To Hell With Poverty by Jon King
Revealed 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 injury {that a} band and a friendship can do to one another.
The e book 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 e book is autobiographical, protecting King’s household background and childhood reminiscences, 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 non-public college 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. Because of this he was the one one within the Gang of 4 – who made their identify as a “political” band – whose political instincts have been based mostly on what we’d name as of late “lived expertise”.
The luxury college, 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 a lot of our technology, he was the primary in his household to go to school. Signing up for a fantastic artwork diploma at Leeds College, he aimed to turn out to be 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 e book: unemployment, fascism, the nuclear risk, corrupt police, the Yorkshire Ripper…
The ups and downs of band life comply with: touring with Buzzcocks, rocking towards racism and sexism, headlining in America, important acclaim, wild audiences… and disastrous enterprise choices, 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 sort of bolshy vitality you affiliate along with his band, propelling the story by way of a sequence of nice anecdotes. A cautionary story, perhaps, however a really satisfying one too.
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To Hell With Poverty is out there in any respect good bookstores.
Phrases by Penny Kiley. You may learn her Louder than Struggle critiques at her creator profile, and her archive music journalism on Substack.
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