Dave Allen (Gang of Four)
September 2005
Portland

                           

Gang of Four may be described as the greatest band you've never heard. They emerged from Leeds during a time of thrilling music in the U.K.: the late 70's/early 80's explosion that gave the world the Sex Pistols, Joy Division, and oh so many more. Although Gang of Four—which was made up of vocalist Jon King, guitarist Andy Gill, bassist Dave Allen, and drummer Hugo Burnham—led the pack in terms of musical ingenuity and daring lyricism, the band never quite received due recognition. Too far ahead of its time, perhaps. And so in 1982 after just three full albums, Gang of Four were no more.

But now the band are back with the album Return the Gift, a jaw-dropping set of re-recordings of the group's favorite numbers off their various albums. Their reapperance has thrilled long-time fans and is sure to impress the pants off new generations who've grown up listening to bands that got all their ideas from the likes of Gang. Thanks to the 2005 Coachella Festival, tens of thousands of young fans—as well as older ones who just weren't privy to stuff the first time around—were witness to Gang of Four's brute power, piercing wit, and sharp observation, manifest in lyrics as politically pertinent today as they were twenty years ago—not to mention some of the catchiest melodies and rhythms you've ever heard.

Upon the demise of Gang of Four, Allen formed Shriekback, which had a respectable number of hits in the 80's and 90's, before moving on to more behind-the-scenes gigs in the music industry as a label executive pioneering Internet releasing and promotion. Allen now runs the Portland-based company Pampelmoose, providing creative web marketing and merchandising for indie musicians. He took advantage of a break in Gang's touring schedule to talk about the whirlwind of nostalgia and newness that the past year has been.

At Coachella we were in a crowd where there were probably just as many die-hard fans and as there were people clueless about Gang of Four. Then, to see the whole crowd completely converted by the end of your set was so great! And seeing all of the other Coachella musicians off to the side of the stage totally freaking out on your performance was really incredible, too. You touched fans as much as you did the other musicians, and it was just a really amazing experience.

Excellent! We’ve had a lot of feedback along those lines; all the touring has been that way. Actually in the bigger clue venues that we do, it’s been more like a third of the audience is people who know all about it, and then two thirds are clearly young; you know, they hadn’t even been born the first time around, and they’re trying to find out what’s going on. So it’s really heartening.

Thank you for coming back; whatever the reasons were, it’s really great that you had the faith in your own material to realize that it was totally relevant and people needed to experience it again. After Coachella I went out and got as much of your stuff as I could, then compared it to the new re-recordings on Return the Gift. The differences are pretty stunning, but what were the technical aspects that you wanted to correct or bolster with this new recording versus what you guys had done before?

I’ve got a two-part answer to that. First of all, when we got back together in late 2004, the first challenge was to find out after all this time how good we were gonna be live. So we sorted out own idea for what would be acceptable and what wouldn’t be, and once we got that nailed down and we’d planned the first tour—which was the UK tour in winter of 2004-05—we realized that we were actually probably a bit better than we were back in the day, kind of more accomplished players, and yet we still had that spark that was Gang of Four. We were rehearsing in Andrew’s studio and thought why not capture some of these backing tracks and see how well it comes out. And once we started the process, it was like, “Wow, cool, we can revisit all of our favorite songs from back then and give them a sort of 2005 approach!” Because the other part of this answer is, as much as Entertainment! is clearly hailed as a classic album, we often felt that the production was a little thin; the drums were very boxy. It’s like an archaeological dig, really; we wanted to play around with the Dead Sea Scrolls and see what we could come up with.

(Laughs) That’s great. Was there a balance that you were trying to keep between like being true to the original material and then augmenting it with new technology or maybe even new instrumentation? How did you guys do that?

We didn’t add any new instrumentation. Clearly, technology has a hand because Andrew’s studio is a ProTools digital studio, nothing going to tape, and his equipment is obviously very modern compared to what we recorded on back in 1977. But other than that, yeah, we just wanted to get another definitive version of these songs down and let people decide what that would be really, and how they felt about it more than what we felt about it, because the other side of the coin here was giving all of these backing tracks—the newly-recording backing tracks—to all these bands that really like Gang of Four, which has resulted in a double CD.

Right – which is pretty interesting.

Yeah, there’s some great mixes – we’re really quite pleased with the way they came out. Quite stunning, actually. People looked at it in a different way than we possibly ever would. But we’ve got ourselves a handy little package.

It’s a very good way to spread out amongst a bunch of different tastes, I think.

Right.

And concerning the actual distribution of the record, how did the deal with V2 come about? When you were in the studio recording and testing the waters for the re-release, what brought about the decision to come sign with a major label and how to pick which one it was going to be?

To be honest, that was all going on all of the time once we’d announced that we were getting back together. A lot of record labels were very interested in signing us, and we were I think initially a little resistant because we didn’t feel we had to do that. Our manager in England, Jazz Summers, was talking to all of these people, and he reported back that he felt the best possible label for us was V2 because the deal is a global deal—they’ve licensed the rights to the new material for a few years globally, so it’s one label handling everything. And with it being a licensing deal, we get our masters back eventually. He just felt that they were a very dependable label more than the major labels. And my experience so far dealing with the U.S. office in New York, especially Dan Cohen, has been pretty amazing.

