Book 52 - Jon King "To Hell With Poverty!"
Sep. 12th, 2026 08:36 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
jazzy_daveJon King "To Hell With Poverty!: A Class Act: Inside the Gang of Four" (Akashic Books)
King grew up very working class and developed a class sensibility pretty early on in life. He was fortunate enough to go to a "good school" which gave him a bit of a leg up and which also made him both "fancy" to some of his audience and peers while also not at all fancy to the truly fancy. King has a great narrative voice.
This book goes along at a quick pace with a lot of fun casual (and sometimes inscrutable) slang. He talks about a lot of the people he met but the book does not at all feel name-droppy. You get a real feel for what was going on in the punk scene at about that time. I even saw a club I knew from Boston in one of King's photos which are sprinkled throughout the book.
His story is told mostly-sequentially through a lot of slice of life anecdotes that get at various themes. There is a lot of detail about his early home life and the early days of the band. It gets a little more muddled when it spells out the details of their US and UK labels and especially their management. King does not talk about his personal life or his partner much at all.
The band was perpetually broke and apparently ripped off by their US management. The book ends on a sour note when King feels forced by their manager to fire their drummer and then the rest of the band gets hung up in petty squabbling and eventually dissolve somewhat. King and Andy Gill, the other main songwriter in the early 80s have huge creative differences and the last few short chapters are grim and bleak. Which is too bad because people who know GOF know that they wound up back together and are doing a farewell tour this year, even though Gill and Dave Allen have died.
I would have liked to know more about the non-band parts of King's life after the band got started, but that's a truly minor quibble. This is an excellent memoir of a band you might not have even known you wanted to know more about.
King grew up very working class and developed a class sensibility pretty early on in life. He was fortunate enough to go to a "good school" which gave him a bit of a leg up and which also made him both "fancy" to some of his audience and peers while also not at all fancy to the truly fancy. King has a great narrative voice.
This book goes along at a quick pace with a lot of fun casual (and sometimes inscrutable) slang. He talks about a lot of the people he met but the book does not at all feel name-droppy. You get a real feel for what was going on in the punk scene at about that time. I even saw a club I knew from Boston in one of King's photos which are sprinkled throughout the book.
His story is told mostly-sequentially through a lot of slice of life anecdotes that get at various themes. There is a lot of detail about his early home life and the early days of the band. It gets a little more muddled when it spells out the details of their US and UK labels and especially their management. King does not talk about his personal life or his partner much at all.
The band was perpetually broke and apparently ripped off by their US management. The book ends on a sour note when King feels forced by their manager to fire their drummer and then the rest of the band gets hung up in petty squabbling and eventually dissolve somewhat. King and Andy Gill, the other main songwriter in the early 80s have huge creative differences and the last few short chapters are grim and bleak. Which is too bad because people who know GOF know that they wound up back together and are doing a farewell tour this year, even though Gill and Dave Allen have died.
I would have liked to know more about the non-band parts of King's life after the band got started, but that's a truly minor quibble. This is an excellent memoir of a band you might not have even known you wanted to know more about.
