To Hell with Poverty! - Gang of Four (Another Day / Another Dollar, 1982)

It’s somewhat incredulous that I’ve managed to get so far into this protracted and spasmodic project without mentioning the film, Urgh! A Music War. Urgh!, which was released in ’81 or ’82, is an extraordinary snapshot of post-punk new wave scene in the UK and USA. The film documents concert performances – primarily in London, New York and LA – by over thirty acts. Some of them have had illustrious careers (The Police); others (Invisible Sex) would have remained anonymous but for their appearance in this infuriatingly difficult to access (legitimately) concert film; and one or two, most notably Klaus Nomi, are dead.

Coincidentally, when Klaus Nomi died in 1983 it was the first time in those intensely stigmatic early days of the pandemic that I recall hearing of a public figure dying of AIDS. The fact that Nomi was an androgynous countertenor who – when in full kabuki-like stage make up and dressed in two-tone vinyl with hair like a Kewpie in middle age and moving like a robotic Victorian porcelain doll – didn’t do much to challenge the media’s ‘gay plague’ hysteria that associated AIDS with all kinds of real and imagined homosexual degeneracy. It’s just occurring to me now, but there’s more than a little of Joel Grey’s Cabaret Emcee in Klaus Nomi. If the former is an icon of Weimar and the rise of Nazism, perhaps Nomi is a bellwether of life for the counterculture in the Reagan / Thatcher years. Nomi’s death was a shock to my 16 year old self and I will never forget the circumstances.

[I’m sure the books are already written, but if regular ‘duck and cover’ classroom exercises in anticipation of nuclear war profoundly marked the psyches of teens during the cold war era, then the spectre of AIDS in the early ‘80s was the threat that compounded the already complicated experience of adolescence for my generation.]

But I digress… Gang of Four was one of the groups featured in Urgh! Somehow I’ve managed to convince myself – erroneously it would appear – that To Hell with Poverty! was the song they performed in the film. It wasn’t, the song documented is He’d Send in the Army. What I did recall correctly and vividly is guitarist Andy Gill’s performance. He plays like he’s gripped by a sort of palsy; as if he’s just had a guitar thrust into his hands for the first time and been shoved out on stage to herk and jerk all over one of the most memorable, disciplined, funky baselines of the whole era. It’s pure genius.