For the first two minutes of Frank Ocean’s “Futura Free,” a slow, half-drowned beat runs beneath Ocean’s voice and piano. It’s taken from Gang of Four’s “Love Like Anthrax,” recorded in 1979 for the band’s debut album, “Entertainment!” The sample comes from the point in the song right after Andy Gill toggles a two-note alarm on his guitar. His tone softens and lifts up to make room for the entrance of Dave Allen’s bass and Hugo Burnham’s drums. Gill’s guitar has been groaning and screeching, like a fender pulled across a bollard, for ninety seconds, but with deliberation, as if his noise were fulfilling a single purpose. The rhythm section starts playing a figure that sounds like dance music with some bits removed, spinning off its center like a dryer full of wet bath mats. The song is bright and awake and not like any music that came before it, not really.
All three instruments are there in the Frank Ocean sample, apparently, but you can only hear the drums. “I couldn’t hear our bit but pretend that I do when anybody asks,” Burnham told me a few days after Gill died, from a respiratory illness, in London on February 1st. “I love Frank Ocean.”
It is proper that one of the most recent appearances of Gang of Four’s music is in a song by Frank Ocean, someone who has melted and reshaped what a pop star can do and say. Ocean inverted the role of the male singer just as Gang of Four inverted the idea of what a guitar band with a vocalist might do. Should a singer talk about feelings or theories? What are electric instruments for? Why is music amplified? Why do songs have so many notes? Why would four people go into a room and play together? Gill’s spoken-word part of “Love Like Anthrax”—one of two simultaneous vocals, inspired by the split-screen dual narrative of Jean-Luc Godard’s film “Numéro Deux”—gives us an answer, a way of understanding the cultural moment and how Gang of Four reimagined it in 1979. “I don’t think we’re saying there’s anything wrong with love,” Gill says in the song. “We just don’t think that what goes on between two people should be shrouded with mystery.”
The day after Gill died, I spoke to the Gang of Four singer and lyricist Jon King. “ ‘Anthrax’ was a breakthrough,” he said. “We felt able to move on from verse-bridge-chorus songs. We had discovered a sound.”
If a Frank Ocean fan, or anyone who doesn’t know Gang of Four, plays “Anthrax,” they will find the essence of Gill, in a performance as important as any other from that time. Eulogizing music is another form of death, so put the song on at a high volume and wait for the nearest person to complain. Feedback isn’t particularly novel now, and it was hardly new in 1979, but “Anthrax” used it in a way that is still astonishing. The song begins with just a guitar, feeding back enthusiastically for a minute with no nods toward a song or any obvious musical frame. It’s a happy and glorious and dangerous noise, and once the rest of the band leaps in it disappears. When Gill’s guitar returns, it’s no more normative. He just keeps squealing. It’s a fabulous guitar song with no guitar part. How’s that for minimalism?
Gill presented his love of minimalism as a guiding principle for Gang of Four, in an interview with Mary Harron for the British weekly Melody Maker, in May of 1979. “Our attitudes have always been to strip down to the bare essentials, or try to,” he said. “Most New Wave groups had a lot of sound textures going on simultaneously. What we’re more interested in is being able to listen to a Gang of Four song and hear every single element—bass, drums, vocals, guitar—separate and equally dominant.”
Making a band legible, from any distance, involves more than a little technical modification. King told me about the band’s collective desire to get away from the “fatness” of valve amps like those made by Marshall, which were popular with English bands in the seventies. Gill used transistor amplifiers made by another English company, Carlsbro, which lent a cold clarity and nakedness to his playing. “That was very much one of Andy’s things,” King said. “It’s very difficult to be naked—it has to be about the thing.”
That thing was very much up for grabs in 1978, when what is widely called the post-punk period was gathering steam in England. Inspired by the self-starters of punk, the second wave of bands had a double remit: love the past and sound nothing like it. The critic Greil Marcus, in the liner notes of “A Brief History of the Twentieth Century,” Gang of Four’s first compilation album, describes this moment: “The Gang of Four acted out, and put into records, a picture of an individual who had discovered that ordinary life—the gestures of affection and resentment one made every day, the catchphrases one spoke every day as if one had invented them—is in fact sold and bought as grease for shopping and silence for the accumulation of capital and passivity.”
The band’s musical influences were not obscure: Allen loved the Meters; Burnham praised the work of Simon Kirke, the drummer for Free; and all the surviving members of Gang of Four mentioned Parliament and Funkadelic. Of Funkadelic’s “One Nation Under a Groove,” King said, “You just lay down a groove and then you come in and out with something or other.” This describes, precisely, one of the ideas behind “Anthrax,” mapped out on paper by Gill and King in 1977, when they occupied “adjacent rooms in a shitty house” while attending the University of Leeds.
Two major inspirations for Gill specifically were Jimi Hendrix—especially his work on “Voodoo Child (Slight Return),” which King says he and Gill listened to “endlessly”—and Dr. Feelgood’s guitarist Wilko Johnson. He’s not usually mentioned in American arguments about seventies rock, but Johnson is the biggest antecedent for Gill’s playing. If the name rings no bells, listen to Gill’s playing on “Outside the Trains Don’t Run on Time” or, really, any Gang of Four song. Then, watch a clip of Dr. Feelgood playing “She Does It Right,” live on the British television show “Old Grey Whistle Test,” in 1975. Johnson doesn’t play with a pick or use his fingertips like a folkie. He whacks the guitar with the back of his hand, using fingernails but also the hand itself. That attack, combined with his Fender Telecaster, created a sound that is as bracing and harsh as Gang of Four itself. (If you want to keep learning about the band, don’t worry. The rights to Gang of Four recordings were owned by Warner Bros. in the United States, and the label took the song files down when the band could not reach an agreement with the company about a new contract last year. The rights to the recordings have now reverted to the band, and the original recordings should be up on streaming platforms soon.)
When Gang of Four came to New York in 1979 and performed at Hurrah, they did a version of “Damaged Goods,” which was already enough of an underground hit that the audience sang along to most of it. Included in The Pitchfork 500, “Damaged Goods” was the band’s first single, there on the flip side of the first version of “Anthrax,” and it probably remains the band’s best-known song. King likened the sound of it to the first-generation video game Breakout (a bouncing ball chips away at a wall of bricks), which he and Gill played during the recording of “Entertainment!” In “Damaged Goods,” the bass and guitar toss small chords back and forth and then take off in opposite directions, with Allen playing what sounds like the song’s melody and Gill hacking away like a sort of angry, rusty metronome. The demystification of sex and love referered to on the B-side, in “Love Like Anthrax,” had already begun on the A-side: “Sometimes I’m thinking that I love you / But I know it’s only lust.”
