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A flagship band of the post-punk movement at the crossroads of the 1970s and 1980s, Gang of Four made their mark as soon as their critically acclaimed debut album Entertainment! was released, and is still recognized as a major work of the genre. The album is often cited as a cornerstone of post-punk, but also as a benchmark for dance-punk, art punk and funk-punk. Singer Jon King’s incisive or satirical lyrics are inspired by situationist theories, but also by the reflections of thinkers such as Michel Foucault, Jacques Lacan, feminism and Marx’s theory of alienation. Themes include the commodification of human relations (“Natural’s Not in It,” “Return the Gift”) the working-class condition (“At Home He’s a Tourist”), criticism of the Great Man theory (“Not Great Men”), political repression during the Troubles in Northern Ireland (“Ether”), theories on the media (notably those of Guy Debord and the “Society of the Spectacle”), or the media’s reporting of terrorism and Maoist guerrilla warfare in Latin America (“5.45 “).
The band also hijacks the codes of traditional love songs to reveal their ideological underpinnings, notably through tracks like “Anthrax” and ‘Contract’, which question romantic love, or “Damaged Goods” and “I Found That Essence Rare”, which deconstruct classical representations of desire and sex. The cover of Entertainment! designed by Jon King, directly reflects the influence of the Situationist International. It shows an “Indian” and a “cowboy” shaking hands, in three stylized images taken from a Winnetou film series, which, in East Germany at the time, were interpreted as critiques of capitalism. The visual treatment reduces the faces to red-and-white solids, evoking racial clichés. Surrounding the image is an acerbic phrase: “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.” This image not only illustrates the theme of exploitation, but also criticizes the simplistic way in which the media and popular culture schematize ethnic, social or political conflicts.
To mark the 45th anniversary of this iconic album, the Gang of Four will visit us on a final tour, appropriately entitled The Long Goodbye Tour. On this unique evening, the British band will first perform Entertainment! in its entirety, before returning to the stage with an anthology of tracks mostly taken from the two albums that followed, Solid Gold and Songs of the Free. Following the death of guitarist Andy Gill in 2020 and, more recently, bassist Dave Allen, singer Jon King and drummer Hugo Burnham will be joined by guitarist Ted Leo and bassist Gail Greenwood.
A few days before the start of this long final farewell, PAN M 360 spoke to Hugo Burnham, who has momentarily swapped his role as professor at Endicott College in Massachusetts for that of tempo keeper. From the difficult return to the drums, to lost friends and, of course, the creation of the now legendary Entertainment!, Hugo Burnham, affable, generous and sometimes emotional, delved into his memories, sharing a few interesting anecdotes along the way.
PAN M 360: First of all, I wanted to offer you my sincere sympathies for the recent passing of your friend and accomplice, Dave Allen, Gang of Four’s original bass player. It’s very sad. I think it would be interesting to talk a little bit about him, if you want. How did you guys meet?
Hugo Burnham: When Jon (King, voice), Andrew (Gill, guitar) and I started the band, we had a bass player called Dave Wolfson, who was really a jazz guy. But he was around the scene, you know, mutual friends and everything. And we played two shows with him in… like April and May of 77, or 76. I can’t remember which year it was, but anyway, then we had the summer off and Jon and Andrew went to New York. When they came back, we realised that Dave Wolfson wasn’t really right for us. So I put up a flyer in the university union bar saying, “Wanted R-I-V-V-U-M and blues bass player’.’ And that was sort of a code. Nothing to do with what is now known as rhythm and blues, which is essentially urban music. But it meant Dr. Feelgood, sort of pub rock, you know, the Coasters, anything of that nature.
So Dave had recently moved to Leeds from the Northwest, literally to find a band. He’d been spending years in cover bands and jazz band. So he came to us. It seemed easy, natural, right from the beginning. From a social point of view, he did fit in with us, but he was especially a real musician, unlike any of us. So when we first started rehearsing and writing together, there was a “Hey, Dave, you’re playing too many notes” or “Great four notes. now play two.” You know, it was that sort of thing, but we just gelled so well. And we each sort of found certain roles. Since Jon, Andrew and I were young students who’d occasionally study or go to class, and Dave wasn’t, he took on the role of basically trying to get gigs. Because we didn’t have a manager, we didn’t have an agent, you know, we were idiots messing around. And his house had a phone, which was not standard. I mean, try to explain that to people nowadays, you know, just there were no cell phones, but some people had a house phone. So that’s what he’d do, amongst other things. So, yeah, that’s how we met Dave. And it was a very easy transition into a great, not just creative partnership, but friendship.
