An odd but nevertheless welcome inclusion in the Soundwave Festival metal/rock punk line up, Gang of Four embarked upon their maiden tour down under and a club show at Melbourne’s Corner Hotel quickly sold out well in advance, with Australian fans of the band desperate to snare tickets to a band that had little chart success but has wielded massive influence in indie and punk circles.
Forming in the highly political Marxist environment of Leeds University’s Fine Art Department in the mid 1970s, the original line up of singer Jon King, guitarist, Andy Gill, bass guitarist Dave Allen and drummer Hugo Burnham provocatively named themselves after four Maoist Chinese Communist Party officials who were arrested and charged with treason over their involvement in the Cultural Revolution from 1966 to 1976 in a move by the Communist Party to absolve themselves from the often violent attempts to remove elements of capitalism in the county and embed socialism.
The band’s politically charged rhetoric was also at the evolutional forefront of punk, taking the three chord snarl of ’76 punk and the bombastic rock of Queen and Yes and literally tearing it up musically; putting it back together with sparse drumming and bass notes, skittish brittle guitars that only played anti-solos and a deep groove that laid the foundation for band ranging from Franz Ferdinand to Bloc Party, Foals to Red Hot Chili Peppers who admit they ripped them off. Enough with the history lesson, however, as it is with little surprise that the Corner Hotel is filled to the gunwhales with a crowd that ranges from those who turned 18 just in time for tonight to those who picked up an original vinyl copy of 1979’s landmark Entertainment! as earnest young music fans.
Opening with a blistering ‘You’ll Never Pay For The Farm’ off this year’s latest offering Content, the band are blistering but a trifle loose, a theme continued in to ‘Not Great Men’ and ‘Ether’, perhaps confirming that the sound check they’d missed earlier in the day might have come in handy. However, by the time they kick in to ‘(Love Like) Anthrax’ the crowd erupts and the band match the malevolence of the original B-Side to ‘Damaged Goods’ and lit from below like the witches in Macbeth stewing their cauldrons, they truly look it; the crags in Jon King and Andy Gill’s faces illuminated like grotesque gargoyles, although the lyrics remain clunky over thirty years later. The song climaxes with Gill throwing his guitar down on stage in a squall of feedback and string breaking which shows up the original incarnation of the Jesus & Mary Chain for the jackdaws they are.
‘At Home He Feels Like A Tourist’ takes a Zeppelin-esque bass groove and pours guitars resembling broken shards of glass and concrete over in, with King throwing himself around the stage with moves that Axl Rose would start emulating in the mid 80s.
After a rather desultory ending to the first set, the band return for a storming rendition of ‘I Love A Man In Uniform’ that sees the crowd shouting along, and conclude the encore with a remarkable bit of post industrial chaos in which they took a microwave oven suspiciously like the gaffer covered one that lived in the venue band room and proceeded to clobber it to bits on stage with a piece of wood at the finale to ‘He’d Send In The Army’.
Returning to face a rabid crowd for a final encore which concludes with the song that started it all, ‘Damaged Goods’ it puts paid to the accusations that the band – now featuring only the original guitarist and singer – are the ‘Gang of Two’. Further demonstrating their appeal across the decades, a young woman is heard to call back to a straggling older woman in the exiting crowd – ‘Mum, Mum, i’m over here’.
– Jim Murray
