Britain’s late 70s provincial punk scenes were seldom places for the faint-hearted, but few were as starkly polarised as that in Leeds. At one extreme, the city had a large National Front presence: Leeds has the dubious distinction of the giving the world its first openly Nazi punk bands, the Dentists and the Ventz.
At the other, there were the bands spawned by the city’s university and the radical leftwing theory popular in its fine art department: the Mekons, Delta 5 and Gang of Four. The result was frequently chaos, “terrible violence”, as Gang of Four guitarist Andy Gill put it. There were pitched battles on the university campus and at the F Club, the city’s main punk venue.
It’s tempting to say you could hear the tension in the way Gill played guitar. His biggest inspiration was Dr Feelgood’s Wilko Johnson, but he took Johnson’s taut, jagged, aggressive rhythm guitar style and ran with it: there was a sharp funk influence too, but as the writer Simon Reynolds noted, the way Gill played guitar could make you flinch.
There was something austere about it. Gill refused to use distortion or play solos, unless you counted what he did on the extraordinary Love Like Anthrax from Gang Of Four’s debut EP Damaged Goods, where he unleashed a howling, scourging torrent of feedback that opened the song then seemed to crash in and out of it completely at random.
Source: UK Guardian
