Named after the famed leaders of the Chinese Cultural Revolution, Gang Of Four formed in Leeds in March/April 1977. School friends Jon King and Andy Gill had moved to this northern industrial city to study fine art at the university. There they met their first drummer, Hugo Burnham, who, like the core members of Gang Of Four, was a Southern boy. "We were all from Kent, way down in the south of England," says Burnham. "None of us were natives. The art departments in the art school and the university and the polytechnic were all big and vibrant, and there was a busy gay scene. When I got to Leeds, the alternative was there: people wore straight-leg trousers, had short haircuts, danced with or without women, listened to a lot of reggae, and drank like fish. It was a very exciting time." "When I went to Leeds I was into post-Expressionist American artists like Frank Stella," says Gill. "While I was there, I got into Impressionism. The Impressionist period had many parallels with now: Manet was using formulae and iconography from a tradition, but he put it together in a way that was uncomfortable. Tim Clark was then the professor of art. He had been involved with the Situationist International. We talked about the way a work of art works in its context, with its public, the way it has to find its market place." "It was a tough time of rising unemployment and poverty," says Burnham. "The National Front and the British Movement [nationalist, fascist parties with skinhead street gangs] were everywhere then. There were beer-glass fights and skirmishes with the police on horseback when we marched against the Front. Jon King got whacked across the head by a mounted policeman." "There was a lot of fighting," Gill agrees. "I remember pitched battles with the BM. At one point a large number of BM got into a bar we drank in. There was glass and chairs flying everywhere. A friend got his skull smashed with a metal traffic barrier. The violence was terrible." "The main places to hang out in Leeds were Terry's All Night Cafe, which specialized in chip butties [soggy french fries in a hamburger bun] and the Heaven And Hell Club, which specialized in lager and fights," Burnham adds. "There was the International Club in Chapeltown, which played good black music. There was a guy called John Keenan, who used to put on gigs like the 'F' Club, which moved around different venues. There was one band called SOS that was doing punk stuff, but that was about it before Gang Of Four did its first gig in May 1977. That was in the basement of the Leeds Corn Exchange." The bass player on the first two albums was Dave Allen, the only working-class member of the band. "I was brought up in Kendal in the north of England," says Allen. "It's a small town of about 20,000 people and one record shop. I got very fired up by listening to John Peel at night -- he was playing a lot of reggae, which inspired me as a musician. Then, when he progressed to playing what later became known as punk rock, I went looking for like-minded musicians to form a band. Leeds was the nearest big city to Kendal. I saw an ad in the student union: 'Fast rivvum & blues band requires a fast rivvum & blues bass player.' That spelling of rhythm was like a code, so I knew I was on the right track." "On the earlier stuff, the lyrics were collaborative," says Gill. "Sometimes Jon wrote the whole thing, sometimes it was 50/50. Sometimes I wrote it all. The ultimate ratio was 70 percent/30 percent between Jon and myself. We were constantly talking about what we were doing with the music and the words; they weren't the standard rock 'n' roll lyrics." Late in 1977 Gang Of Four recorded some demos, including "Love Not Lust" -- an early version of "Damaged Goods." With friend and sound man Rob Warr on board as their first manager, they sent a tape to Bob Last, whose Fast Product, based in Edinburgh, had just released its first record, the Mekons' sterling "Never Been In A Riot." "We were miffed about that," says Gill. "We'd started before them and lent them our equipment. The Mekons said, 'We keep telling him he's got the wrong band; he should be releasing Gang Of Four, but he won't listen.' But he put out the Mekons' thing, and quite a while afterwards he turned to us." Released in 1978, the Damaged Goods EP had a huge impact in the U.K. With its deconstructionist cover -- a clipping from the mass-media picturing a bullfighter, overlaid with the group's caption "You know we're both in the entertainment business" -- it arrived as a fully fledged manifesto, a way forward for a postpunk scene marred by cynicism, mystification, and drug abuse. With its punning refrain "the change will do you good," "Damaged Goods" was Gang Of Four's first keynote song, a cautionary tale of how oppressive power relations -- like unemployment: "I can't work/I can't achieve" -- spill over into and infect those areas of life typically considered private and apolitical. As people become objects, love is not a refuge from capitalism, but an extension of it: "Sometimes I'm thinking that I love you/But I know it's only lust." This theme was developed on another great coup, "Anthrax," which introduced a Gang Of Four trademark: two or three voices singing against each other, often in careful counterpoint -- a trick first used by The Velvet Underground on 1969's "Murder Mystery." Here, the song's tune and mood -- "Woke up this