Rip It Up and Start Again (10 page)

While the Mekons upturned both traditional rock heroics and its punk successor (the Clash’s guitarist-as-guerrilla shtick), Gang of Four gradually acquired a reputation as a sort of new, improved Clash, agit-punk with a proper grounding in theory. “Damaged Goods,” the title track of their debut EP, showed the group had done its Marxist homework and knew about things like “commodity fetishism” and “reification.” “Damaged Goods” uses the language of commerce and industry as a prism offering disconcerting insights into affairs of the heart. With grim wit, the song represents a breakup in terms of refunds and emotional costs: “Open the till/Give me the change you said would do me good…you said you’re cheap but you’re too much.”

The EP’s other standout track, “Love Like Anthrax,” was an even more heartlessly cold dissection of romance. The music was estrangement enough by itself. “There’s this bizarre, totally robotic drumbeat matched with a weird two-bar-loop bassline, so that the emphasis in both drums and bass falls entirely in the unexpected place,” explains Gill. “And then my guitar comes in with random free-form noise.” In 1978, feedback hadn’t been heard in rock for a long while. Gill’s howling cacophony was nothing like Hendrix’s controlled yet orgiastic use of feedback to smear melody lines, or Velvet Underground’s tidal waves of white noise. In rock’s Romantic tradition, feedback typically signified the engulfingly oceanic, a swoony rush of Dionysian oblivion. In Gill’s hand, it just sounded like migraine, which totally suited “Anthrax”’s theme of love as a debilitating brain fever, something any rational person would avoid like the plague. In the lyrics, King bemoans feeling like “a beetle on its back.” He’s paralyzed and literally drained, his lovesick thoughts trickling “like piss” down the gutter.

“Love Like Anthrax” is constructed as a sort of Brechtian stereophonic duet. King wails the stricken lover’s lament from one speaker; Gill recites dry-as-dust details about the recording process from the other. Burnham once compared “Anthrax” to the split-screen techniques in Godard’s 1975 movie
Numero Deux,
where everyday life in a working-class French family is juxtaposed with more dissonant, private scenes of the same characters. Gill and King ran Leeds University’s student film society, so they’d have been familiar with Godard’s work: the deliberately exposed means of production (like the clapper board that flashes into view every so often in
La Chinoise
); the disjointedness (continuity lapses, incorrect eye line matches, jump cuts, lack of congruence between images and sound); characters breaking the fourth wall to address the audience; and all the other stylistic tics designed to make the viewer conscious of film as artifact and contrivance. Gang of Four and Godard both maintained a wary and vigilant stance toward the seductions of their chosen art forms. Godard described cinema as “the most beautiful fraud in the world,” and saw his films as a form of active criticism. A veteran contributor to the journal
Cahiers Du Cinema,
he wrote, “I’m still as much of a critic as I ever was. The only difference is that instead of writing criticism, I now film it.” Both Godard and Gang of Four inevitably faced similar accusations from traditionalists: too much concept and theory, not enough emotion, sensuousness, warmth.

Behind the director-provocateur and the agit-funk group lay a common source, Bertolt Brecht’s antinaturalistic, unabashedly didactic theater. What Brecht called “epic theater” confronted the spectator with an arbitrary and absurd reality. Instead of feeling that the protagonist’s woes were in accord with the ordained nature of reality (and therefore, as in tragedy, somehow noble), you were meant to feel that “the sufferings of [the protagonist] appall me, because they are unnecessary.” Brecht’s “alienation effects” dislocated the viewer from his “natural responses,” cutting through so-called realism to offer a glimpse of the deep structures that organize our lives. Brecht’s imperative—“what is ‘natural’ must have the force of what is startling”—dovetailed with another Marxist thinker, Antonio Gramsci, whose work was being rediscovered in the 1970s. In his view, the ruling class exerted “hegemony” by making the ways of the world seem like simple “common sense.” Radical critique, argued Gramsci, should unmask every obvious-seeming piece of common sense as man-made, a “truth” built to serve somebody’s interest.

