Gang of Four - Solid Gold

The band's rampaging, balls-out rock side got captured on Solid Gold, which was released in early 1981. Sporadically exciting, the album's live-sounding production was more conventional than Entertainment!'s dessicated starkness.

Lyrically, Gill and King seemed to have lost their touch. The songs veered from crude, third-person typology (the protofascist caricatures of "Outside the Trains Don't Run On Time" and "He'd Send in the Army") to clumsy satire (the anti-American "Cheeseburger").

Gang of Four - Outside the Trains Don't Run On Time 1981


Gang of Four - He'd Send in the Army 1981


Gang of Four - Cheeseburger 1981

The better songs like "Paralysed" and "What We All Want" struck a note of sadness that tapped into the apprehensive mood that pervaded the start of the eighties, as the implications of the Thatcher and Reagan victories began to sink in.

Gang of Four - What We All Want 1981

The supine despondency of "Paralysed" offered an occasional glimpse of fragility in Gang of Four's music. The spoken lyric was taken by most reviewers as the lament of a man laid low by being laid off. According to Gill, who wrote and recited it, it's actually much closer to the blues in the original sense.

Gang of Four - Paralysed 1981

Gang of Four - "At Home He Feels Like a Tourist" and "Entertainment!"

While the Mekons struggled to promote Quality of Mercy, Gang of Four released their debut major-label single, "At Home He Feels Like a Tourist". The lyrics obliquely critiqued leisure and entertainment as surrogates for real satisfaction and stimulation. Lyrically opaque, the song was sonically Gang of Four's starkest and most compelling yet. Gill's backfiring guitar slashed across the robotic/hypnotic mesh of drums and bass, which sounded like "perverted disco", in Jon King's words.

Gang of Four - At Home He's a Tourist (Album version) 1979

Entertainment!, the debut album, is one of postpunk's defining masterworks, every aspect of the record (lyrics, music, artwork - the famous cover image of the fooled indian shaking hands with the cowboy eager to exploit him) is perfectly aligned. 

The sheer sound of the record - sober, flat, at once in-your-face and remoted - stood out. Entertainment! broke with with rock-recording conventions by being extremely "dry", in the technical sound-engineering sense of "no reverb, drums that didn't ring", says Burnham. There was no attempt to capture  what the group sounded like live, no gesture toward simulating music being played in a real acoustic space. This was obviously a studio artifact, a cold-blooded construction.

Entertainment! was dry in the emotional sense too, using the scalpel of Marxist analysis to dissect the mystifications of love, "capitalist democracy", and rock itself. And so "Contract", one of Entertainment!'s most unnerving songs, recasts matrimony in terms of a business arrangement, "a contract in our mutual interest". It shifts from the concrete specifics of a malfunctioning partnership - disagreements, disappointing sex - to the scripted nature of the unhappily married couple's conflict: "These social dreams/Put in practice in the bedroom/Is this so private?/Our struggle in the bedroom".

Gang of Four - Contract 1979

Recoiling from consumerism's "coercion of the senses", "Natural's Not in It" similarly insists there's "no escape from society". "Not Great Men" challenges history written from the standpoint of powerful leaders like kings and generals while ignoring the little people who build palaces and fight wars.

Gang of Four - Not Great Men 1979

Rerecorded for Entertainment!, "Love Like Anthrax" now featured a Gill dissertation on the love song as a staple of pop music issuing from one speaker, while the romance-ravaged King wailed out of the other. Gill ponders why pop groups sing about love constantly, expresses doubt that everyone is capable of this allegedly universal emotion, and concludes, "I don't think we're saying there's anything wrong with love, we just don't think that what goes on between two people should be shrouded in mystery". The polemic is spot-on. Propagated by Hollywood and popular song, the myth of romantic love gradually replaced religion as the opiate of the people in the twentieth century.

Gang of Four - Anthrax (Album version) 1979