morning desperation a.m." -- is carried by King on one channel and Gill on another, delivering a nonstop, monotone rant about studio equipment and why pop groups sing about love. The song ends with the kiss-off "I don't think we're saying there's anything wrong with love/We just don't think that what goes on between two people should be shrouded in mystery." "How we used [the vocal technique] depended on the song," says Gill today. "Sometimes it was like a narrator slips in and passes comment. Sometimes, in a song like 'Damaged Goods,' Jon sings the bulk of the song, and I do the middle part, and that becomes the chorus. It gave us the opportunity to put a different slant on the subject matter -- we could both summarize and look at it from a different angle. We used this device on several songs. On 'It's Her Factory,' Hugo got his moment to vocalize his own lyrics and get off the drum kit." This collaborative/competitive vocal style was an aural example of how Gang Of Four worked. "You could not have found four more different people," says Burnham. "And although we all got on very well, we fought viciously at times. That's part of what made it so brilliant. We'd talk and argue all the time, in the van, in the pub." Like the vocal delivery, the music was similarly thought out. "What is special about Gang Of Four is that they're funky," says Gill. "Most of those bands weren't. It's not that we consciously sat down and listened to James Brown; it was really a much deeper assimilation. The musical form Jon and I loved above all was dub reggae, which is all about space and things disappearing and coming back. Dance music today knows all about that. Something's there and then it isn't. We were trying to achieve that in a rock context. "Although I used feedback, I was using Solid State amplifiers and the distortion was reined in. We'd had years of listening to reggae. We didn't want to do reggae -- we wanted to do loud guitars, but as a rhythm, like building blocks of riffs. I wanted a harsh, angular, clipped approach to take it away from clichéd rock posturing. That seemed like too easy an option; I wanted to avoid those signifiers." The success of Damaged Goods not only concentrated attention on Gang Of Four, but also the whole of northern England, which came further under the press microscope. In their wake, there was exposure for Fast Product and such associated groups as the Mekons, whose second single, "Where Were You," was an independent smash. This was the period when the independent sector really began to take off in the U.K. If the majors were still obsessed by punk or new wave, true independents like Fast Product, Factory Records, and Rough Trade Records -- however much they may have squabbled amongst themselves -- offered an often stark, rigorous angularity with a hefty boost of sex and gender politics in such groups as Kleenex, and Gang Of Four associates The Au Pairs, Delta 5, and The Raincoats. In 1979 Gang Of Four signed to EMI. "It was like a production deal," says Gill. "They gave us the money, we gave them the tapes. We had total control over the packaging and the production of the records. From the beginning, we picked EMI as being a perfect label for us to be on: one of the biggest industrial conglomerates in the U.K. -- a huge multinational, trading in everything from arms to entertainment. If we'd been on Rough Trade, it would have been a far less potent juxtaposition." During 1979 Gang Of Four toured constantly, building up a ferocious live reputation. But it was not all smooth sailing. Released in the spring of that year, their first single for EMI, "At Home He's A Tourist," was their definitive summary of alienation in the private sphere. Due to the group's strong fan base, the single began to rise up the chart, and Gang Of Four were scheduled to appear on the U.K.'s principal music TV show, Top Of The Pops. The combination of the song's lyrics -- "Down on the disco floor/They make their profit/From the things they sell/To help you cob off/And the rubbers you hide/In your top left pocket" -- and the herd of teenagers corralled on the dance floor made for a potentially neat Trojan horse maneuver. "They objected to the word rubbers," sighs Gill. "Ironic. Now you'd get a medal. They said, 'This is a family show; we can't have you saying rubbers.' So we had a big powwow, and we thought we'd give it a go, and we changed it to "packets," went back into the studio and dropped in the word, and went back and they said, 'Oh no, we want you to change it to "rubbish" so it sounds the same -- so it's not obvious that we've censored you." But it doesn't have the same meaning. So we refused, with minutes to go. So we didn't do it. I think it was Dire Straits that went on instead. It might have been the beginning of Dire Straits' career." The single stalled in the U.K., and Gang Of Four's first crossover moment had passed. Next up was their first album, Entertainment!, a perfect introductory statement. Even the bright, primary-colored sleeve works as a manifesto, with its acid, graphically-led comments about the nature of the entertainment industry: "The Indian smiles, he thinks that the cowboy is his friend. The cowboy smiles, he is glad the Indian is fooled. Now he can exploit him." According to Gill, "Jon found it in a Belgian TV guide, that image, from a Western." Gang Of Four's tough, terse, kinetic rock set up a grid