In the late 1970s, a small group of art students at Leeds University created a pivotal hotbed of radical post-punk. Gang of Four’s jerky-punky-funky music would influence bands as diverse as the Red Hot Chili Peppers and Massive Attack. Together with the jaggedly romantic Mekons and the slightly lesser-known Delta 5 (and, initially, the early Scritti Politti, who formed at the polytechnic), they established a blueprint of fiery, political, community and DIY-based creativity that reverberates through the city’s music scene to this day.
“Some nights I’d watch Gang of Four and think, ‘I’m watching the best band in the world’,” original Mekons guitarist Kevin Lycett remembers over a green tea in the Fenton, the pub where the scene once congregated. “‘And they’re my mates. How on earth is this happening among people I get pissed with?’”
Leeds already had a countercultural underground in the 70s, including housing co-ops, the alternative Leeds Other Paper and radical tutors in both colleges’ art departments, one of whom (the University of Leeds professor Tim Clark) had been in the European revolutionary alliance the Situationist International.
Punk provided the trigger to put this into music. After Gang of Four guitarist Andy Gill obtained a grant subsidy to visit New York art galleries, he rocked up at CBGB as the New York music scene was erupting. “I was surprised to find myself with Joey Ramone to my left and John Cale to my right, and chatting with them,” he remembers. “I saw the Jam play there and spoke with Paul Weller. Everyone seemed dead normal. When I came back, I thought: ‘We’ve got to start a band.’”
Meanwhile, most of the future Mekons saw the Sex Pistols at Leeds Polytechnic. “They were fucking awful,” says Lycett with a chuckle, “but they had an amazing attitude. I came away thinking: ‘We can do this.’ I’d never felt that way about anything before.”
DIY came through necessity. Gang of Four (GO4) initially rehearsed in the university’s film society, which adjoined the Fenton. When they nipped to the pub, their friends picked up their instruments and called themselves Mekons. GO4 were soon fed up of paying pubs for use of their PA, so they built their own. Gill remembers turning an old wardrobe into bass cabinets with vocalist Jon King, “and all of us having a whip round to buy an ex-RAF amplifier”.
“It was an amazing time for anyone to step up and express themselves,” remembers Ros Allen, who was initially in the Mekons and then formed Delta 5. “Fanzines, posters, indie labels or bands. You didn’t need to be a trained musician to make music – there was suspicion and derision if you were.”
For Mekons guitarist Jon Langford, London punk was “business-oriented, major-label and about being outrageous. But in the north we didn’t feel a part of that. There was a licence to do what we wanted.” The goal was something more communal than the capital’s elites. “At early gigs we would literally give our instruments to the audience,” Lycett says. “We learned very quickly that this was a bad idea.”
The environment fed the music. Gill borrowed a title from a feminist pamphlet he picked up locally for the GO4 song Why Theory? (which asked: “We all have opinions. Where do they come from?”) and the quartet distilled Marxist critique into jagged, three-minute pop songs. Mekons songs – like those of Manchester’s Buzzcocks – rejected the traditional pop male persona for something less masculine, more vulnerable. Allen reveals how Delta 5’s cocktail of punk and funk was fuelled by “drinking ourselves silly at the Heaven and Hell nightclub, where Sylvester’s Mighty Real was a favourite floor-filler”.
The Leeds scene rejected the male-dominated ethos of the era, with the bands featuring a mix of men and women in their line-ups. Lycett believes this wasn’t a conscious decision but a natural evolution of the scene. “Women were as active as men, and nobody blinked an eye,” he says. “The Mekons always had women in the group, but there were still massive obstacles if you were a woman active in music in those days.”
“There was an acceptance of difference,” says Allen. “I’d come from an all-girls high school where we were encouraged to be high achievers, and my parents gave me the same encouragement, so I never felt unequal because of my gender and was drawn to similar, independent women. Bethan [Peters, bass] had a Honda 500 and Emma, another friend of ours, had a motorbike, too. I never liked being told how I was supposed to feel or behave.”
A pivotal local promoter, John Keenan (who is still promoting today), gave all the bands their chance, and a support slot with the Rezillos led to the Mekons being spotted by the new Edinburgh indie label Fast Product. The band’s debut single was inspired by another late-night Leeds haunt, the long-demolished Terry’s All-Time, a 24-hour cafe on Woodhouse Street. When the police raided, the band hid in the loos, so they sang Never Been in a Riot (“I was always in the toilet”) in riposte to the Clash’s White Riot, which they saw as macho posturing.
