The first thing you hear on Entertainment! is the bass. Four notes, deliberate and not hurrying, before the drums arrive, before the guitars, before either voice. Then Andy Gill and Jon King begin talking over each other, and they are not talking about the same thing. King is singing about aspiration and disappointment, the private calculus of wanting a better life. Gill is singing about Northern Ireland, H-Block, the torture of special category prisoners, oil rights under Rockall, the mechanics of imperial possession. The two arguments run simultaneously, neither resolving the other. Gang of Four opens their debut album with a song that refuses to hold one thought at a time, because the world did not hold one thought at a time either.

The band formed in Leeds in 1977. Andy Gill and Jon King met studying art at the University of Leeds. Dave Allen played bass. Hugo Burnham played drums. Leeds in the late 1970s was not a comfortable place to be on the left. The National Front had an organized presence. The confrontations were physical, happening in streets and in pubs. The band studied cultural theory alongside music theory. They understood that entertainment was not neutral, that the form of a song made an argument before the words did. They wanted to use the shape of funk. The groove, the repetition, the emphasis on rhythm. Strip it of warmth until what remained was the structure without the comfort.

Gill signed the band to EMI in 1978. The album was recorded at The Workhouse in London and released September 25, 1979. Gill’s guitar playing on the record is not melodic. It chops and stabs in short, deliberate lines that owe something to Wilko Johnson’s rhythm work with Dr. Feelgood but push that influence somewhere harder and more angular. The spaces matter as much as the notes. When the band stops, they stop completely. The absence is part of the argument. “Ether” opens with this grammar and the rest of the album follows it. The groove always present, the warmth always withheld.

Andy Gill died on February 1, 2020. He was 64. The record he made in 1979 shaped almost every guitar band that followed and wanted to say something. “Ether” is track one, side one. It is the first choice the band made on record: two voices, two subjects, no resolution, four notes of bass, and then everything at once.