PAN M 360: What was his contribution to Gang of Four? He had quite a unique bass playing style, and this awesome sound he was able to create.
Hugo Burnham: In the early days, we all basically rehearsed and wrote together; all the time arguing, pushing back and forward, testing each other, pushing each other. So his contribution was as an equal partner. It’s a bit like the four elements Earth, Wind, Fire and Water, you know, they’re completely different, but meld together to make this planet we live on. I mean, that’s a bit of a reach, but you know what I’m saying. Four totally different elements that worked together to create something fierce and wonderful. And that’s what we wanted to do, and did.
PAN M 360: So was there any question of him joining this tour, or was he too ill?
Hugo Burnham: We knew Dave had been unwell for quite a few years. We had hoped, back in 2020, before COVID threw the world under the wheels, and when Andrew died (of COVID), we had hoped that we would do a proper reunion. That would involve Dave. But after we came out of that and it got to sort of late 2021, it became clear that Dave wasn’t really able to come out and play with us. So that’s when we got Sara Lee back, our Sarah Lee, who had also retired after a stunning career with so many brilliant people, whether it was the B-52s or Ryuichi Sakamoto. I mean, Sara Lee really is a superstar player. But then Sara retired again last year. And we now have Gail Greenwood, from Belly and L7, who again brings a whole different vibe and really freshens it up, and kicks. I have to say I’ve been extraordinarily lucky as a drummer to play with those bass players. I don’t think I’m a brilliant drummer, but I became as good as I am because of playing with Dave. We formed something, we understood each other, we worked so well together, and it was terrifying when he left the band [1981, went on to form Shriekback with ex XTC Barry Andrews]. I didn’t know what I was going to do, but Sara came in, it was great. Although before Sara, for a few weeks after Dave left, we had Busta ‘’Cherry’’ Jones, who was with Talking Heads, Eno, Chris Spedding, Sharks, Parliament and many others (and Pagliaro!). He joined to finish a tour and that was extraordinary. He was brilliant, crazy… another one who just fitted right in with the team. Not just musically, but socially and everything else. But that wasn’t ultimately going to work. He lived in New York, he had other things, so Sara came in brilliant.
Then after I left (1983), Jon and Andrew carried on with some other people, then we all got back together briefly from 2005 ‘till 2006, and then in 2012, Andrew carried on with three younger session guys. So, you know, it’s an absolute joy coming back together for one last round, but it would have been wonderful had Dave been able to join us. When we played at the Cruel World Festival in California in 2023, we also did a couple of shows in San Francisco. Everyone then went home, but Jon and I flew up to Portland to go and spend a day with Dave and his family. Because, you know, by then, everyone knew he was not terribly well, but he was in great shape that day and we had a lovely time together. It really was good. So we miss him dreadfully. It’s really… [stifles a sob]… Even though we knew that he wasn’t probably going to last very much longer, it still is a punch in the heart.
PAN M 360 : You mentioned Andy Gill, whose passing in 2020 is also very sad. He too had a quite unique sound. Did you have any trouble finding a replacement for him ?
Hugo Burnham: Well, it really was a conundrum for us. It’s like, how do you replace a sound, and a vibe, and an attitude like Andy’s? And it was like, okay, we have to find somebody. Lots of people said, oh, you know, anyone who’s ever played guitar for the Red Hot Chili Peppers would do it, that sort of thing. And a friend of mine suggested David Pajo (Slint). Not knowing anything of David’s history, I started investigating Slint and everything else that David had done. And I realized he looked and sounded like somebody who could be brilliant. So I reached out to him and asked if he’d be interested. We didn’t want somebody who simply just copies everything Andy did… We had a lovely time with David. And then at the end of last year, he wanted to concentrate on other things. I think he really wanted a little bit of stability. So now we have Ted Leo, who, well, I mean, people should know Ted, he’s been around for 100 years. He came out to the New York, D.C. hardcore scene years ago, younger than us. But then everyone is except Bill Wyman (laughs).
