Alongside Pere Ubu, Wire and Joy Division, Gang Of Four's post-punk/funk fusion became one of the most commonly cited influences of the post-millennial decade. Content, the quartet's first album in 16 years, is a focused and fiery record, the sound of a committed band playing in a room with minimal smoke and mirrors. So did they feel the need to reclaim that very sound from numerous young (The Rapture, Franz, Bloc Party) and sometimes not-so-young (Chili Peppers) pretenders?

"I think so,” says guitarist and producer Andy Gill. “Obviously we’ve taken a very long time to go about doing this record. Possibly a ridiculously long time! I remember the conversation Jon (King, vocalist) and I had three or four years ago, and he said, ‘We’re doing these festival gigs, it’s a lot of fun. But maybe we should do some new things to make our lives more interesting.’ That was the initial motivation. And it didn’t really need talking about, it was a case of doing stuff that came naturally – similar kinds of questions and solutions as when we started off: rhythm is king and the groove is the master and everything is subservient to that thing which gets under your skin.”
Miscegenation is the key. Just as Public Enemy sounded Teutonic, and Afrika Bambaataa sampled Kraftwerk, Gang Of Four were classic post-punk yet couldn’t have existed without dub and funk.
“Me and Jon really liked black American music and also Jamaican music when we were teenagers,” Andy concedes, “but when it came to developing the early Gang Of Four sound, I thought the way people seemed to have to choose between doing groove orientated stuff or white guitar music was a strange thing. My approach to these rhythms was to absolutely invent stuff from scratch. There’s this huge adventure in seeing what happens if you move the snare drum half a beat later or earlier, and it ends up sounding slightly odd and yet completely groovy. How much better is that mechanistically unstoppable groove if it also surprises you and feels like something you haven’t quite heard before?”
Content also comes down squarely on the side of album as art artifact (and fetish object) in an age of disposable downloads. As well as the standard format, the new record will be available in a limited edition 'Ultimate Content Can' which contains amongst its treasures an art piece Jon and Andy have created to depict the last 40 years of world history, a book of Rotoscoped photographs of the band's emotions, and sachets of Jon and Andy's blood.
"It's very often stated that the age of the album is over and it's all about the individual download of a three minute song, whether it be file-shared or actually purchased,” Andy reflects, “but we strongly felt that you lose something if you don’t have a context for a song, its brothers and sisters. If you think of great records, very often songs gain something from being part of a larger whole. Off the top of my head, I was listening to Exile On Main Street a month or so ago, and the songs are not ones you'd hold up as being individually great classics, but when you listen to the whole lot, the album itself is a classic."
Plus, album-is-over propaganda overlooks the artists' preference. Poets prefer collections, painters arrange work in galleries. Same with musicians.
"Exactly. It's an example of the technology tail wagging the cultural dog. Just because it's possible to do it that way and it's more convenient doesn't mean to say it's better. When we started Gang Of Four the stuff that was on me and Jon's minds was as much the films of Godard or the paintings of Manet as it was the brilliant music of Dr Feelgood. It was a big soup of stuff going on that was informing where we thought we might go. When me and Jon were doing Fine Art at university, the thing that was attractive about pop culture was everybody got their lessons from the moment they were born, from the moment the radio goes on. We really wanted to tap into that."

Content is out now on Groenland Records. You can listen to 'You'll Never Pay For The Farm' on hotpress.com