I just saw the news on Twitter. Very sad. An inimitable guitarist… I’ve tried to – it’s tricky! I know they had their detractors on here but I love this sound…
Andy Gill of Gang of Four RIP
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A short respiratory illness at the age of 64 could happen to any of us. When I bought Gang Of Four first EP I was a happy student. Seems like yesterday. His style was startling, almost like an aggressively super-charged Reggae chop. Boy, he had attitude! I hope he kept that fire in his belly right through to the end.
Super charged reggae chop. Good description.
Carved out their own niche.
Nice to see the backing vocalist, future Robert Burns orchestral-folk album singer and MBE, in that clip.
I think ‘entertainment!’ is going on the Linn later.
See also…
For all the quality of his later records, he peaked early with his first. The Damaged Goods EP is better than the same songs re-recorded for Entertainment!
Weird eh?
Damaged Goods was my morning earwrom. only sated be listening to entertainment! (a fine way to spend 40 minutes).
Sad news about Andy Gill, unique guitarist.
Distinctly remember a little punk-wars skirmish in the group, as given in a MM or NME article, round about 1982. Sorry, can’t remember who was who. The subject of the Beatles comes up.
One: Oh, I quite enjoy the Beatles.
Other: Eh, what, enjoy, Beatles????
One: Yeah, I’ve got a few of their records. They make me, y’know, erm..kinda..emotional.
Other: What? Emotional? You fucking soft wet prat!
Etc.
I suspect “Other” was Gill.
I agree that the first EP is the best record they did ( shame that Bob Last won’t let anyone listen to it). This is Andy Gill’s version of a protest song- a dig at The Clash’s ‘Tommy Gun’ perhaps?
I have the FAST Product – The First Year Plan compilation and can, ahem, ‘help’.
That’s a good old noise isn’t it. I didn’t know them at all and was always slightly put off by the political angry man thing they had going but another sad loss.
Thanks for saving me the time to explore. Too shouty for me, I fear. Has its merits. Prefer the Redskins. A little.
Wait come back! This is downright groovy: I love a man in a uniform.
From Alexis Petridis’s piece on Gill from the Guardian homepage. He covers, among other things, Gill’s production work with the Red Hot Chilli Peppers:
“It was not, as it turned out, a great meeting of minds: the band’s members were dismayed when they snuck a look at the notebook Gill kept, to discover that he’d baldly appraised them as “shit”.”
Lol.
As I said on the AW post-punk podcast, without Go4 there would be no RHCP, so they have a lot to answer for.
Re:”without Go4 there would be no RHCP”
I initially read that as “RCMP” – the Royal Canadian Mounted Police, which made for a fairly amusing sentence. Ha!
Mr Gill’s death came as a bit of shock to me, I’m not entirely sure why compared to the death of other musicians I’ve followed. Anyway, I’ve been doing that thing you do when someone from a band you follow dies, you re-listen to their stuff, in chronological order obviously, and I’d forgotten just how much I liked their first two albums and just what a cliff they dropped off after that.
What is particularly sad is that Andy Gill was not too proud to push the Go4 work to anybody who’d have him so he’s been on a lot of podcasts in the recent years and listening to his energy and drive for the band was infectious, he always had plans and something coming up.