LONDON – British post-punk pioneers Gang of Four didn’t come to Japan until 2005, nearly 30 years after the band formed. If guitarist Andy Gill had his way, it would have happened a lot sooner. “I clearly remember a conversation in the ’80s about going to Japan,” Gill says, sitting among an array of equipment in the basement of his home studio in central London. “The agent told us to go to Australia as well to make it pay. And Jon King (original vocalist) said, ‘I don’t want to go to Australia.’ So that was it. … Why the f—- he said that, I don’t know.”
Exasperation is pretty much par for the course when Gill talks about the past. Ambitious and tunnel-visioned, Gill has been — as he doesn’t miss an opportunity to state — the driving force behind Gang of Four’s on-and-off four-decade career that has been variously groundbreaking, frustrating, reaffirming and bitter.
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