PAN M 360: For this special tour, will you be solely focusing on Entertainment!?
Hugo Burnham: This time around we’re really concentrating on Entertainment!. So it’s four people on stage and we’re doing two sets. We really wanted to make it like, and I know it sounds wanky, an evening with gang of Four. In other words, when you come in, the songs that you’ll hear before the show, will be the songs that we choose. The visuals will be the things that we choose. We will come on and play Entertainment! track by track, all the way through, to honour the fact that it’s the 45th anniversary of Entertainment! being released in the UK. That was 1979 in North America and everywhere else, but in the UK, it was the beginning of 1980, so it is 45 years. And interestingly enough, when we come up to you later this month, it will be almost exactly 45 years since we first played Montreal. May the 9th, 1980, at Broadway Live!
PAN M 360 : And what about the second set?
Hugo Burnham : After the Entertainment! set, we will then take a little break and come back to do a what we’re calling a best of the rest. We’ll play songs from other albums, a lot of the songs we’ve been playing over the last four years. It’s a lot of work for a bunch of old people. I mean, two whole sets. No support acts. Everyone must get there pretty soon after the doors open, because it’s not like the old days when we were going on stage at 11 (laughs). I will add that copies of Jon’s recent memoir, To Hell with Poverty! will be available on site, and that Jon will be holding a signing session after the concert.
PAN M 360 : So there aren’t any new songs on this show?
Hugo Burnham: No new songs. All the songs we’ll be playing are basically from the first two, slash three albums and we do one song, called ‘’I Parade Myself’’, which I’m not sure If it ever made it to an album, maybe on Content, I can’t remember. It was one of the songs when it was just the Jon and Andy years, which is a fantastic song… Some of these songs for Entertainment!… we have not played them since 1980. Like ‘’Guns before Butter’’, when I started listening to that again, to remember how to play it, I cried. I thought I was too old for it. And ‘’Contract’’ is a very difficult, fast song. So we’ve actually adapted them somewhat. When you’re 23, full of spit and vigor and speed, you can do these things. Not so much now.
PAN M 360: Playing the whole of Entertainment! in these weird times seems most appropriate. But when the album was originally created, what were your sources of inspiration, both lyrically and musically?
Hugo Burnham: Musically, the things that pulled us together, that drove us together, that we shared, it was everything from Dr. Feelgood to Free, to Jimi Hendrix, to Parliament Funkadelic, to Can, Hawkwind… You know, we had great shared musical loves. And like any group of artists, when you get together, you’re working from those common elements. You know, you can tell which songs were driven by me trying to play like Simon Kirk in Free, or being influenced by reggae. I mean, ‘’Damaged Goods“ is very much influenced by reggae and ska, which we all grew up with in England, of course. It was part of the whole thing. There weren’t black radio stations and pop stations. It was all one thing. So that was very much part of our DNA. And then you start to find your own sound. And I think that lyrically, it was very much avoiding the obvious, like singing about cars and girls and getting drunk and misbehaving… you know, being unsubtle. So there was something much subtler about our lyrics, But very observant about how people interacted with each other and with things around them, emotionally, socially, politically. Everything’s politics, really, isn’t it?
PAN M 360: So how was this album created?
Hugo Burnham: Well, we’d been playing for a couple of years, you know, at least 18 months, two years maybe, developing and building the songs. And we had been very successful with our first independent EP/single, Damaged Goods, which had ‘’Armalite Rifle‘’ and ‘’Love Like Anthrax‘’ on it. And that suddenly started getting us a lot of attention in the music press. I mean, we earned the fact that suddenly, after being ignored for a while by the whole industry, everybody wanted us to make a record. Because that’s what was going on at the time. There were quite a few labels that were hoping to sign us back then. They felt they’d missed out on The Clash. So they went for something similar, although we never dressed up quite as beautifully as they did (laughs). And to be honest, we turned down a lot of money from other major labels to sign with EMI. Because instead of huge advances, we got significantly better royalty rates. For the time, we got complete creative control. As long as the label was technically able to make a record from what we turned in from our recording sessions. They could not refuse it because it didn’t sound right to them, or because it wasn’t commercial sounding enough.