I know that your work since leaving the band has been in label logistics and new distribution methods online. How much were you guys thinking that was going to affect the way your music got out now?

Actually I was driving that from day one, because I remember the first meeting we had in London was like, “ Well, I’ll get my company to build a really cool website,” and the guys were totally resistant to that. Which was kind of odd; they were not really sure whether it was necessary or not. But it didn’t take long before they came around, realizing, “Well, look, if Gang of Four was new today, being as exciting and cutting-edge as we are, we probably wouldn’t necessarily think about a record label. We’d probably do everything ourselves and do it all online!” So anyway, what’s happened is V2 jumped in and as part of the deal they threw up some marketing money to have my company build gangoffour.us, and each CD will have a special code inside the sleeve which will take you to a special area of the website where you can get free downloads and watch Quicktime videos and other cool stuff. There’ll be a different sort of mixes from the remix CD, including one that didn’t make it on in time.

Very cool!

So yeah, Pampelmoose—that’s what we do, we build high-end websites and online stores and streaming radio players and so on.

Now how did you get into all this industry stuff after leaving Gang of Four? Was that what your intention had always been career-wise?

Not really. After Shriekback ended, I moved to Los Angeles in 1989 because I was sort of disillusioned with the European music scene. And when I got to Los Angeles, I got a new manager and they hooked me up with Capitol Records, where I started a record label, World Domination. I hired a guy called Jason Fiver, who’s now running this new Warner Bros. e-label, Cordless. He was a computer whiz and he came to me at the beginning, as the Internet was becoming the World Wide Web, and he built a website for World Domination. Of course I said, “What’s that? It looks like a cool graphic, but…” Then I began to realize the potential of the Internet in terms of saving me money for my label, marketing-wise, and that just struck a chord. From that point on I got involved in a lot of dot-com startups that were all about music distribution online, and then I finally got hired by emusic.com as general manager for them. Then when that was going down the pan, I got picked up by Intel and was helping them with an Internet connect product, another online sort of home service, and so on. So I’ve been involved in this for a very long time, about twelve years now. It’s just something I really enjoy because it actually, in a strange way, takes me out of the music industry and into a whole new area which is still developing, so it’s quite exciting.

Sure. You must know, then, that there’s so much controversy about the freedom the Internet allows, the fight over artistic property rights, how stuff gets spread around and how it's really good that it gets spread around but then there’s no real control over it. How much agony as a musician has developing all of this new technology caused you? Do you see it is something that needs to be contained?

No, no – it hasn’t caused me any pain. I’ve been in the front end of research during the Napster years while the record companies were busy complaining. What they didn’t do was effective research, because what I found even when I was at Intel was that your average consumer online using a service like Napster was not downloading entire albums. They were searching for a hot song from an album. And I think what the record companies didn’t like and perhaps what was causing a decline in sales was that if they listened to certain tracks from the album and realized it was a bunch of filler, then they didn’t buy the record. So it wasn’t because of downloading. I saw that as a tool that let customers decide whether they wanted to drop fifteen bucks on a record or if it sucked. So I don’t worry about it too much. I mean, Gang of Four’s philosophy has been quite happily that we’re not having our disc copyright-protected. I don’t know about the rest of them, but I’ve got no problem offering up unprotected mp3s because I think the more things get out there, the more people hear it, and the more people want to buy the whole package. I mean, artists can’t have their cake and eat it, too, you know?

True—you want people to hear your music. You put it out there for public consumption and however the public’s consuming it, you’ve gotta deal with it, I guess.

Yeah! Also, we’re standing at the gates of a whole new delivery system that could switch over and put the little shiny disc out of business, I don’t know. But you have to embrace these things or if you’re going to try and block them then you’d better come out with something else really quick. The consumer doesn’t worry about it, ultimately. They’ll do what they want. Ironically, that’s capitalism, isn’t it? It’s what the record labels want people to do—“Please consume our product”. Unfortunately, it got away from them. (Laughs)

True! (Laughs) Now, in finding out that there’s so much appreciation for you these days, whether it’s with bands ripping you off or paying homage, or fans rediscovering you like I did, what do you feel is most relevant about Gang of Four? Is it the musical style, is it the lyrics and the way that you guys question things via what John’s singing? What is it that’s really striking a chord with people?

