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

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.