Ether
It opens with the bass. Four notes, deliberate and heavy, before anything else arrives. Then the drums. Then two voices talking over each other about completely different things. Jon King is singing about aspiration and disappointment, the private logic of wanting a better life. Andy Gill is singing about Northern Ireland, H-Block, the torture of special category prisoners, oil claims under Rockall. Neither voice resolves the other. The song holds them both and does not choose between them. That is the first thing you hear on Entertainment!
Gang of Four formed in Leeds in 1977. Gill and King came from the university art department, Dave Allen on bass, Hugo Burnham on drums. They signed to EMI in 1978. The album was recorded at The Workhouse in London and released September 25, 1979. Leeds at the time was a city with organized National Front activity and an active left. The friction was physical. The band were card-carrying Marxists who had studied cultural theory and understood pop music as a political instrument. They were not interested in protest folk. They wanted a sound that felt like what was happening.
“Leeds at that time was fairly bleak, especially without much money, and not a very comfortable place to be, with fairly constant strife between National Front representatives and people on the Left, which often broke out into street violence or violence in pubs.”
Gill’s guitar on the record is not melodic. It chops and stabs, influenced by Wilko Johnson’s rhythm playing but pushed into something more angular and deliberately uncomfortable. The spaces are as important as the notes. When the band stops, they stop completely. When they start again, it is with intention. The whole record operates this way. The funk is there but stripped of warmth. The groove is present but cut through with something abrasive. “Ether” establishes the method in the first three minutes. Everything that follows on the album is a variation on the same argument.
Andy Gill died on February 1, 2020. He was 64. Almost every guitar record with political intent made after 1979 owes something to what he did here. “Ether” is track one, side one. It is the first thing Gang of Four chose to say.