I think it’s the whole package. I think that we manage to deconstruct rock and roll musically, at the same time lyrically start questioning the personal politics of life itself. That struck a chord, especially back then. And I think what’s happened is if you bring that up in 2005, people realize when they listen to the record again or see the band live, the musical relevance is one thing but the lyrical relevance is still totally contemporary. I mean, nothing much has changed. Women’s rights—which we used to pontificate on back then—have come a long way, perhaps not all the way, but they’ve certainly have been major improvement there, and so we don’t necessarily perform those songs anymore that were pointedly about that. But everything else, you know...“Natural’s Not In It”, lyrically, is as spot-on today as it was back then. So clearly the appeal of the band is many-fold, and it doesn’t sound dated like some other 80’s bands that you could say are nice but are a bit twee. (Laughs)

It’s a little sad, or just maybe odd and confounding, the fact that we’ve just been talking about technology and how much the Internet and computers have just come so far in terms of all these ways of getting music out, but music itself hasn’t really changed that much. It still hasn’t caught up with you guys. (Laughs)

I know, and that’s kind of galling, but I think that another argument is as an art form, rock music is very young. It’s what, about fifty years old? It’s like a blip! So there’s time yet. But it is a bit boring that no one’s presenting very challenging music or very challenging lyrics. So I’m very grateful, as we all are in the band, and we appreciate the fact that a lot of new bands have discovered our music and have appropriated some of that sound—it’s absolutely fine with us. What I really object to, though, is that they’re not saying anything—they’re still singing about the same ole’ BS!

Right! They’ve realized the sound is catchy and marketable, but they’re not putting any substance into it.

Yeah! That’s pretty much what I would say is going on. Ot’s a complete bore. The challenge is there. If all these bands want to do is be on MTV then, I suppose, fair enough, but if they wanna be held up to a higher standard, then there’s plenty to sing about. We’ve got a whole war on our hands out there; nobody seems to be complaining.

I think it also is that students today are a little more conservative and less radical, and people coming out of the colleges and into the work force, even the bands themselves are just not really stepping up to the plate.

Yeah, they seem to be a little more complacent, which is odd given the ubiquity of the Internet, all the information that you have in front of you, the fact that you can know more or less what is going on everywhere at any time and still people... I don’t know, maybe they’re too bombarded, maybe they’re too desensitized. (Sighs)

In this regard, do you guys feel like what you’re saying now with the music that you did twenty years ago is enough, or are you being provoked to write new material based on current events and your current states of mind?

Well, I think Jon King had the best answer to that one: “We never said we wouldn’t do new material, but then again we never said we would, either.”

Good point. (Laughs)

Yeah! But the big hold up in that is that I live in Portland, Oregon; Hugo’s in Boston; and the other two are in London. What John reminded us was the way we actually made our music was as a four-piece in a room for a long period of time, maybe six to eight weeks. And we don’t have the ability to do that just yet. Now, it doesn’t mean we can’t; we may one day get there. But at the moment we haven’t really been thinking about that. I’d certainly like to explore it; I think that there’s no harm in giving it a go. I just wonder, if we haven’t been anxious to do it, then... (Laughs) You can throw up a whole new set of problems.

Well, it’s one step at a time, definitely.

Yeah! Yeah.

Some people will throw themselves all out there that way, but like we’ve been saying, your old stuff is relevant enough and it’s still so powerful to see you guys live and hear those songs.

Yeah, I think our credibility’s intact and we have a really strong legacy. There’s plenty of music for everyone to listen to.

Very true. I was reading an interview that Jon did in the UK, then I read that you actually quoted him in an interview that you did not too long ago about being in opposition versus being in collaboration with the system. What are the things, both about the industry and society or the world in general, that you guys are most in opposition to with your music?

Well, actually, I think that the point that Jon was making is it’s not necessarily picking a subject to be in opposition to, it’s just operating always from an oppositional position so that we would never compromise our music. For instance, if MTV came along and said “Would you edit this, this, and this, and we’ll play your video?”, we wouldn’t do that, whereas we suspect that other bands today would. So that is the stance. And then within society as well, as a unit we don’t take a stance in politics, yet as individuals I think it’s safe to say we’re very left- leaning, and that’s sort of an oppositional point of view. But more so, I think that as an art form, rock music should be devastatingly challenging all of the time, and when it’s not, then it’s definitely not in opposition. So, the argument is that if you want to co-opt our musical sound, just tack it on to some love song to get radio play, you’re really just collaborating with a particular system—getting radio hits, trying to get on MTV, and all that.

Perpetuating the problem.

Yeah!

Going back to you listing where everyone lives now, it's interesting to point out what the four of you have been doing livelihood-wise over the past few years. Each of you has gone off into varying fields, so how are you applying those jobs and experiences towards the new Gang of Four, towards controlling the way that you tour, the media, and all that stuff?

I think we’re all much more mature; we all have a lot of hands-on activity around the band now, making sure that everything we do is the right thing to do. For this tour, I’m in charge of the t-shirt manufacturing, getting the designs and having them printed and making sure we get them printed using American Apparel, which is, as you know, a sweatshop-free shirt, and doing it through a local company in Portland which is employee-owned. You know, there’s little things you can do that take a stand.

Clearly I’m overseeing the website, and in between we’re making decisions about what shows we should be playing and trying to control the ticket price somewhat. You know, just trying to make it something that we feel we can control rather than be swept along by it.

Right, like young, clueless kids. (Laughs)

Exactly!

Check GangofFour.us for updates on the band. The site also features links to the individual members' sites and projects.