultural Revolution.

The group broke up in 1983, although Gill re-formed the band four years later. King, Allen and Burnham all rejoined at various times, but Gill remained the only constant in the line-up, adding new bandmates as required.

Gill, a noted wine connoisseur, is survived by his wife, Catherine Mayer, an Americanborn journalist who in 2015 co-founded the Women’s Equality Party and who stood as a candidate for London in the 2019 European parliament elections. They married in 1999 and lived in Holborn, central London.

He played his final concerts with Gang of Four on tour in the US three months ago. He was already suffering with a respiratory illness. It was, his bandmates said in a statement, ‘‘the only way he was ever really going to bow out, with a Stratocaster around his neck, screaming with feedback and deafening the front row’’.