We made some unforced errors over the years that turned the label away from us. I mean, the famous story about us walking off Top of the Pops… that really crippled our forward movement [the band walked off the show when the BBC told them to sing “rubbish” in the place of the original lyric “rubbers” as the original line was considered too risqué.] Because that was the place where you got to the bigger world. The whole country watched Top of the Pops. So that was disappointing. But anyway, so we made the album in a studio in South London called The Workhouse, which was where Ian Dury and the Blockheads had done New Boots and Panties, which we loved. And we liked the fact that it wasn’t a big West End or Center London studio. It was a little bit down at heel, but quite groovy. And it was Manfred Mann’s studio. It wasn’t the easiest of sessions to do. I found it very difficult. I suffered a lot from what I call red light fever. Because the way we would do the songs was: we’d start with Dave and I, with Andrew just playing along to lay down the bass and drums. And the way the studio was set up, the control room was upstairs and the people in the booth looked down through the glass. It really felt quite oppressive, and I was not very confident. And it was like, “no, do it again, do it!” And the engineer was not smart enough to let us keep going. You made a mistake, he’d stop. And that really was a bit unsettling. It was also quite difficult with the engineer because he did not understand what we were trying to do. Which was to make a record that sounded the way we heard it. It wasn’t a wash in treatments, you know, with reverb and whatever else. We wanted to make it quite dry and normal sounding. And that was anathema to him. So it wasn’t easy, but we loved what we’d done … In the few weeks leading up to the recording, we went to a rehearsal, a farm in the middle of Wales, where we just rehearsed all day and wrote these songs. I think “Not Great Men” came from that session, which is one of the most lastingly brilliant songs we ever wrote. And then we went out on the road and worked it.
PAN M 360: And how did this “Love Like Anthrax’’ song come about? Because it was utterly unique, with its manic guitar and layered lyrics.
Hugo Burnham: We wanted to make something that really pushed into people’s faces, something awkward, odd and extreme. And there was that whole Godard thing of, you know, you’ve got one screen here, one screen there. So you’ve got Jon sort of singing and Andrew just mumbling something underneath him at cross purposes. So there are two things going on at the same time. And then, of course, just the whole nod to Jimi Hendrix in the extreme feedback. People were just stunned by it, either they hated it, or they were like wow!, yeah! And it was great because it was never quite the same whenever we played it live, and it still blows people up. Like I said, we wanted to do things that were not just predictable and, at the same time, that were interesting to us. I mean, it was fun when we started, doing silly punk songs, or when we’d play a Ramones song and other covers, that was fun. But then you sort of want to do something that challenges each other as well as our audience.
PAN M 360: Over the years, Entertainment! have gained a bit in popularity, but especially in respect.
Hugo Burnham: Yes. like we’ve said in the past, we were sort of like our generation’s version of the Velvet Underground; everyone who saw or heard us went to start a band and was successful, but we never sold any records. You know, for everyone who said, “Oh my god, without the Gang of Four, we’d never existed,’’ or “Oh my god, they were so influential.’’ If we had a penny for everyone who had said that … but it lasts. You know, what we were doing, the songs we were writing, and the lyrics that mostly Jon was creating back in the late 70’s, are still so pertinent. Even more so now, I suspect. And I think that’s a large part of why we strike a chord with quite a lot of younger people. Our audiences, since we got back together in 2022, 30% to 40% are under 30, which is encouraging. And it’s not just fat old guys like me bringing along their teenage kids. People. They hear it, they react to it, they come and see us. It’s great, I’m pleased that our audiences aren’t just all people in their 60s like us. Come and see if we can play two whole sets without falling over!
Gang of Four – The Long Goodbye
April 22, 2025
Théâtre Beanfield – 2490 Notre-Dame St W, Montreal Quebec H3J 1N5
Portes: 7:00pm
Spectacle: 8:00pm
All ages
Tickets: https://www.ticketmaster.ca/event/31006184C9C830E4…
Opening photo by Jason Grow Photography