A Brecht fan to the point of having Bertolt’s picture on the wall of his Edinburgh flat, Bob Last incorporated alienation effects into the artwork of
Damaged Goods
. “The group sent me a letter that was very precise about what they wanted on the cover,” he says. Enclosed was a newspaper clip with a photograph of a female matador and a bull, along with a caption of dialogue. The matador explains, “You know, we’re both in the entertainment business, we have to give the audience what they want. I don’t like to do this but I earn double the amount I’d get if I were in a 9 to 5 job.” The bull grumbles in response, “I think that at some point we have to take responsibility for our actions.” In the end, Last ignored the Gang’s wishes and designed a different cover, but reproduced the letter and the untidily snipped-out newspaper clipping on the back sleeve. “This didn’t exactly mollify the group,” recalls Last. “But I’m sure they recognized that, to the extent they were interested in deconstruction, this was an unassailable gesture!”

Released in the autumn of 1978,
Damaged Goods
was hailed as a breakthrough. Here was a group that had found a totally new way of negotiating the thorny danger zone of politics in rock. Abrasive but accessible, Gang of Four avoided both Tom Robinson–style preachy protest and the forbidding didacticism of avant-gardists like Henry Cow. The form was as radical as the content, and yet it
rocked
. You could even dance to it.

After
Damaged Goods,
Gang of Four, encouraged by Last, made a then controversial decision to abandon the independent sector and sign to a major label. The idea of reaching the largest number of people possible made sense given the group’s propagandizing impulse. It also chimed with one of the group’s major subjects, entertainment. It was much more provocative to intensify the implicit contradictions by operating right at the heart of the rock leisure industry. Whereas other politicized bands agonized over being connected to multinational conglomerates, Andy Gill and his comrades felt that the Pop Group’s and the Slits’ dream of “escaping Babylon was bollocks hand-wringing, as much as we loved both those groups. The point for us was
not
to be ‘pure.’ Gang of Four songs were so often about the inability to have ‘clean hands.’ It just wouldn’t be on our agenda to be on a truly independent label, as if such a thing could even exist.” Several majors courted them, but EMI emerged as a favorite, precisely for its sheer monolithic size and bland image. Along with its globe-spanning muscle, EMI offered them a surprising degree of creative control. According to Gill, it was almost a production-and-licensing deal, with Gang of Four handing over the finished album tapes, which they produced themselves. The group also designed their own album sleeves, posters, press ads, and badges.

The Mekons’ second single for Fast Product, the indie smash “Where Were You?” was released toward the end of 1978 and quickly sold out its 27,500-copy first pressing. But the Mekons, too, were eventually persuaded to step up to the major leagues and sign with Virgin. “Bob Last convinced us there was nothing morally superior about signing to an indie label,” says Greenhalgh. Ambushed by success, the Mekons had inadvertently ended up with a career on their hands, arriving at a level of gigging activity that needed the sort of funding only a major could provide. The group’s rise peaked in March 1979, when they were featured on the bill of what was semijokingly dubbed the gig of the century by the music papers, a showcase at London’s Lyceum venue of “new music” that included Gang of Four and another Fast Product band, the Human League, along with the Fall and Stiff Little Fingers. But not long after this show the Mekons’ attempt at infiltrating the mainstream went awry.

The big time didn’t really suit a group based around amateurish charm. All the life was sucked out of the Mekons’ debut LP,
The Quality of Mercy Is Not Strnen,
by its being recorded in Virgin’s topflight studio, the Manor. By the end of 1979, the group seemed hopelessly confused, denying in interviews that they’d ever made a virtue out of ineptitude (“we were always desperately trying to play well,” Greenhalgh told
Melody Maker
). They’d gradually reneged on their early impractical principles (no photographs, no personality cult), yet were too self-effacing to really seize the possibilities of fame. “When we first started, our only reason for existing was that we’d made this appalling record that should never have been a record but was,” Greenhalgh said. “And we were a group that never should have been a group but were. Now we’re at the stage where those sort of reasons for existing are irrelevant. So it’s a question of what actually are we?” It would be five years before the Mekons discovered a new and brilliant purpose for themselves, after a painful, fitful process of self-reinvention.

