Leeds post-punk pioneers Gang Of Four will play London’s Heaven on Feb. 2nd 2011 as part of the NME Awards Shows 2011 and tickets priced at £15.00 are available on sale through www.NME.com and on general release through Gigs and Tours and Ticketmaster. All prices are subject to booking fees plus a 50p charity donation to Teenage Cancer Trust.
Gang Of Four have also revealed details of their first album of new songs for more than sixteen years. Set for release on January 24th 2011, it is titled ‘Content’.
“What we're trying to do is keep it totally stripped down, where everyone in the band makes an equally intense contribution,” says founding member Jon King. 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’.
Andy 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.
The band remain Jon King (vocals & melodica), Andy Gill (guitar & vocals), Thomas McNeice (bass) and Mark Heaney (drums).
