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“Damaged gooooooods! Do damaged gooooooooods!”
Wearing a bright red t-shirt emblazoned with the artwork from their seminal 1979 LP, Entertainment, the man stood next to Gigwise is what you have to assume most reformed bands would call their worst nightmare. He mildly bops about through song after song, only becoming animated when the band stop playing and he has the chance to continue baying for the classics.
When Andy Gill – the only original member of the current line up – eventually replies “we’re gonna do it later, but first you need to eat your greens” with a serrated edge of sarcasm in his voice, it’s evident that this group certainly aren’t interested in simply peddling the hits. New single ‘Stranded’ is introduced by John Sterry – who took over frontman duties from Jon King in 2012 – as being dedicated to “the guy we overheard at the bar…the one in the cheap suit” (who you’d imagine was caught saying something disparaging about their new material) and it all adds to the feeling that they’ve got something to prove, a musical chip on their shoulder to go along with the landslide’s worth of socio-economic and psycho-sexual ones.
This is a good thing. It adds urgency.
And if you take the urgency out of The Gang of Four sound, all bludgeoning bass and guitar scratches arranged around jagged funky-asthma-attack-rhythms, then there’s not much left. Thomas MacNiece sounds in especially fine form. He pulverises 1981’s ‘What We All Want’, making his four strings work twice as hard as Gill’s six – the former fizzing, popping and growling will the latter layout a blanket of sinister background noise. But obviously it’s Gill who holds the limelight – despite the odd histrionics of his young foil, Sterry – and during ‘Anthrax’ he takes a moment to soak in the adoration of a room largely filled by first-time-around fans, adopting a Christ-like figure, arms outstretched, guitar held to the right an then dropped with a wonderful clang.
Japanese guitarist Hotei joins the gang for ‘Isle of Dogs’ – another cut from the new album – adding his squealing whammy bar hijinks to Gill’s noisy attacks before the show is rounded off with a couple of sing-along moments, ‘At Home He Feels Like A Tourist’ and ‘To With Hell Poverty’. And as sing along lines go Poverty’s ‘Ohhhhhhhhhhhhh, AH, AH, AH OWWWWWWWW!’ is oddly moving done en masse.
It certainly sounds better than “damaged gooooooooods! Do damaged gooooooods”.
