Gang of Our shunned the heat of rock spontaneity, the intuitive looseness of letting songs emerge "organically" out of jams. "No jamming - that was the J-word", says guitarist Andy Gill. "Everything was thought out in advance".
Drummer Hugo Burnham worked out unusual drum parts that inverted or frustrated the usual rock modes of rhythmic motion, like the mechanistic drum loop of "Love Like Anthrax", and what he calls the "continuous falling-down-the-stairs flow" of "Guns Before Butter".
Gang of Four - Guns Before Butter 1979
In their most thrilling songs - the taut, geometrical paroxysm of "Natural's Not In It", for instance - everything worked as rhythm, just like in James Brown's funk.
Gang of Four - Natural's Not In It 1979
A stumbling juggernaut of crude guitar and caveman drums, "Never Been in a Riot", the Mekons' debut, was a sonic argument in support of the proposition that rock, in the words of Melody Maker's Mary Harron, "is the only form of music which can actually be done better by people who can't play their instruments than by people who can".
Not everybody bought the argument initially. Rough Trade literally didn't buy it, refusing to take any copies of the single, saying it was just too incompetent. "Shortly thereafter, though, it was made Single of the Week in NME", recalls Fast Product's owner Bob Last (who signed the band for their first single). "And everybody wanted it, including Rough Trade".
NME's seal of approval was all the more significant because it came courtesy of the paper's resident punk rocker Tony Parsons, who took the lyrics of "Never Been in a Riot" as an inspired lampoon of the Clash's street-fighting-man posturing. According to Mekons' leader Tom Greenhalgh, the song is closer to an admission of vulnerability. "That you might be in a riot and be scared. Being open about that kind of weakness rather than trying to put on a front".
The Mekons - Never Been in a Riot 1978
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