Blending punk, disco, reggae, and funk, with a dash of Marxist theory, Gang of Four offered the sound of dissent for many in Margaret Thatcher’s Britain. Last week, singer Jon King and drummer Hugo Burnham — the band’s remaining original members — wrapped up their farewell tour in the US. The pair were rounded out by indie rock royalty Ted Leo on guitar and Gail Greenwood (L7, Belly) on bass. King and Burnham sit down with Madeleine Brand to reflect on never breaking through commercially, navigating thieving managers, and the boringness of English punk.
For a deeper dive into the Gang of Four lore, revisit their KCRW live session from 2015. At that time, both King and Burnham were on extended hiatus from the band, and Gang of Four was spearheaded by the late founding guitarist Andy Gill.
The following has been edited and condensed for clarity.
KCRW: How does it feel, emotionally, for both of you to be on this farewell tour?
Hugo Burnham: In many ways, [it’s] quite different to every tour before. It's a small group, there are just seven of us traveling, and it is enormous fun. Almost every show has sold out, and what has been quite moving is [that] Jon and I both go to the merch table after the show finishes; Jon [is] signing his book and I’m signing posters and records and just talking to people. The lines have been long, and without hyperbolising, grown men [have been] crying and saying: “You changed my life, or you saved my life.” And really, I'm telling the truth, and people [are] saying:
“We need you right now.” … Because we speak to the reality of what's going on, because things are rotten right now, and scary, and dark. My daughter is 25, all her friends are that age. There's an air of hopelessness.
Let’s talk a little bit about when you were both around that age. What can you tell us about the early days of the band and your time at university together in Leeds?
Jon King: From my point of view, British punk was really an irrelevance. I had to write a dissertation and an essay about a subject of my own choosing. I decided to write about Jasper Johns, the American pop artist. And to do that properly, I needed to go and actually look at the paintings where they mostly were, which was in Manhattan. Andy Gill, who was in the year below me, didn't have to write an essay, but he wanted to come along with me. We went more or less every night to CBGBs. Everyone in the room — The Ramones, Blondie Talking Heads, the Voidoids — were then pretty much unknown bands, or unknown outside of Manhattan. And everyone thought we were in a band. Hugo, Andy, [and I] had already talked about being in a band. I thought the British punk rock thing was really conservative musically. It’s just like, speeded up Black Sabbath. Whereas, if you compare, say, Richard Hell or Television to The Sex Pistols… I mean the Sex Pistols, the music has not aged well. It's really boring to listen to. The Ramones did it far better in 1976. It's unimprovable, that first album, I saw them half a dozen times. And then the interesting bands, like Talking Heads, were pushing the envelope about what you might sing about and what you might sound like. So it was really American music. Hugo revered Creedence Clearwater Revival, and I revered The Band and Bob Dylan.
So the band broke up for a while. The main four of you were together for what, three years?
HB: We started in late ‘76 Dave left in the summer of ‘81 and I left the band in April or so of ‘83.
What happened?
JK: The stresses of being in a band were… we never missed an opportunity to miss an opportunity. “I Love a Man in Uniform" was banned in Britain. “At Home He's a Tourist” was banned by the BBC.
Why were those songs banned?
HB: “The story about “Tourist” was that it was climbing into the charts. The BBC said, “Come onto Top of the Pops.” So we said “yes.” And they [told us] to change the lyric, “and the rubbers you hide in your top left pocket,” which is part of the refrain of the chorus. And we sort of [grumbled], but we thought, okay, this is a great opportunity. We said that we’d change it to, “and the packets you hide.”
[But] they suddenly decided that that wasn't good enough. They wanted us to change it again to, “and the rubbish you hide.” And we said, “well, that changes the whole thing.” [They replied:] “Yeah, but then it doesn't sound like we've made you change the lyrics.”
