Gang of Four have today released the video for Lucky from the band’s latest Complicit EP. Watch the Lucky video – also featuring Nova Twin’s Amy Love, who provides BVs on many of the tracks on the forthcoming album below!
Arriving ahead of a new Gang of Four studio album due for release in September 2018, Complicit is co-produced by the band’s Andy Gill, alongside Ben Hillier (Blur, Depeche Mode) and Ross Orton (M.I.A., Arctic Monkeys). The EP, from a band recently quoted as a touchstone for musicians as diverse as St Vincent, Frank Ocean, James Murphy and Pharrell Williams, also includes the single ‘Ivanka (Things You Can’t Have)’ and has already caused a stir with artwork that captions the President’s daughter with a single Russian word, замешанная, meaning ‘complicit’.
The video itself was shot in a deliberately small space with just two Dedo lights so the light bounces of the walls to achieve the gritty neo-realist feel of 50’s Italian films. Gaoler comes across as an Homme Fatale gangster, while Gill comes across as, well, just a gangster.
Lucky also offers a commentary that is political and metaphysical. Gill says: ‘‘Lucky’ is about how luck defines more than we imagine. You might think of the words from Macbeth concerning life being an hour upon the stage where the walking shadow struts and frets but can change nothing. A parallel idea is that luck may have as much impact on the course of a life than anything an individual does. As in Sartre’s ‘les jeux sont faits’, action, truth, morality will always play second fiddle to luck.’ Lucky identifies itself as a Gang of Four track with Gill’s serrated guitar, beneath frontman Gaoler’s alternately piteous and self-aggrandising protagonist, freighted by a taut groove from Thomas McNiece and Tobias Humble’s rhythm section.
Complicit also zeroes in on the push/pull between Trump’s White House and the ways in which news stories are pollinated. Talking about ‘Ivanka (Things You Can’t Have)’ – which weaves into its lyrics quotes from Ivanka and her father – Gill says; ‘It would’ve been easy to be extremely damning about Donald Trump and of course, like everyone else, I could have called him all kinds of names. What drew me to this subject at all was the running commentary from Ivanka in the earlier stages of this administration – it was fascinating to get a kind of explanation or justification from the daughter who had already been given an official position within the White House. A lot of it was pretty funny. But although the characters in the Trump family are interesting, it’s more the ideologies and politics which they represent and enable which need describing.’