over which they could patch in a variety of voices and viewpoints. "A song like ' Natural's Not In It' is one very simple riff," says Gill. "Just a three-note melody. Occasionally the drums stop and occasionally the guitars stop, and then they come in again. Over that, there's one stream of consciousness." This consciousness was embodied in the figure of Jon King, who could enact the classic Gang Of Four tension -- between the intellect and the emotions, between an analysis of their situation and their failure, even thus armed, to transcend it. On a song like "Natural's Not It," King can articulate what's going on -- "A market of the senses/Dream of the perfect life" -- yet he remains as helpless as that beetle on its back: "This heaven gives me migraine." On "Return The Gift" the scenario is the anonymous sales pitch: the tantalizing world of color supplement shopping ("Go to Scotland no obligation"). King sends off, gets his free gift, but doesn't find that anything has changed: the space between him and the rest of the world, which this consumer impulse was meant to fill, returns ever wider, mocked by petty luxury. There are few more plaintive cries in rock than the song's coda: "Please send me evenings and weekends," interpersonal relationships reduced to a giveaway offer. At points Jon King might have seemed above it all, but he always revealed the emotion behind the analysis: this is not only how it is, but also how it feels. His vulnerability not only subverts rock machismo, but it also gives extra force to the group's empathy with life's losers, suckers, and patsies. Gang Of Four toured America constantly during 1980-81, with two major outings a year. "We were an enormous critical hit," says Burnham. "I love listening to the live stuff -- it's the truest form of what we were doing. One show in particular was the high point emotionally for me: when we played the Geary Temple in San Francisco during that first 1979 tour, supporting The Buzzcocks. It was the hottest night in the city for about 20 years. The place had a 1,600 capacity, but there were well over 2,000 people in there. It was cripplingly hot and crammed. Expectations were running high. Robert Fripp talks about those moments when you are so transported beyond yourself that you stop thinking about what you're playing, and then anything you play becomes seamless, perfect, almost orgasmic -- and we hit that as a band that night. People still come up to me and talk about how that show changed their lives." Three cuts here are taken from one such early U.S. show, at The North American Indian Center in San Francisco in 1980. Along with a wild version of "Anthrax" -- with Gill allowing himself to cut loose on guitar -- their set featured "Contract," an early live staple from Entertainment!, and their then-latest U.K. single, "He'd Send In The Army," a fresh disquisition on militarism and fascism. "That's a great live version with the different voices," says Gill of "He'd Send In The Army." "Jon and Dave and I all played a different part, with a cacophony of voices throwing in different points of view. It really was the closest we came to pure theater. It starts with Jon just slowly hitting a big metal object with a metal pole; I think originally it was an old fridge or something. He was the metronome. Sometimes in the song it was just Jon hitting this thing and me on the guitar making scratchy sounds. Then all the instruments would pile in together. Audiences were open-mouthed -- nobody had seen or heard anything like it. Later on, R.E.M. did a version of it in their set." With their initial statement out of the way, the group were free to explore further depths and complexities on their second album, Solid Gold, recorded with American producer Jimmy Douglass in January 1981 at EMI's Abbey Road studios. "It was a more pleasurable experience to record," says Burnham. "Jimmy had produced the Slave albums --they were a really good, heavy funk band -- and he acted as a welcome referee." Solid Gold has a deeper, funkier sound than Gang Of Four's previous work. In a contemporary interview, Jon King called the album "a more danceable record. The songs have more feeling in them. I think it was a reasonable criticism that we've been too dry before." This did not weaken the group's polemic, but deepened it. If Entertainment! presents you with a series of problems, then Solid Gold confronts you with the emotions that lie behind the statistics. Both albums offer a valuable psycho-social record of the swing to the New Right that occurred in both Britain and the U.S. at the turn of the decade. Nowhere was this swing epitomized better than in the bleak, deadpan mesmerism of their greatest song, "Paralysed." As you listen to Andy Gill intoning internalized social Darwinist manifestoes, you pick up on the reasons for the New Right's upsurge: "Every man is for himself; wealth is for the one that wants it; paradise -- if you can earn it." He knows that he's "the dupe," that he's "blinkered, paralyzed," but he has reached such a pitch of desperation that he has no choice but to parrot these destructive clichés: "My ambitions come to nothing; what I wanted now seems just a waste of time; I can't make out what has gone wrong; I was good at what I did." Thus the individual crisis is seen as part of a wider pattern of international power relations: "History is the reason/I'm washed up."

