Andy Gill, co-founder, lead guitarist, and longest serving member of influential English post-punk band Gang Of Four, has died. Socially conscious, stripped-down, and endlessly energetic, Gang Of Four’s music did yeoman’s work in developing the punk sound of the late ’70s, transplanting ideas that Gill and co-founder Jon King absorbed while hanging out in New York’s legendary punk scene in the summer of 1976, rubbing elbows with Joey Ramone and members of Velvet Underground. Returning to the U.K., Gill and King decided to get serious; three years later, the band’s breakout debut Entertainment! would elevate them from a well-liked touring band into the higher echelons of late-’70s punk.
Born in Manchester in the 1950s, Gill met King while both were art students; the duo eventually recruited drummer Hugo Burnham (“Who happened to have a drum kit, and he had a transit van, which made him like gold dust,” Gill joked to us in an interview last year) and bassist Dave Allen, setting the line-up that would propel Gang Of Four into all of its initial heights. And while that membership would shift and alter over the ensuing five decades, Gill remained the lone constant in the band’s musical output. According to the band’s statement about his death today, he’d still been working on mixes for an upcoming album from his hospital bed this week.