To Hell With Poverty by Jon King
Printed by: Constable
Launch date: third April 2025
This memoir from the Gang of 4’s singer is the story of a band and the story of a friendship. It’s additionally concerning the harm {that a} band and a friendship can do to one another.
The guide is subtitled A Class Act: Contained in the Gang of 4, and sophistication consciousness is a giant a part of the story. The primary a part of the guide is autobiographical, masking King’s household background and childhood recollections, and it exhibits the “posh Southern boys” label that the Gang of 4 got in Leeds wasn’t fairly correct.
King grew up in a family the place cash worries have been regular, and his place on the personal faculty the place he met future Gang of 4 guitarist Andy Gill was funded by the council. That’s what occurred in his Kent village to working-class boys who handed the eleven-plus. Which means that he was the one one within the Gang of 4 – who made their title as a “political” band – whose political instincts have been based mostly on what we’d name nowadays “lived expertise”.
The luxurious faculty, although, set the course of King’s life as a result of it gave him a love of artwork and concepts, together with aspirations. Like lots of our technology, he was the primary in his household to go to school. Signing up for a positive artwork diploma at Leeds College, he aimed to develop into an artist, not a musician.
The band appeared to occur accidentally, constructed on the nucleus of Gill and King and their “chalk and cheese” friendship. The music was impressed by their love of Dr Feelgood and a formative go to to New York within the heyday of CBGB and early punk. The inspiration for King’s lyrics got here from the social and political panorama of the late 70s and early 80s, skilfully evoked within the guide: unemployment, fascism, the nuclear menace, corrupt police, the Yorkshire Ripper…
The ups and downs of band life observe: touring with Buzzcocks, rocking in opposition to racism and sexism, headlining in America, crucial acclaim, wild audiences… and disastrous enterprise selections, and dodgy administration, and an “argumentative band dynamic” that ultimately proved to be terminal. It’s a quick paced and thrilling story, recalled in dramatic element, with an inevitable and all too widespread sad ending.
Regardless of the difficulties, that is an entertaining learn. King’s prose writing voice has the form of bolshy power you affiliate together with his band, propelling the story by a collection of nice anecdotes. A cautionary story, perhaps, however a really satisfying one too.
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To Hell With Poverty is obtainable in any respect good bookstores.
Phrases by Penny Kiley. You may learn her Louder than Warfare opinions at her writer profile, and her archive music journalism on Substack.
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