His Gang Of Four bandmates have announced the awful news that their leader, Andy Gill, has passed away at the age of 64.
Andy's passion for the Gang Of Four and music in general was evident in 2006 when he graced the Hot Press Chatroom at Electric Picnic. Such was his attention to sonic detail that when they played Dublin's Tripod venue at Christmas that same year, Andy insisted on a specific type of microwave being purchased and put on stage so that it sounded just right when hit with a hammer.
Formed in 1976 in Leeds, the Gang Of Four took their lead from punk but never conformed to 1-2-3-4 orthodoxy with their debut album, Entertainment, and its Solid Gold and Songs Of The Free successors going off in all sorts of fantastical funk and dub directions.
The band's influence never waned with Nine Inch Nails, U2, Red Hot Chili Peppers, The Kills, Interpol, Babes In Toyland, Rage Against The Machine, Nirvana, Bloc Party and Franz Ferdinand all readily admitting to being Gang Of Four devotees.
Indeed, Gill, also a talented studio man, was brought in to produce the Chilis' eponymous debut album, which sounded extremely GOF-like in places.
In a little bit of Hot Press related trivia, he was a few years ahead (in all conceivable ways) of our man Stuart Clark when they attended Sevenoaks School in their teens.
We're really going to miss him.

Andy Gill. pic.twitter.com/DHNCz5lAe6

— GANG OF FOUR (@gangof4official) February 1, 2020

The Gang Of Four kept on making great records, with Sammy Steiger last year giving their Happy Now album this enthusiastic thumbs-up:

Throughout a long history of constantly fluctuating line-ups, and despite periods of dissolution, guitarist Andy Gill has remained a constant presence in Gang of Four. The current configuration of John Sterry (vocals), Thomas McNeice (bass) and Tobias Humble (drums) might rightly be called Andy Gill’s Gang of Four.

Other than that, it’s business as usual: familiar spiky industrial-funk married to trenchant state-of-the-nation addresses. Despite the title, Happy Now sounds as serious as a death sentence. There’s not a great degree of variety, with the band preferring to find fifth gear and cruise steadily and menacingly. Gill’s angular guitars mesh economically with bouncy bass lines and solid drums, while any gaps are filled with squidgy synths that ooze from the speakers like Play-Doh.

They slip into third gear briefly for the fragile love song, ‘White Lines’. For the most part, though, it’s the sort of socio-political invective that has always been GoF’s stock-in-trade. Let’s face it, they’ll never be short of material, and a certain orange-hued man in a white house gets the Gang’s appraisal in ‘Alpha Male’ and ‘Ivanka: My Name’s On It’.

As a band with a lasting legacy that has influenced so many others – including but not limited to Nirvana, Massive Attack, Franz Ferdinand, St Vincent, Sleater-Kinney and IDLES – the temptation might be to trade on former glories and phone it in, but with the new blood on board, it sounds like they’re just getting started.