That’s Entertainment!

“We were never a Marxist band,” clarifies Gang of Four bassist Dave Allen by cell phone from London. Regardless, the quartet of onetime Leeds University art students – Allen, guitarist Andy Gill, vocalist Jon King, drummer Hugo Burnham – set a new standard for politically engaged pop through songs like “Natural’s Not in It,” “At Home He’s a Tourist,” and “Anthrax,” which memorably likens being in love to a case of said bovine affliction. They fought punk’s garish simplicity with twitchy guitars and funk-derived rhythms, currently the sound of choice for bands from Brooklyn to Glasgow.

While acolytes like Franz Ferdinand and the Futureheads have troubled the charts in ways Gang of Four never did, 1979’s debut Entertainment! – recently reissued by Rhino – still seethes with urgency and disillusionment. Return the Gift, due Oct. 11 on V2, goes a step further: The group, which split in 1984, re-recorded cuts from Entertainment!, 1981’s Solid Gold, and ’82’s Songs of the Free. The politics are just as potent, but the guitars are sharper and the grooves tighter.

“We’re so much better than we were 25 years ago,” Allen says. “We’ve actually improved as musicians.”

Austin Chronicle: The million-dollar question: Why get back together?

Dave Allen: Has that not been well-documented by now? [Laughs] There’s a strange inevitability to it now that we’ve been back together for a while. We never really got ’round to it because there was not a huge amount of interest. We all had very diverse careers and/or lives going on that really didn’t encompass the idea of a reunion. But once the media latched onto the idea that every band in the world sounded like Gang of Four, of course the phone started ringing again. I don’t know what happened, but somehow the planets were aligned, and Andy Gill and I were talking about it and figured well, if Hugo and Jon were interested, why not at least meet and see what we wanted to do?

AC: Did it feel like picking up where you left off?

DA: It was a matter of if we can’t do it as well as we were doing it when we left off, then we’re really not interested in going out there and doing a sort of weak impersonation of the Gang of Four. Refreshingly, two days into rehearsal, it’s like, “OK. We’ve still definitely got it.”

AC: How much had you kept in touch?

DA: We didn’t. I hadn’t spoken to Jon for about 20 years. Hugo I saw quite a lot. We both lived in L.A. for a period of time. Andy and I met about three times in the 20 years since I left the band. So it was quite a significant moment when we all got back in a room together.

AC: What prompted the band’s interest in funk?

DA: You have to place yourself, if you can, in our situation: growing up in England and ending up at Leeds University. And then being in the midst of this punk rock explosion. That was quite an interesting time for us because here were the Sex Pistols and the Clash, and they’re screaming and yelling and playing these three-chord songs. For a bunch of art students, it’s very intriguing, like these doors had been opened. The walls had been torn down.

Our background musically was reggae, especially very early Bob Marley, Lee Perry, Peter Tosh. All four of us were huge fans of Funkadelic and Parliament, what we called the American R&B music. It was really refreshing to meet a bunch of guys who didn’t really have much interest in the Sex Pistols. I didn’t want to be in a band that had three chords and a clown figure up front. We had no truck with the spiky-haired crowd.

AC: How did that make you fit in with the other bands of the time?

DA: Well, I don’t think we did. By the time we were out touring, we were inviting bands like Pere Ubu and Red Krayola to tour with us. We were interested in the American avant-garde. In fact, when we started out, a lot of the early inspiration had come from bands like Television and Richard Hell & the Voidoids. That was a more interesting form of punk rock to us.

AC: What about it interested you?

DA: I think it was almost an unconscious backlash on our part. We didn’t want to be Billy Idol in Generation X. We didn’t want to be Sham 69 and all these sort of what we called “B-bands.” The Sex Pistols, the Clash, the Jam, they’d sort of stolen the limelight, but we felt that they were very conservative. They weren’t really pushing the envelope or tearing down the walls of convention. They just seemed to be copying all the wrong bits of rock & roll and wearing the uniform of punk. I think that’s how we got labeled post-punk, because we came at it from a different angle altogether. Obviously a more intellectual angle, with a more art-based theory behind it. Other than that, it’s hard to put my finger on what made us do what we did. Remember, we were all like 20 years old.

AC: How did your early audiences react?

DA: Initially, they reacted viscerally, as everyone did to hardcore, intense live performance. The Gang of Four live was quite a thing to see. I think we built an audience of people who understood the message. We were operating in a repressive climate: the collapse of the Labour government, massive unemployment, the class wars, where the middle-class police force was pitched against the working-class miners and other unions. They understood that we had our finger on that pulse, and yet you could probably argue that 50% of them just got the riffs. They didn’t get the lyrics or the whole package.

AC: Are you surprised how well the songs have held up?

DA: I’m not surprised, I’m disappointed. By that I mean everything we’ve been presenting and singing about, nothing much has moved on in 25 years. I think that’s why we’re attracting a younger crowd now. They’re latching onto the songs the same way our original audience did.

AC: How closely do you follow new music?

DA: I’m in tune with a lot of popular music. I have three children who are teenagers. They introduce me to a lot of new things. At the same time, I’ve always been an avid music listener and collector. I’m really depressed with the state of rock music. It’s appalling. Kanye West’s Late Registration is one of my favorites right now, and I’m really looking forward to getting that new Damian Marley album.

My disappointment with the current crop of bands that have been borrowing the Gang of Four sound is that yes, you can listen to the guitar and drum parts, and they’ve borrowed quite extensively from it, but they have nothing to say. How about attacking the current administration about the war in Iraq? So many interviews I read, they’re saying there’s nothing to write about. You’ve gotta be kidding me. You guys are either blind or deaf. It’s very, very depressing.

AC: They’ve picked up on the music and not the content?

DA: Absolutely. Bloc Party, for instance. It’s appalling. They were slagging us off in the press the other day, saying a) they never heard us, and b) they think we’re crap. Which is quite a statement. If you’ve never heard us, how do you know we’re crap?

AC: Do you think the band’s outspoken politics hurt record sales?

DA: Well, no. I think if you look at the Gang of Four’s career, that after all this time we can come back and be as vital as we were originally, then we’ve been incredibly successful. And we’ve sold plenty of records. We don’t have to sit around and count them all. We never did it for the money. I know that upsets American sensibilities, but that’s it.

AC: Why do you think so many musicians today are squeamish about bringing up things like the war?

DA: There’s this backlash culture, like Clear Channel will ban your record, MTV won’t show your video, therefore you won’t sell as many albums. It’s clearly a weakness on the part of the artist to [not] challenge the system. What they don’t understand is that by not challenging the system they’re digging their own graves.

AC: Do you remember playing Austin’s Club Foot the night Ronald Reagan was elected?

DA: I do. Very much. We came out onstage and informed the audience they had a new president. It was an incredibly intense atmosphere, actually, and I wasn’t quite sure which way the audience was going to take that. It being Texas, I don’t think we knew much about whether Austin was leaning left or leaning right, and on the night I do recall thinking, “I hope they don’t think we’re taking the piss here. We don’t need to start a riot.” But the sentiment seemed to be very much on our side.