That Essence Rare
Gang Of Four’s inspirationally clanging guitarist Andy Gill made his exit on February 1.
FIRED UP by punk’s two transatlantic variants, as well as the Situationists, Jean-Luc Godard and Italian Communist theorist Antonio Gramsci, the 20-year-old Andy Gill knew he wanted to get involved in the emerging musical consciousness of 1976-77, but there was one problem: he couldn’t decide whether to be a guitarist or a drummer.
With hindsight, one could almost say Gill became both, as he soon attacked his electric six-string with a ferocious sense of rhythm, inventing a new post-punk language for rock guitar, most aptly described as “jagged”, its mechanistic spasms straining free of first-wave punk’s ties with the blues.
On Gang Of Four’s landmark debut from 1979, Entertainment!, Gill’s clear antecedent was Dr. Feelgood’s
Wilko Johnson, whose wiry clawhammer twang he corrupted with funkateer scratching, and the spatial insight of dub reggae.
Andrew James Dalrymple Gill was born in Manchester on January
1, 1956. By the time punk’s summer-of-’76 eruption in London filtered north, he’d already buddied up with future Gang Of Four singer/ ideologue Jon King after the pair met at Sevenoaks School, where they also hung around the art room with the embryonic Mekons. After their whole crew decamped en masse to study Fine Arts at Leeds University, King and Gill ran the film society, and, on a grant to visit New York’s galleries, experienced the CBGB’s scene first hand. Keenly politicised, the band they formed on returning was named (reputedly by Mekon Andy Corrigan, possibly in jest) after the Maoist leadership cabal that ruled early ’70s China.
Though initially positing themselves as “fast rivvum and blues”, Gang Of Four locked tight around bassist Dave Allen and drummer Hugo Burnham, with Gill as, almost, the rhythm section’s third member, leading them into a taut, twisted agit-punk. His fragmented riffs mirrored lyrics about marital disharmony, social alienation and political crisis – too serious for pop consumption. Invited onto Top Of The Pops in June 1979 to perform second single At Home He’s A Tourist, they declined, refusing to change a lyric about ‘rubbers’ to ‘rubbish’.
The ensuing Solid Gold album wasn’t so catchy, and after Allen and Burnham quit, subsequent efforts at disco-fied commercialism foundered, and the band dissolved in ’84. Gill, however, endured as a key post-punk influence, first on UK bands including Delta 5 and The Au Pairs, then in America on such underground groups as Minutemen and Fugazi, as well as more high-profile icons Kurt Cobain, Michael Stipe and Red Hot Chili Peppers, who hired him to produce their 1984 debut.
Gill first reconvened Gang Of Four with King in the early-’90s, then in the mid-2000s, as another wave of disciples led by Franz Ferdinand dropped his name. He was reportedly suffering from respiratory problems while touring America last November, the sole founding member of a new Gang Of Four line-up. His passing, aged 64, robbed British music of one of its genuine originals.
“He invented a new post-punk language for rock guitar.”