The group went for the jugular with the Another Day/Another Dollar EP. On "Capital (It Fails Us Now)" and "To Hell With Poverty" the nightmare has already occurred: "In this land right now some are insane, but they're in charge." "Capital" lays it out: "From the moment I was born/I opened my eyes/I reached out for my credit card." For the duration of the song, Gill struggles, not against the whole concept of debt, but to stay afloat in this new condition of life: "Surrounded by luxury goods . . . I'm still in credit -- just!" he mumbles to himself, as though he still can't believe it.

Understanding better than anyone the contradictions of their position, Gang Of Four had no choice but to plow through them: analyzing the lies of entertainment at the same time that they worked within the entertainment industry; analyzing the commodification of their lives at the same time that they commodified themselves. These incongruities were always at the center of their work; in a sense, they fueled it.

In 1981, after a grueling series of tours, Dave Allen left the group. "My decision to leave was based on being utterly lost, personally and in relation to the group. I found that I couldn't commit to the group, because I was not sure about what I wanted as an individual."

"Dave was the first to crack," says Burnham. "And I'm not being unkind. You know what rock groups are like. We weren't an exception. We went for it -- drugs, drink, you name it." Although Allen was quickly replaced, first by ex-Talking Head player Busta Jones and subsequently by another Leeds music scene alumnus, Sara Lee, whom they had first met when she was working with Robert Fripp's League Of Gentlemen, Gang Of Four faced a changed musical climate in their home country. The mood in the U.K. had moved toward pop rather than rock, and new romantic bands were topping the charts.

Despite this, the group hit the moment with their first single from Songs Of The Free. "I Love A Man In A Uniform" was a subversive, dance-rock masterpiece, a club smash that crossed over to the gay scene, and the wittiest and most succinct of their definitive critiques of male emotional impotence and militarism. With its echoed hand-claps, sassy femme backup, and nagging bass, "Uniform" fit in perfectly with the New York electro of the period, it sounded great next to Peech Boys and Grandmaster Flash when I used to play it at Manchester's Hacienda club during its first year.

Then there was the thrill of its minatory lyrics, which took on extra resonance when Britain went to war with Argentina upon the single's release in the spring of 1982. "It got banned because of the war," says Gill. "BBC Radio One had started playing it until the Falklands hit, and then a memo was sent 'round to the DJs, telling them not to play it." In the face of a cowed media, pop was one of the few places where you could get the other side of the story -- that many people in the U.K. did not approve of this war and were, in fact, torn apart by it. With its circular epigrams ("To have ambition was my ambition"), "I Love A Man In A Uniform" gave voice to feelings that were otherwise denied, and, with its insistent rhythms, gave the listener the impulse to dance them out.