“Rough Trade refused to stock it because we were ‘too primitive’,” Langford says. “Too primitive for punk! But then John Peel played it and NME made it single of the week.” Fast Product also released GO4’s Damaged Goods EP. Both bands later joined major labels, but when GO4 became the first unsigned band on the cover of NME, they sent tremors through the record industry and the Fenton post-punk scene was catapulted to national attention.
Today, with its wood and tiles and punk soundtrack, the pub-hub close to campus is almost as it was; Gill observes that the jukebox has moved rooms. “Pre-mobile phones, you’d have to go where you knew people would be,” Mekons singer Tom Greenhalgh explains, remembering “intense political debates and insane hedonism”, and legendary scene characters such as Barry the Badge. “A huge gay guy covered in badges from Armley Socialist Worker’s party. He was rock-hard, but then he could just grab you, snog you and stick his tongue down your throat.”
Today’s city centre, with its swish shopping centres and homogenous chains, is unrecognisable. When Gill looks at old GO4 photos he thinks “it looks like we’ve been parachuted into the Somme”. The Yorkshire Ripper’s murderous activities in the late 70s imposed a virtual curfew for young women. “He cracked a friend of ours in the jaw with a hammer outside the Skyrack, but she got up running,” remembers Langford. “She survived, thank God.” What Langford describes as a “weird solidarity where people – especially women – would walk home in groups” culminated in the Reclaim the Night marches, which the Mekons sang about.
National Front skinheads populated several city-centre pubs, including the Scarborough Taps, today a salubrious gastropub. Allen witnessed goose-stepping in the F Club punk venue and was called a “communist witch” outside. Jon King marched against the NF and was struck by a police truncheon. Greenhalgh was assaulted with a fire extinguisher and the Mekons were sieg-heiled when they were supporting punk band 999.
One night the Fenton was attacked. “I think they thought: ‘There’s a load of weirdos and anarchists there and we’re going to hurt them’,” says Lycett. “Somebody picked up a beer glass and threw it across the room and it hit Dick, a political activist. Everyone got up and we chased them down the street. After a short running battle, it was over, but it was shocking, because this was the only place we had.”
The community felt emboldened by the emergence of the city’s Rock Against Racism group, which put gigs on in the now-demolished Roots club in Chapeltown, uniting black and white, punk and reggae. “RAR was enormously important in Leeds,” Gill says, “both as a platform for bands and a banner people could rally round.”
For Greenhalgh, the 1981 Carnival Against the Nazis in Potternewton Park, headlined by the Specials when Ghost Town was at No 1, was “a pivotal moment, a cultural mix of the West Indian community, Asians, left and locals”. Langford remembers seeing “kids who had been into nasty Nazi shit, thinking ‘this is great’ and having a great time. Everyone really did rock against racism.”
By then, the Ripper had been caught and the scene was changing, with newer bands such as the proto-goth Sisters of Mercy or the vibrant Girls At Our Best!, whose guitarist-turned Leeds College of Music tutor Jez Pritchatt recalls “wanting to be more colourful, less serious than Gang of Four. They inspired us, but in the opposite direction”. Manchester-born Gill left his adopted city in 1982. “I feel lucky to have been there,” he says. “When I moved to London, there suddenly wasn’t a Fenton. I was suddenly adrift in this mega metropolis.”
Today, the guitarist is the only original member in Gang of Four and Lycett is the only (ex-)Mekon left in Leeds. But both bands have new albums – Happy Now and Deserted respectively – and new acts carry their DNA.
“The DIY ethos is very obvious here,” says Sarah Statham, who arrived from Manchester, played guitar in Esper Scout, runs the label/gigs community Bomb the Twist and currently plays in Fig by Four and Crake. “You can hire the Fenton or wherever for £40 and do a poster. In Manchester, competitive promoters killed the vibe.” Her bandmate Rebecca Jane says that when Statham sent her a Delta 5 track she thought: “This band’s got two bassists and they’re both women. How did I not know who they are?”
“Leeds is a small city but big enough to have lots of cultural connections, so the underground functions really well,” says Alice Nutter, the former Chumbawamba singer-turned-scriptwriter who herself was “hugely influenced” by the Mekons and GO4. Today, the non-profit Brudenell Social Club serves the city’s leftfield and for Nutter, venues such as the collectively run Chunk and worker’s co-op Wharf Chambers “feel really countercultural and open to politics”. The latter is on Wharf Street, where the GO4 and Mekons shared rehearsal space in 1979.
“Someone attacked us there one night with a dustbin,” says Langford. “I much prefer playing there now.”
• Gang of Four release Happy Now through Gill Music Ltd on 19 April; Mekons’ new album, Deserted, is out now through Glitterbeat