Gang Of Four’s Jon King now sees the comedy in their endless self-sabotage

Gang Of Four’s moment was dramatic but brief. It was littered with times when the future seemed impossibly bright before disaster crept up with a cosh in their relentless “refusal to do the obvious”. Being a musician, he points out, is a ridiculous life best not taken seriously. His memoir ‘To Hell With Poverty!’ rightly describes itself as “rich with stories”, many remembered in this spirited exchange with David and Mark, among them …

… the transformational effect of a scholarship to the boarding school where he met GO4 guitarist Andy Gill and future film-makers Adam Curtis and Paul Greengrass.

… life-changing records he heard in the school art department – Highway 61 Revisited, the Stooges, the MC5.

… “never miss an opportunity to miss an opportunity”.

… aged 11, bumping into John Lennon in Sevenoaks who’d just bought his Mr Kite poster.

… signing a contract with the manager that robbed them and whose busy and efficient office of “ripped and buffed” staff turned out to be hired actors.

… being thrown off Top Of The Pops for not changing an ‘offensive’ song lyric – “EMI were “mortified”.

… the old hippy world of the ‘70s – Hawkwind, the Whole Earth Catalog and “a Withnailesque flat where we had an airgun to shoot the mice”.

… hopeless online misinterpretations of his song lyrics - “there may be soil under fuck all” (aka “there may be oil under Rockall”).

… the rigours of trying to promote “outsider music”.

… reaching “the point where the game is up”.

… the Bourgeois Brothers, the ‘comedy’ duo he formed with Andy Gill at Leeds University and why they returned to England to form a band in the mould of Talking Heads, the Ramones and Richard Hell.

… and why recording the audiobook moved him to tears.

Order ‘To Hell With Poverty!’ here:

https://www.amazon.co.uk/Hell-Poverty-Class-Inside-Gang/dp/1636142346

Gang Of Four tour dates:

https://www.songkick.com/artists/393675-gang-of-four/calendar

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