The faux east German setting of the Barbican is a good choice for Gang of Four’s student Marxist polemics as they resurface to play the whole of 1979s spellbinding Entertainment. I was only 10 at the time but the band’s shadow has hung over me since hearing ‘At Home He’s a Tourist’ in the early eighties on John Peel (aye, the times they really have changed). A chance encounter with a bootleg disco remix of ‘To Hell with Poverty’ in the early nineties blew me away again and tonight is a straight trip to a time before the fall of the Berlin Wall, before Glasnost and perestroika and McDonalds taking over the world. Before Chernobyl and Reagan. A time when the fat cunts of Thatcherism were yet to be birthed. Before the miners strike and the Redskins and acid house and the Mondays and the drugs and drink and dreams and regrets and sex and mistakes and memories. Water under bridges and all that shite.

It’s a Saturday night in East London and suddenly they’re back. Chiming, slamming punk funk rhythms and crashing guitar from Andy Gill. And centre stage Jon King ranting, yelling and battering the hell out of a microwave with a baseball bat like a demented Lee Brilleaux and you feel like asking god, can I be young again? Can I be young again with the weather and the bile and the hope and the fire? And you know the answer.

But while it lasts it’s electrifying. The mainly male and middle aged crowd love it. The clocks roll back. At times it feels as if Gill could shoot you dead with that discordant guitar, and King might just destroy all off the years and words with his graceless torment and anger. I’m not going to bother telling you about the content of ‘Entertainment’. If you haven’t heard it, it’s enough to say that it’s an obnoxious, abrasive racket sounding like nothing before, but a lot since.

And yes, it seems churlish to compare Franz Ferdinand and the likes who appropriate the iconography without the attitude - although the Kaiser Chiefs can definitely fuck right off. Maybe I’m just out of time.

There’s not much said, just a cursory hello and goodbye, and the band belt through the album with hardly any gaps. It’s a kind of reconstruction of deconstruction which maybe doesn’t make much sense, but it still sounds like rock and roll.

And then they appear for their second encore, finally you hear King screaming ‘To hell with poverty, we can get drunk on cheap wine’. Well, over the years too much cheap wine has passed my lips for that to make me smile anymore but as a rallying cry it still sounds magnificent and relevant. Red Wedge and the young socialists. For a moment maybe we really can kick over the statues. And maybe we can change the world.

But then after just an hour it’s all over. They leave as briskly as they arrived. And the doors have shut, the crowds are gone, the summer is over and all that’s left is a cool, quiet night in September.

It’s a long walk home.

Stuart Blackwood is 30 (odd), was born in Newarthill and lives in Glasgow. He supports Motherwell FC, has an MA in Economics and Philosophy and likes William Bell (the singer), Bukowski & Fante, Eric Arthur Blair, Negativeland, Eric Hobsbawm, politics, philosophy and ambiguity. He dislikes Alan Bloom and Francis Fukuyama, U2, categorization and Violence.

© 2005 Laura Hird All rights reserved.