‘Entertainment!’: Gang of Four’s tale of a revolutionary debut album
Few artists can boast a debut as lauded as Gang of Four. Spiking shredding guitar jabs with skewed funk bass, the UK post-punks injected a nervous groove to their politically charged lyrical attacks similar to the more experimental-leaning The Pop Group, unleashing a potent attack of taut abrasion that made you dance as much as wanna throw a brick through the establishment window.
Released in 1979, Entertainment! endures as the band’s defining document, counting Flea and Michael Stipe as dedicated fans and included in Kurt Cobain’s ‘Top 50 Albums’ diary entry.
Formed in Leeds by art students Jon King, Andy Gill, Hugo Burnham, and Dave Allen, Entertainment! was burnished by the tension that choked their environment, rising racial strife spearheaded by an emboldened National Front, a city stricken with terror by the serial killer Peter Sutcliffe’s brutal murder of 13 eventual women, and The Cold War ‘heating’ up again illustrated with the Protect and Survive pamphlets that littered their campus.
“The real difference for me, Andy, and Jon was transitioning from being schoolboys in Kent to suddenly living in the north,” drummer Burnham told the BBC last month. “That was a radical shift socially. It really felt like the north had been left behind. Musically, you felt this responsibility to speak up for the working classes.”
The genesis of the band went back further to King and Gill’s teen years at Sevenoaks School. Travelling to study at Leeds together, a Fine Art grant each afforded them a trip to New York City where they could soak up the nascent punk seizing Lower Manhattan’s CBGB. Back in England, a band was formed more indebted to the Dr Feelgood pub rock from a few years prior, but the introduction of Allen’s bass added their distinguishing tension dub, which shaped Gang of Four’s essential hooky swagger.
This bold and direct sonic front was matched by King’s lyrical focus, channelling the alienation anticipating the newly elected Margret Thatcher and her ruthless economic dogma that would strangle the 1980s and beyond. “British people were starting to feel like objects, traded by the capitalists in charge. You can hear this feeling in my lyrics, like on ‘Return The Gift’: ‘It’s on the market, you’re on the price list!'” King stated. “The country was just a disaster in the late 1970s. I wanted every lyric to be simple and not far away from the headlines in a tabloid newspaper. They needed to be chantable. It’s all a spin on propaganda.”
Entertainment! still bristles with combative energy 45 years on, the political targets of failed foreign policy and consumerist mire no less potent now in a contemporary world order spinning out of control and a systemic death grip on maintaining class power. Explaining: “In 2024, young people have got the bad end of the stick in every conceivable way. The older generation are creaming it, generally, whether that’s owning the best property or having the best pensions.”
King concluded: “Today, young people feel like they’re being held back. Entertainment! speaks to those frustrations. It’s about that cursed transaction we all make when we think we’re going to get something for nothing but don’t, and then we’re trapped in this conundrum. There’s so many parallels between 1979 and 2024.”
