1981@40 - SOLID GOLD - GANG OF FOUR

There were a few factors in the change I went through from right to left in my politics. First, the right side ultimately failed to convince me, it just felt like something. Second, actually finding out what the left stood for allowed my affinities with it to appear in sharp focus. Third, the culture of Brisbane in the early 1980s tended to polarise the mind the more that mind engaged with it. All of those led me to records like this. They declared themselves but dismantled the sloganeering machine, showed how hard it was to affect any kind of politics and stick with it but kept at it anyway. Gang of Four made The Clash look childlike.

I'm not dismissing The Clash, there, they were forging ahead and very much fighting the good fight but they did keep the slogans. They were expanding their musical horizons but it sounded more like dilettantism to me. The razor wire textures and and minimalism of Gang of Four felt like a relief. 

Paralysed. A spiky guitar figure and spoken vocal. Unemployed and reduced to stasis as the rest of the world chases prizes. The stark description of the ejected worker unable to regain his feet is chilling. "I was good at what I did," he says numbly as the spikes rattle around him. What We All Want - a doctored Bo Diddley riff with an overdriven guitar snaking over it. Less a groove than a machine like chug ensues. "Could I be happy with something else? I need something to fill my time." Rather than the inertia of the laid-off worker in Paralysed, this narrator wants to escape the futility of the society and his part in the workforce that powers it. But it looks like hobby-level pointlessness is the only alternative. Why Theory blends a dissonant disco groove with a hint of dub. You could drown it all in gin or think about what you do.

If I Could Keep it For Myself and Outside the Trains Don't Run on Time both follow the path with the repurposed disco slashing we began with but it's less repetitive than committed. The first of the two features one of the album's most melodic verses as a confusing encounter is recalled (or is it something more sinister?) The next track refers to the boast of Mussolini that he made the trains run on time. A domestic despot muses on the sagging of discipline he sees wherever he looks and swells with anger over the compulsion to order. The final word is the title, yelled both from his frustration and the glee of anyone who sees his impotent rage. It's easy to forget the resurgence of The National Front in the UK as well as the great divisive gloom of the Thatcher years as they began. You could dance to this (I did) but you had to pay it some thought to do it.

A series of field recordings punctuate Cheeseburger with sounds of wait staff and customers as a lorry driver's thoughts, frenzied from caffeine make him question what he is doing with his life, producing wages for himself and greater profits for the nameless few who own his vehicle, as he stops in anywhere he can find for the worst food in the world. The song comes to a hard stop. And then a series of thumps and scrapes of guitar strings sound like he's trying to start an engine that doesn't want to go. Some murmured directions. End. See also, his life. This reminds me thematically of the eerie Listening Wind on Talking Heads' Remain in Light except for the setting, England's green unpleasant land.

The Republic starts with sharp guitars before launching into the haranguing vocal describing the education of the privileged, grinding through years of aloofness to greater society. "Better take smaller chances and bugger the consequences." In the Ditch takes us closer to the street level where people keep to their houses as though waiting for the two minute warning about a nuclear strike. But this is a description of a general lifestyle. "Show me a ditch and I'll dive in it." A Hole in the Wallet lists conservative values of female education. The near future of the dread caused by Thatcher's win was here and was already feeling like it.

He'd send in the army starts with percussion that sounds like either weapons being cocked or whips in use. Staccato guitar slices harden the sound. The band come in bludgeoning form. The vocals go from full unison chanting, dialogue-style asides and the declaiming style of much of this set. A break that is not a dance break recreates the the violence of the opening with the whips and grinding guitar stabs. "She pays him back in the bedroom, one step down from her leader. Obeys or is punished like he obeys his bosses." The stifling oppression could be a brutalising army career or domestic violence or a vicious circle composed of the two. A sudden end. End of side two.

The thing about Gang of Four for me was that they sounded more committed than The Clash (who were learning to play and losing their touch) and less contrived than The Jam (who were working out how to sound like Revolver-era Beatles) but their seriousness was not burdened by  a ham fist. Everything still had that bedroom to gig rawness and for all the strident parade ground chanting they never stooped to sloganeering unless it was in irony. Listening now and hearing the transparency of the arrangements, the anti-rock chopping of the guitar and the funk rhythm section reminds me of how exact and pure this was then, as though there was nothing but an instant collective agreement between the members on what had to be said and what was to be done. It reminds me, too, of why I liked this and didn't like Midnight Oil's pared down prog rock approach which did stumble into slogans. Gang of Four kept their music angry, precise, unlovely and accusing. Whether it's the absence of star members or the defiance of singalongs  or maybe just the insistence on the content over the show this band shed all rock and roll traits as the times only absorbed that. But there wasn't nothing left after that. You could dance to this. You could think to it. You could dance and think to it. Even the funk was free of bullshit.