Jon King remembers the rejections. He kept the receipts. Stiff Records stamped their Gang of Four demo “IN THE DUMPER” and mailed it back like a bad report card. “Some of them were pretty rude,” he says, but you get the sense he’s still a little amused. “The people that were more abusive didn’t write it in a letter, which is a shame.”
Forty-some years and a few revolutions later, King is now holding the biggest receipt of all: 77-81, a stunningly heavy box set collecting the band’s earliest work—Entertainment!, Solid Gold, a flood of B-sides, demos, a 100-page book, a red cassette, and a 1980 live show recorded at San Francisco’s American Indian Center. The set arrives after King and his bandmates took advantage of a little-known U.S. copyright law that allows artists to reclaim their catalogs after 40 years. “It’s the only country in the world where artists can get back their catalog,” he says. “A very enlightened law.”
The release is packed with history, not just musical but literal—images of the band on anti-fascist tours, flyers from the Rock Against Racism campaign, and that infamous 1939 Nazi rally at Madison Square Garden, now recontextualized for the B-side “History’s Bunk.” “You look at that photo and go, ‘Oh god,’” he says. “It’s shocking.”
But King doesn’t just want to shake you. He wants you to move. “We loved funk. We loved really loud guitar. We loved dancing,” he says. Hendrix was god. The Ramones were sacred. And punk, even in its earliest days, was already too stale to hold them. “We liked the angular stuff, but punk didn’t have that danceability. That’s why the Chili Peppers were fans.”
This wasn’t rebellion for rebellion’s sake. It was dance music with teeth. And teeth with ideas. “There’s nothing wrong with fantasy life,” he explains, “but to say something about what it’s like to be alive—that was really exciting.”
It still is. Gang of Four’s fingerprints are all over today’s most ferocious political music. Run the Jewels sampled “Ether.” Frank Ocean looped “Love Like Anthrax.” And Jon King, who once wrote Solid Gold lyrics in the throes of late ‘70s British collapse, now watches a different kind of empire crack from afar. “We don’t have a meritocracy,” he says. “We have something much closer to an oligarchy.”
The songs haven’t lost their bite because the world hasn’t lost its teeth. “Heat’s ‘Send in the Army’—that was about someone with hard-right ideas on how the family and society should be. And now, we’re still hearing that line about ‘they just don’t want it enough.’” He’s talking about Jared Kushner, but he may as well be quoting “Paralysed”: Wealth is for the ones who want it. Paradise if you can earn it.
Asked if Solid Gold felt darker than Entertainment!, King doesn’t flinch. “The second record had more feeling. I was writing in the third person before. Solid Gold was more like looking at yourself and saying things aren’t right.”
Even the live shows were battles. Skinheads and fascists crashed their gigs, and the band, who co-founded the Anti-Nazi League in the UK, took the stage anyway. “It got quite hairy,” King admits. “But we were always focused. Foot on the gas. Never stop.”
That’s what makes the inclusion of the American Indian Center show so vital to the box. “We felt total solidarity with the Native American movement,” King says. “Andy was obsessed with Sitting Bull. It was one of those shows where we thought: how are we lucky enough to be here?”
The night after, they played the Geary Temple. It was 110 degrees on stage. King sweated out four pounds in 75 minutes. “I had my head in a bucket of ice afterward,” he says, laughing. “Steam coming off my head.”
Even the heat didn’t stop the juggernaut. It never has.
Watch the interview above and then check out some classics.