"When I was in my mother's womb," Gill and King sing on "The History Of The World," "social structure seemed a simple thing." Songs Of The Free refines even further the group's internal dialogue: between stating what was going on -- i.e., political reaction and consumer bondage -- changing the ways in which we think ("we have the chance to include ourselves out"), and all in the transcendence of hypnotic dance textures. The latter also permeates "I Will Be A Good Boy," with its bitter wish: "I want to be everything a man should be." And finally, in "Of The Instant," they spit it out: "Who owns what you do?/Who owns what you use?"

Despite "Uniform's" success, Songs Of The Free followed the by-now-familiar Gang Of Four pattern. The group was still playing big concerts, including 1982's US Festival, in which they performed in front of more than 200,000 people. And for a long while they could do no wrong. But they still couldn't break through their level of record sales. And then there was the schism of April 1983: "Jon and Andy kicked me out," Burnham says. "It became about their comfort as a duopoly rather than a triumvirate. They just said they didn't want to argue anymore. I had been the band's manager for 18 months. I had the daily grind of dealing with agents, roadies, promoters, lawyers, accountants, van-hire companies, and so on. They decided, not totally unreasonably, that they were now the sole writers rather than the way it had been working, which was that everyone should be credited equally. As a music publisher now, I think that should be a focus of real discussion for almost every new rock band."

"Parting company with Hugo was not a satisfactory solution to the situation," says Gill. "The real problem had been that the band had never had good management up to that point, apart from our first manager, Rob Warr. There was a structural imbalance in the group due to the fact that Jon and I did almost all the writing, despite the fact that we credited the first album four ways. Hugo taking on the administrative role had only partly resolved the tensions within the group concerning writers, nonwriters, decision making, and so on."

After Burnham's departure, Gang Of Four prepared Hard, a collection that belied its name with lush production values. More and more in the band's later records -- Hard and particularly Mall and Shrinkwrapped -- scenarios are played out against a familiar backdrop: the urban landscape of motels and malls, the interiors of cars, in apartments and hotel rooms with the television always on -- perhaps tuned into the porn channel, probably with the sound off. An early mapping of that topography occurs on Hard's "Woman Town," in which, inspired by two European films -- Fellini's City Of Women and Godard's Alphaville -- sexual attraction is juxtaposed with the strange, arbitrary nature of sexism. Andy Gill voices the character of the narrator, a stranger to whom everything is familiar. Against a rhythm reminiscent of that of Marvin Gaye's "Sexual Healing," industrial-(de)tuned guitar reinforces the ten-minutes-into-the-future ambience. Hard builds to its sarcastic climax with Jon King singing "A Man With A Good Car." As the man sits behind the wheel, he "needs no justification/Fate is in my hands and in the transmission." The car becomes the great modern symbol of machismo empowerment.

Hard, however, marked not a new beginning but the first end of the group, which split up later in 1984. Says Gill now: "The album got a mixed reception. Some fans were pissed off that there were some songs that weren't as raw and angular as before; it can be difficult to step outside the role which you've been designated. Gang Of Four had been our only life up to that point, all that we'd done. We were keen to explore other ways of making a living. I came out of the group and produced the Red Hot Chili Peppers. I was busy with solo work and producing until Gang Of Four reemerged in 1991, three years after Jon and I got back together again. We'd both gone off and done other things, so Gang Of Four wasn't the only life that we knew. The musical environment had changed in the U.S., and we were continually being asked to do another Gang Of Four record. In 1988 we got excited about doing a record again."

Mall instantly has that recognizable Gang Of Four sound, but the beat was by this time coming from a mix of drums and programmed electronic hits and loops. Time had not dimmed the force of the group's original approach or removed the reasons for their lyrical urgency. "Everybody Wants To Come" and "Motel" navigate the murky waters of voyeurism and sexual coercion, while "F.M.U.S.A." -- an acronym for Fuck Me U.S.A., the slogan the prostitutes of Saigon wrote in lipstick across their almost-naked buttocks -- looks at another side of the Vietnam War. American culture often depicts Vietnam as a jungle war between heroic white Americans and anonymous Vietcong flitting across gun sights; instead Gill and King focus on the sexual-financial transaction between two of the main players in the Vietnam war -- the black GI and the Vietnamese woman. Exploited within their respective societies, they exploit each other in the violent, dislocated world in which they find themselves. Gail Ann Dorsey, who later became David Bowie's onstage sidekick, played bass on most of Mall, and then the group took the album on the road on the fairly hefty but interesting U.S. tour with Public Enemy and Sisters Of Mercy during the summer of '91.

