GANG OF FOUR
Andy Gill left us last February 1, an early victim of Covid. Now a star-packed tribute album honours his life’s work, as his partner Catherine Mayer and devotee Gary Numan explain.
“This album was his utter obsession.” CATHERINE MAYER
BEFORE HIS passing on February 1, 2020, Gang Of Four’s Andy Gill had been working on a 40-year celebration of the band’s 1979 post-punk masterpiece
Entertainment! He’d made a list of artists to cover its tracks and was fielding finished music when he was admitted to hospital on January 18 with suspected pneumonia.
“This album was his utter obsession,” says Catherine Mayer, Gill’s wife for 30 years, and an author and women’s campaigner. “He literally delayed his ambulance, for me to go back inside and get his laptop so he could keep doing stuff in his hospital bed. Then he kept sending me home to find hard drives and noise-cancelling headphones, so he could listen through to mixes as they came.”
By the time of his hospitalisation, the project had evolved into a career-traversing tribute to the Leeds-founded ensemble, who injected funk and political radicalism into punk’s furious mix. “One of the last things Andy did,” says Catherine, “was listen to the Robert Del Naja [AKA Massive Attack’s 3D] remix of Where The Nightingale Sings, which Andy absolutely loved – and Flea and John Frusciante’s wonderfully bonkers version of Not Great Men with the children’s choir, which also came in that day.”
As Mayer has detailed in Good Grief: Embracing Life At A Time Of Death, her recent book about losing both her husband and stepfather within 10 days of each other, Gill entered hospital with symptoms of a treatable form of pneumonia. After he was put into an induced coma, he died five days later. As the UK government didn’t acknowledge
coronavirus had reached the country this early, Mayer herself conducted a track and trace among friends and relatives, which turned up numerous positive tests (including Go4’s tour manager), leading to the deduction that Gill died of Covid.
After that harrowing process, the completion of the project has been therapeutic, if necessarily bittersweet. Entitled The Problem Of Leisure: A Celebration Of Andy Gill
And Gang Of Four, and due in May, the album’s list of contributors includes post-millennial disciples (LoneLady, Idles) and international stars (Germany’s Herbert Grönemeyer, Japan’s Hotei) through to post-punk peers Killing Joke and Gary Numan.
Reveals Numan, “Andy said I could do whatever I wanted, but I chose Anthrax [off Entertainment!] because it was the song I thought I had half a chance of doing justice to. I’d sung it once before with Nine Inch Nails in Los Angeles, when I was reminded just how different it was.”
A version of Entertainment! track Natural’s Not In It by Rage Against The Machine guitarist Tom Morello and System Of A Down’s Serj Tankian will appear on January 1 (Gill’s 65th birthday). Mayer hopes that these musical tributes will help secure Gill’s legacy.
“I don’t think he had any idea how many people were actually inspired by him,” she says. “Andy had a lot of confidence in his vision, but he was never at all confident about himself as a public figure. I think he would have been utterly astonished by the outpouring, and I wish he had seen it.”