JK: They were very patrician about it: “The last thing we want to do is to censor your work absolutely. We'd never do that, however…” But the number one single that week was “Ring My Bell…”
HB: … By Anita Ward and if that isn’t a euphemism…
JK: The week before we'd been on, Squeeze had been on with “Pulling Mussels (From The Shell), which has really got some filthy lyrics in it. When “Uniform” was banned, we were rising up the charts. It was doing really well, but we went again to do a TV show, and we were told that we could play any song we liked… except the song that we were there for, because our paratroopers were going into … the Falklands, which I'd never even heard of. They thought [the song’ was unpatriotic. I mean, I don't know whether we did the right or the wrong thing. Certainly, I was prepared to change stuff, but I wasn't prepared to change the meaning.
HB: It turned our record label’s promotion team against us.
So all of that contributed to the band breaking up?
JK: It did in a sense, because we never had a commercial hit.
HB: Well, the building frustration. We got close quite often, it always seemed to be right around the corner … and we made some poor decisions sometimes.
JK: It's very difficult. People say being in a band is like being married, but it's not. I mean, when you're married, you don't spend 24/7/365 with your significant other. [Being in a band] can become very difficult, because there’s no sort of training in how to be with other people all the time. It's not unique to us.
HB: I mean, we were educated, we weren't stupid, but there was no training or education about the business of the entertainment industry. It took a while to understand what publishing actually meant.
JK: The only useful advice I give to anybody, [that] I have ever given to anybody, is to be interested in what you're not interested in. If you're a creative person, be interested in the boring money people. If you're a boring money person, be interested in what the creative people are doing, because each side could bring the other down. That is my only useful piece of advice. I wish I'd given that to myself back then because I wasn't interested in money. I've never been interested in money. As a result, our manager — based in Los Angeles — was a crook. He stole all of my money, and he stole all of Andy Gill's money. He was very instrumental in steering us to get rid of Hugo, because Hugo is the only one who kind of had any sense.
You thought something was wrong here?
HB: Well, before we got that manager, I’d sort of been managing the band between [other] managers. It caused some fissure between us all.
JK: Bennet, now dead, was a crook. He managed Frank Zappa and Nina Hagen. We thought, “well, if he's good enough for Frank, he'll be good enough for us.” He invited us to his “office” — I put this in scare quotes — off of Sunset.
HB: There were probably like 10 or 11 people all scurrying about with fax sheets, and on the phone. They were all rather gorgeous. [So we thought:] “Okay, this is active, this is good.” But what we discovered was he only had two people working for him, the rest were all unemployed actors that he hired in for the day to look active.
JK: So it was a long con, every person in that room was an actor … All these really ripped young men and these gorgeous women were there to sucker us into thinking it was a busy office.
HB: When Bennett came in, [he kept] hundreds of thousands. It was never given back. So we all suffered that one.
So you broke up, but there were reunions along the way?
HB: Yeah, we got the original four of us back together in 2005. And then there were various iterations, until Jon finally called it a day, working with Andrew in about 2012.
JK: Andy was an alcoholic by then. He and I had been lifelong friends, but we're no longer really on speaking terms, and I won't go into any details. And then when we thought about getting back together again he, of course, very sadly, died during the production of the box set — which came out in the same year that he died. And of course, it was the COVID year.
HB: I was the only one that everyone spoke to, because we always had business. And I did that when people weren't talking to each other, because things had to get done.
So you've reconstituted the band, but you are the only two remaining. How do you feel about that?
JK: I'm privileged, really: Hugo and I being great friends and working with each other, but also to work with Gail Greenwood, who was from Belly and L7, and Ted Leo.
HB: This is a great Gang of Four. Actually, in Portland, we put on a show, and there were 24 of [recently deceased original bassist Dave Allen’s] extended family in the audience. We got his very well known bass guitar, the black one with “fact” written on it — that he had for years — and we just put it on the drum riser, on a stand. It just sat there, for the entire show. It was quite moving.