Toward the end of the U.S. tours promoting Mall, Gill and King were offered the soundtrack for an intriguing film by writer/director Peter Hall about an adolescent boy who murders his abusive father and gets away with it. At some point in the process of recording the soundtrack, it became clear that what they were working on was, in fact, an album in the making. Namely, Shrinkwrapped. "It remains one of my favorite Gang Of Four records, along with Entertainment! and Solid Gold," says Gill. "This time, through bitter experience, we didn't let things through when we weren't entirely sure about them. We went over stuff again and again. We did a lot of it by fax. Jon would send some lyrics and I'd annotate them, line by line, what was good and what wasn't. We were really going to take the record to task, and I think that shows."

Released in 1995, Shrinkwrapped contains nuggets like the hardcore rocker "Better Him Than Me," the robotic, narcissistic fantasy "I Parade Myself" (included here in a new, edgy Alan Moulder club mix), and the twinned "Unburden" and "Unburden Unbound."

As Andy Gill explains, "'Unburden' is me as a man in a motel room phoning a sex line and not quite knowing what he's doing. He wants to talk to someone, and then there's confusion between him and the woman he's talking to. Masturbation is a secondary issue [laughs] but the sex worker can only go into her usual schtick, and the end result is a brick wall between them. In the second song, Jon and I are talking about what we're doing with that scenario. I think Jon and I always knew that our main strength as GOF was the way everything we did emerged as the result of a dialogue between us, and on both Mall and Shrinkwrapped that recognition took a more concrete expression in songs like 'Unburden Unbound.' We realized as the record took shape that there were various threads emerging: onanism as a metonym for psycho-sexual dysfunctionality; people growing ever more dependent on therapy and the parallel public aspect of that Jerry Springer-style public therapy -- that bizarre, comic, emotional display on TV."

A Shrinkwrapped centerpiece like "Tattoo," featured here in a hallucinogenic remix by Paul Schroeder, continues as though Gang Of Four had never been away, with its chilling lyric refrains: "You don't know who I am/You don't know where I come from." King's powerful, threatening vocal places us in the mind of a serial killer lost in the hinterland and obsessing about his next victim. The twist is that his heinous intentions are couched in the language of a love song: "When you discover my name/I'll tattoo it on your heart."

Since Shrinkwrapped, Gang Of Four have not worked together. Sara Lee, who joined The B-52's on tour in the wake of GOF, now lives in New York state, as does Gail Ann Dorsey. Dave Allen and Hugo Burnham now live in Los Angeles, where Burnham works as a music publisher and A&R man, while Allen owns and runs his own independent record label, World Domination, and still plays, produces, and records. Jon King and Andy Gill both live in London. Gill is a respected record producer. Having recently completed work on the Jesus Lizards' Blue album, he is now putting the final touches to a solo album by the late Michael Hutchence, which he cowrote and coproduced. King is no longer involved in the music industry.

Gang Of Four left behind a body of work that asks a sequence of cogent, critical questions, which have rarely been addressed, let alone answered, in pop music before or since. The group emerged at a time when the music industry was not as integrated and niched as it is now, when major record companies were not in total control and thus had to take a flyer on the new and the different. The result was a widening of the definition of what pop is and what it could be. A door opened, briefly. Gang Of Four helped to make this happen and benefitted from the mainstream access that followed. In other words, it gave them power. Their iconoclastic approach derived from their attempt to rebuild pop music from first principles: outside fashion, of the moment, and as far from being frozen in the amber of pop styles as they could ever be.

-- Jon Savage