One to finally cross off my bucket list: I've wanted to see Gang of Four since at least 1981, and even though there's only one of the original gang still in the band, it's guitarist Andy Gill, and I'd be more than glad to see a show listed as "Andy Gill Plays Gang of Four Songs," so I shook off my lingering late winter cold and went to Variety Playhouse to see 'em.
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New York's Public Access Television opened. They seemed an odd choice to be opening for Gang of Four. Andy Gill recently said, "Gang Of Four was never a star vehicle. We defined ourselves against stadium rock, rejected received wisdoms about music and prided ourselves on working as an artistic collective." PATV played loud, generic, John Fogarty, beer-commercial guitar rock (as the curmudgeonly Mark Kozelek once described a far better band). All their songs sounded the same to me. Some people in the audience seemed to really like them, but I just didn't get it.
No such problem with the reformulated Gang of Four. Gill has trained the young new band well, honing their skills to a fine vehicle for the band's explosive music, and they played not only authentic sounding renditions of Gang of Four classics, but brought a new urgency to the sound as well, if such a thing was even possible.
They covered just about everything I wanted to hear, including Not Great Men, At Home He's A Tourist, and even Anthrax.
The set ended with To Hell With Poverty, and their encore included I Love A Man in a Uniform.
Bonus points; the band had multiple mikes set up on stage, and each performer freely wandered the stage performing from mic to mic, so the lineup on stage was never a static one-two-three assemblage, but a constantly shifting arrangement of musicians.
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