Gang of Four have every right to feel smug. Let’s be clear: smugness is seldom something to be encouraged, nor is it inherent in frontman Jon King. Smugness, after all, is the realm of Thatcherism. Smugness supports Manchester United. Smugness, above all else, loves to say “I told you so”. King fails to offer any such sentiment and yet, as he stoops on stage, an ageless spectre of post-punk, the throng gathered before a revamped Gang of Four—only King and Andy Gill remain of the original quartet—senses that he’d be entitled to a moment of prophesying onanism.
In the thirty years since the Leeds quartet released Entertainment!, a zenith of abrasive Das Kapital inspired post-punk, the world that King and Gill dismissed with such sulphurous disdain as a free market free-for-all in 1979 is now merely the same game with different players, despite the apparent wane of Reaganomics since the neoliberal nadir of the 80s.
King, from the outset, takes great pleasure in thrusting the serrated edges of Gang of Four’s oeuvre at the throats of the onlooking crowd, even chilling the blood on occasion (shrieking “I’m so restless” as he does at the denouement of ‘Glass’ whilst leaping dementedly in all directions, serves as a discomfiting flash of what The Exorcist might look like filtered through Maoist sympathies). Strangely, such mercurial moments don’t possess the galvanising effect that tonight’s atmosphere sorely needs. In fact, the opening twenty minutes is fairly subdued, which is as much an indictment of the overpriced lager (at nearly £4 a pint) as it is of King and Gill’s lopsided set list.
Gang of Four don’t truly hit their stride until the vertiginous guitars and clustered percussion of ‘Not Great Men’, and from here on in Gang Of Four barely put a foot wrong. ‘I Love A Man In Uniform’ is crisp and urgent, benefiting from a rhythm section that is indistinguishable from the original line-up of Dave Allan and Hugo Bernham, while ‘Damaged Goods’, the penultimate three minute burst of jarring guitars and one of Andy Gill’s less asphyxiating riffs, rounds off the show on a pleasing if incongruous note.
Gang of Four are, contrary to the obvious interpretation, as relevant as they’ve ever been, and their ideological alacrity remains untainted by the tethers of age and the presumption of wisdom.
4/5
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