Gang Of Four Announce Details Of 'Content' - First Album For Sixteen Years
Tuesday, 02 November 2010
Written by Jon Stickler
Gang Of Four, one of the most radical and radically important groups of the last thirty years, are set to release their first album of new songs for sixteen years on January 24th 2011. Entitled 'Content' the record sees founding members Jon King and Andy Gill continue to deliver intelligent and liberating music that is both provocative and thrilling. New tracks include 'Who Am I?' 'You Don’t Have To Be Mad', 'I Can’t Forget Your Lonely Face' and 'I Party All The Time' and they reveal Gang Of Four to be just as challenging and unconventional now as they were in 1978.
“What we're trying to do is keep it totally stripped down, where everyone in the band makes an equally intense contribution,” says King whilst Gill says: “When Jon and I talked about the album we were making, we looked back at some of the other records we had made and thought about how the visual context we created for the music was integral to each project. Bands usually hand over the artwork, the ‘packaging’, to other people but for us, it’s an intrinsic part of what we’re communicating. The record is called 'Content', in recognition of the way every creative form has been reduced to just that: content, the obligatory filling for the advertising sandwich. So we decided to make a box with contents, or rather a metal can. It reminded us a little of Manzoni’s canning of his own excrement [Artist's Shit 1961].”
The album will be available in a standard CD release and on vinyl. It will also be available in a limited edition 'Ultimate Content Can' which contains six booklets, the first containing the new album on CD, the second featuring an art piece Jon and Andy have created to depict the last 40 years of world history (composed of a series of twenty drawings and montages), and subsequently a book of lyrics, a book of Rotoscoped photographs of the band's emotions, a book containing sachets of Jon and Andys' blood and a scratch and sniff booklet which reflects the key areas of human activity.
Gang Of Four are Jon King (vocals & melodica), Andy Gill (guitar & vocals), Thomas McNeice (bass) and Mark Heaney (drums). Since their inception in 1978 with the legendary 'Damaged Goods' EP and continuing through albums like 'Entertainment!' (released in 1979 and one of the greatest debut albums of all time) and groundbreaking albums 'Solid Gold' (1981) and 'Songs Of The Free' (1983), Gang Of Four have triumphantly defined their place on the musical landscape and been a major influence on a wide range of bands including R.E.M., Red Hot Chili Peppers, Sonic Youth, Bloc Party, The Rapture and Franz Ferdinand.
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