100 Best Albums Of All Time

01 Ether

02 Natural’s Not in It

03 Not Great Men

04 Damaged Goods

05 Return the Gift

06 Guns Before Butter

07 I Found That Essence Rare

08 Glass

09 Contract

10 At Home He’s a Tourist

11 5.45

12 Anthrax

If you wanted to question the basic givens of a modern western society – that is the cycle of everyday living and the assumption that work and leisure are separate things – then Leeds in the unholy year of 1977 was the perfect place to start. There were violent clashes on the streets and in pubs between the far right National Front and those who opposed them. Albums by the Clash and the Sex Pistols supplied a soundtrack to social discontent, and the Labour government of James Callaghan was stumbling towards oblivion as Margaret Thatcher and Thatcherism loomed. In such circumstances, how could the Gang of Four not make perfect sense?

The band that was formed around the Leeds University milieu in 1977 – vocalist Jon King, guitarist Andy Gill, bassist Dave Allen and drummer Hugo Burnham – released their debut album in 1979 and Entertainment remains one of the key releases of the then nascent post-punk era. It’s hard-edged in sound, as if a metal machine press had started to malfunction, and furiously inquisitive in terms of its worldview. It’s one of those albums were you can logically identify the quartet’s diverse precursors, but the end result is a revelation. Entertainment somehow leaves you shattered and elated.

Dave Allen had responded to an ad seeking a bassist for a ‘fast R&B band’, and in a very simple way that’s where Gang of Four began, taking the stripped-down sound of the brief pub-rock scene (punk’s spiritual predecessor in the UK) and pummelling it into a new shape. That transformation left gaps that the group filled, whether with dub bass or asphyxiated funk grooves, industrial racket or simply menacingly evocative silence. On ‘Damaged Goods’ Gang of Four sound urgent but scared; there’s not a hint of catharsis and the rhythm section ratchet up the tension until the final, repeated shouts of ‘goodbye’ sound like fleeting final words.

Of the many dialogues engendered by Entertainment, the most prominent is between King’s voice and Gill’s guitar. The former sounds harried, as if caught between fear and seduction, while the latter is caustic and expressive. ‘Anthrax’ begins with a slow, dilated scrawl of feedback that has the expressiveness of a monologue, while the sparks that illuminate the opening of ‘At Home He’s a Tourist’ make clear the song’s idea that the trappings of a regular life are simply the mechanism of imprisonment. ‘She said she was ambitious, so she accepts the process’, King sings, and Gill’s viscous, electric accompaniment brings it to life.

Inspired by texts spawned from France’s fractious, and ultimately unsuccessful, revolutionary movement of 1968, Gill and King wrote songs about what we want to do, what we’re compelled to do, and whether there is any real difference between the two forces. ‘Barricades close the street but open the way’, was one graffiti slogan in Paris a decade prior, and Gang of Four did the same to rock & roll. The beginning of ‘Return the Gift’ made vinyl listeners think the record was stuck on a scratch, but then it burst into desperate life as Gill’s playing ricochets off the unyielding rhythm.

The reason that the numerous ideas worked into Entertainment are so richly recognisable is because the songs are starkly engaging. The way the guitar, bass and drums combine on ‘Natural’s Not in It’ initially sounds slapdash, almost simplistic; but within a few bars they’re locked together into something that sounds compelling by itself while serving as a crucible for King’s dissection of the interchangeability of consumerism and pleasure. And like all the songs on this record, it’s finished before you’re entirely at ease with it. Gang of Four never outstayed their welcome.