To Hell With Poverty!

I came to Gang Of Four via the Wedding Present. I was in thrall to Madness and Adam and the Ants and clearly far too young for this thing called post-punk, but I was however just the right age for David Gedge’s gnarly yet faithful reworking of GO4’s I Found That Essence Rare; one group from Leeds being reverentially covered by another, which was somehow, to these ears, a symbiotic moment of baton-passing. I did what most of us do when we discover a new band – I worked backwards to find the source. I’d eventually find …Essence Rare on Gang Of Four’s debut album Entertainment!, an aptly-titled, bone-shaking, nerve-jangling amalgamation of tight ‘n taut basslines, fuss-free drumming and scorching guitar; all pristinely jagged lines and trebly, ear-splitting attack. Jerky music for twitchy people, the sta-cca-cca-cca-ccato guitar stylings belonged to Andy Gill, but the colour on GO4’s razor sharp cheekbones came courtesy of vocalist and lyricist Jon King. Socially-conscious, anti-capitalist and anti-military, King’s words cut just as cleanly, just as sharply as the six strings that rang from Gill’s electric Ibanez.

As it turns out, Jon King writes exactly the way Gang Of Four sounds.

In his autobiography, From To Hell With Poverty! (published for the first time in paperback on 16th April 2026) there’s nary a flabby line nor bloated opinion. Clean, lean and free of fat, his words are economical and considered, yet shining with individual style and an ear-ringing clarity. If literate and bullshit-free music biographies are your kinda thing, you’ll probably want to read it.

Thrillingly, Jon and his team have asked if Plain Or Pan will run a feature ahead of the book’s publication, so here we are, one aborted Zoom session (hands up – my fault) and a scrambled phone call later.

Me: This music thing, then. What are your earliest memories of music? When did you start playing in bands? Was there a point when you thought, ‘hang on – I could maybe make some sort of a living from this?’

JK: At the risk of saying it’s all in the book…

There was no music at home. We had no record player. We had a wind-up 78 which my mum had picked up at a jumble sale, along with a pile of shellac records. No delta blues classics, unfortunately. Just stuff like The Teddy Bears’ Picnic. On a Sunday we’d listen to Two-Way Family Favourites on the radio, broadcasting from the real fag-end of the British Empire. Light entertainment parlour music  – Max Bygraves and the likes.

I heard music properly for the first time only after I’d passed the 11+ and found myself at Sevenoaks School. The boys in the art room, who’d have been 17 and 18 at the time, played Highway 61 Revisited. Baaam! This totally thrilled me. I’d never heard anything like it. It was anti-authority, driven purely by creative artistic integrity…it was immediately my kind of thing. From that moment on, all my money earned from fruit picking and potato picking went on records. I’d heard Hey Joe and Space Oddity during lessons and these became the first two 7″ singles in my collection. I’d pick lots of records up at jumble sales. Clearly, a lot of parents were emptying out their children’s bedrooms after they’d moved out, and I became the welcome recipient of their abandoned record collections.

I gained a total love of music from those art room listening sessions, but I never really wanted to be in a band. I wanted to be an artist. I went to study Fine Art at Leeds University and a bunch of boys from Sevenoaks followed me. These fellow art room boys – Mark White, Tom Greenhalgh and Kevin Lycett would end up in The Mekons. Adam Curtis would become a documentarian. Paul Greengrass went to Hollywood and directed all those Bourne Supremacy films. Andy Gill would become the guitar player in Gang Of Four. We were a creative, competitive group of friends, pushing one another towards artistic endeavours.

I wanted to write my dissertation on Jasper Johns, the American painter and sculptor and, amazingly, I was given a research grant to go to New York to learn all about him. Andy thought, ‘If he can get to New York, I can too,’ and he got himself a grant as well. I can’t emphasise how extremely lucky I’ve been in life. Sometimes, things happen to me that have had positive outcomes on my situation. This New York trip was one such thing.

We were put up by a woman called Mary Harron. She was a journalist with New York Punk Magazine, just about the definitive word on this new thing. She’d recently broken up with the drummer from the Patti Smith Group. Mary lived in St Marks’s Place, the hippest, most happening area of Manhattan at the time, with jazz clubs around the corner where Coltrane and Davis had played. Debbie Harry lived nearby. Richard Hell too. And she let Andy and I crash on her floor for the duration of our stay. We’d be out all the time, regulars in CBGB’s, getting in for nothing simply by being with Mary, and we’d see all the bands; Television, Blondie, Ramones, Talking Heads.

Because we were always there with Mary, people would ask us, ‘What band are you in?’ Andy would always reply, ‘The Mudlarks’, and they’d all nod knowingly, even although this was entirely fictitious and we had no intentions of becoming musicians. But when we returned to the UK, punk had made its way there and we started thinking about its possibilities. I saw punk as an art project. Music wouldn’t interfere with my painting…it would contribute to it.

Before we knew it, Andy and I had formed not The Mudlarks but Gang Of Four and in no time we’d toured with Buzzcocks. They were great friends and sponsors to us. They still are, actually. It was Steve Diggle’s suggestion that I write this book and I’m so glad I let him inspire me.

We toured the States with Buzzcocks. We’d often play two shows a day; we’d open up for them and then play one of our own shows in a small club elsewhere in the city. At one point, we did something like 40 gigs in 30 days. This is where we really learned to play.

Gang Of Four – I Found That Essence Rare (Peel Session, 9.1.79)

We paid it back when it was our turn to do headline tours. Over those tours, we had great support acts; REM, Mission of Burma, Pylon, The Specials, The Smiths. U2 opened for us once. We were inspired by Dylan, Television and the likes, and Gang Of Four became inspirations for Red Hot Chili Peppers, Nirvana and REM. We all stand on the shoulders of giants, don’t we? Gang Of Four have a brilliant track record in bringing along groups who would subsequently eclipse us!

I’m still friends with lots of these people. Last year in the States, Mike Mills jammed with us. Peter Buck has too. We never made Entertainment! in order to make loads of money – that was just not in our thoughts when we started the group. My ambition was simply to change the world. At the end of the ’70s we had facism. We had war. We had poverty. We had social issues. I don’t think (Jon sighs in resignation) that I managed to realise that ambition.

I compliment Jon on his book; the writing style, the pace, the unputdownability of it all.

‘Avoid adjectives and adverbs,’ says Jon from down the phone. ‘Avoid cliche. Avoid metaphors and similes.’

This is the writer who, on Entertainment!‘s Glass wrote, ‘I’m so restless, I’m bored as a cat.’

‘Yeah,’ he laughs with a wry grin. ‘It’s a stupid simile too. And cats are anything but bored, aren’t they? They’ve nine lives to live for a start. They’re always up to something. I’m really annoyed with myself for writing a lyric like that.’

Find out what else irks and annoys Jon King in To Hell With Poverty! 

To Hell With Poverty! is published in paperback by Constable on April 16th 2026.

Its launch will be officially marked north of the border by two events in Glasgow and Edinburgh on the 23rd and 24th April. The Glasgow event, at the 1 of 100 premises is sold out. There are a handful of tickets left for the 24th at the Voodoo Rooms. Asking the difficult questions in Edinburgh will be Phill Jupitus.

You’ll probably want to be there. And you’ll definitely want to read it.