Andy Gill (1956-2020)

REMEMBERING GANG OF FOUR’S POST-PUNK GUITAR ICON

- Alan di Perna

“WHAT COMES NEXT?” That was the essential question for forward-thinking rock aficionados back when the late Seventies gave way to the early Eighties. Punk had blown open a big, gaping hole in the rock firmament, tearing down the clichés that had attached themselves to the music over the course of previous decades, toppling its sacred cows and even challenging the very existence of rock as a consumerist, capitalist commodity. The time was ripe for a totally new kind of music, one born of the empowering artistic license that punk had granted all of us who had heard its clarion call. But what, exactly, might that sound like?

One of the most compelling answers to that key question came in the form of a 1979 album, titled, with maximum irony, Entertainment!, by a British quartet called Gang of Four. The sound was stark, bonedry and confrontational. No big reverbs pumping anything up. No production sheen. No fake feel-good bonhomie. Just the elemental truth of guitar, bass, drums and the human voice.

Gang of Four guitarist Andy Gill, who died of pneumonia on February 1 of this year, probably would have hated to have his guitar work singled out for praise. The whole idea of Gang of Four was that every instrument was to have an equal role — “democratic music,” they called it. “Every part of it had to be radical,” Gill said in 2005. “It was building musical tension in a very precise way.”