While the Mekons struggled to promote
Quality of Mercy,
Gang of Four released their debut major-label single, “At Home He Feels Like a Tourist.” The lyrics obliquely critiqued leisure and entertainment as surrogates for real satisfaction and stimulation. Lyrically opaque, the song was sonically Gang of Four’s starkest and most compelling yet. Gill’s backfiring guitar slashed across the robotic/hypnotic mesh of drums and bass, which sounded like “perverted disco,” in Jon King’s words. But a verse in “Tourist”
about
discotheques caused the group’s first setback. Boosted by frequent evening play on Radio One, the single cracked the lower end of the U.K. Top 75, at which point the group was invited to appear on
Top of the Pops,
a golden opportunity to penetrate the heart of mass culture. Exposure to an audience of ten million would almost certainly propel the single into the Top 30 the next week. But on the day of the show, the producers objected to the line “the rubbers you hide in your top left pocket,” part of a verse about discos making their profits through selling sex, or the promise of it. Gang of Four offered to change the coarse slang term for condoms to the more neutral and ambiguous “packets.”
Top of the Pops
insisted the word be changed to “rubbish,” because “packets” sounded too obviously altered and they didn’t want anyone to know there’d been censorship. After agonizing debate, with minutes to go before recording was due to start, Gang of Four refused.

“At Home He Feels Like a Tourist” continued its rise anyway, and
TOTP
extended the invitation again, but on the same terms. “We stuck to our guns,” says Burnham. “We were all as one on that decision, and it felt great. But in retrospect, walking off
Top of the Pops
essentially killed our career.” Burnham is convinced that the single would have shot into the Top 30 after the group’s dynamic performance. “Plus we would not have lost the support of a large number of people at EMI like we did. The exasperation on the promotions man’s face when we announced we wouldn’t do
Top of the Pops
!”

Entertainment!,
the debut album, did reasonably well critically and sales-wise, but by Gang of Four’s own standards it was an intervention that had fallen short, given their ambition to infiltrate the mainstream. Taken as an art object in itself (and considering its long-term impact),
Entertainment!
was anything but a failure. One of postpunk’s defining masterworks, every aspect of the record (lyrics, music, artwork—the famous cover image of the fooled Indian shaking hands with the cowboy eager to exploit him) is perfectly aligned. The sheer sound of the record—sober, flat, at once in-your-face and remote—stood out.
Entertainment!
broke with rock-recording conventions by being extremely “dry,” in the technical sound-engineering sense of “no reverb, drums that didn’t ring,” says Burnham. There was no attempt to capture what the group sounded like live, no gesture toward simulating music being played in a real acoustic space. “In retrospect, it would have been nice to hear those songs recorded in a way that was truer to how we sounded onstage,” says Burnham. But this was part of
Entertainment!
’s achievement, its alienation effect. This was obviously a studio artifact, a cold-blooded construction.

Entertainment!
was dry in the emotional sense too, using the scalpel of Marxist analysis to dissect the mystifications of love, “capitalist democracy,” and rock itself. The songs depicted relationships and situations in a diagrammatic fashion. Even though Jon King often sang in the first person, there was an element of depersonalization, a sense of the song’s human actors being buffeted by impersonal social forces. As Greil Marcus, an early champion of the group, suggested, the characters in their songs often seem to be on the brink of seeing through “false consciousness” and apprehending the structural realities that govern their existence, but they never quite make it. And so “Contract,” one of
Entertainment!
’s most unnerving songs, recasts matrimony in terms of a business arrangement, “a contract in our mutual interest.” It shifts from the concrete specifics of a malfunctioning partnership—disagreements, disappointing sex—to the scripted nature of the unhappily married couple’s conflict: “These social dreams/Put in practice in the bedroom/Is this so private?/Our struggle in the bedroom.” Recoiling from consumerism’s “coercion of the senses,” “Natural’s Not in It” similarly insists there’s “no escape from society.” “Not Great Men” challenges history written from the standpoint of powerful leaders like kings and generals while ignoring the little people who build palaces and fight wars. In
Sounds,
Garry Bushell sourced the song in Brecht’s famous poem “A Worker Reads History,” which concludes with the lines “Every page a victory/Who cooked the feast for the victors?/Every ten years a great man/Who paid the bill?”