Gang of Four - Damaged Goods EP

"Damaged Goods", the title track of their debut EP, showed the group had done its Marxist homework and knew about things like "commodity, fetishism" and "reification". The song uses the language of commerce and industry as a prism offering disconcerting insight into affairs of the heart. With grim wit, the song represents a breakup in terms of refunds and emotional costs: "Open the till/Give me the change you said would do me good...you said you're cheap but you're too much".

Gang of Four - Damaged Goods 1978

The EP's other standout track, "Love Like Anthrax", was an even more heartlessly cold dissection of romance. The music was estrangement enough by itself. "There's this bizarre, totally robotic drumbeat matched with a weird two-bar-loop bassline, so that the emphasis in both drums and bass falls entirely in the unexpected place", explains Gill. "And then my guitar comes in with random free-form noise". 

In 1978, feedback hadn't been heard in rock for a long while. Gill's howling cacophony was nothing like Hendrix's controlled yet orgiastic use of feedback to smear melody lines, or Velvet Underground's tidal waves of white noise. In rock's Romantic tradition, feedback typically signified the engulfingly oceanic, a swoony rush of Dionysian oblivion. In Gill's hand, it just sounded like migraine, which totally suited "Anthrax"'s theme of love as a debilitating brain fever, something any rational person would avoid like the plague. In the lyrics singer Jonathan King bemoans feeling like "a beetle on its back". He's paralyzed and literally drained, his lovesick thoughts trickling "like piss" down the gutter.

"Love Like Anthrax" is constructed as a sort of Brechtian stereophonic duet. King wails the stricken lover's lament from one speaker; Gill recites dry-as-dust details about the recording process from the other.

Gang of Four - Love Like Anthrax 1978

A Brecht fan to the point of having Bertolt's picture on the wall of his Edinburgh flat, Bob Last incorporated alienation effects into the artwork of Damaged Goods. "The group sent me a letter that was very precise about what they wanted on the cover", he says. Enclosed was a newspaper clip with a photograph of a female matador and a bull, along with a caption of dialogue. The matador explains, "You know, we're both in the entertainment business, we have to give the audience what they want. I don't like to do this but I earn double the amount I'd get if I were in a 9 to 5 job". The bull grumbles in response, "I think that at some point we have to take responsibility for our actions".

In the end Last ignored the Gang's wishes and designed a different cover, but reproduced the letter and the untidily snipped-out newspaper clipping on the back sleeve.