Gang of Four, from front, Jon King, Hugo Burnham, Andy Gill and Dave Allen. Click photo for larger image. Gang of Four With: Morningwood, Men, Women & Children. Where: Mr. Small's Theatre, Millvale. When: 7:30 p.m. tomorrow. Tickets: $17.50-$20; 412-821-4447.

It was the most menacing sound of the post-punk era.

The electric shock of Andy Gill, waging a small guerilla war with his guitar. The muscular funk of rhythm section Dave Allen and Hugo Burnham, pushing and pulling with and against Gill. Singer Jon King, like a man on the brink, carrying on about sex as a commodity, the individual vs. the state and love as a case of anthrax.

Anyone who saw Gang of Four at Carnegie Mellon University's Skibo Ballroom in 1982 will never forget it. The rawness and intensity of the sound, the disquieting way Gill stared down the audience, the way King threw his body around the stage -- it made The Clash seem almost quaint.

Gang of Four made an earthshaking debut with "Entertainment" in '79 and followed it strong with the "Solid Gold" EP and "Songs of the Free," scoring a college radio hit with the dance-punk classic "I Love a Man in a Uniform." By '83, the heyday was over.

Enter Radio 4, The Rapture, The Futureheads, Franz Ferdinand, The Dead '60s and other '00s bands that have made Gang of Four's sound de rigueur once again.

Seeing the description "Gang of Four-like" enough times in the music press was enough to bring the quartet back in its original form for the first time since 1982.

As a focal point in Gang of Four's return, the band announced that it would do the unthinkable: Go back into the studio as men in their 40s and re-record 14 songs from the first three records. The result, "Return the Gift," due Oct. 11, is brilliant, infusing the songs with more of the sonic punch they always needed. There isn't a dated sounding moment on the record and, in fact, the songs sound like they were written for these times, with King and Gill trading lines like, "Dig at the root of the problem (Fly the flag on foreign soil)/It breaks your new dreams daily (H-block Lock Kesh)/Fathers contradictions (Censor six countries news)/And breaks your new dreams daily (each day more deaths!)."

The band is also on the second leg of a U.S. tour that stops at Mr. Small's tomorrow night.

In advance we talked with singer Jon King about the comeback.

Q: Is your return in part due to the bands who have gravitated to your old sound?

A: It was one of the factors that influenced us wanting to do this. When you hear elements of your music all the time, you feel that your music is contemporary again. I just saw the Scorsese movie about Dylan, "No Direction Home." He kept on getting this question, "Why did you write these political songs," and Bob says, "I don't write political songs. I write contemporary songs." I think [Gang of Four] is a contemporary band and not a nostalgia band. Certainly there is a sense that there are these pop bands who you can hear our work in -- from [Franz Ferdinand's] "Take Me Out" you "Natural's Not in It," the Red Hot Chili Peppers, you can hear "Return the Gift." So it does make a difference. As a musician you want what you do to be noticed. You wouldn't stand on a stage if you didn't want people to look at you. It seemed like the environment was right for us to do our thing.

Q: Were you flattered by it, or did you feel, in some way, violated?

A: As musicians, it's hugely flattering. I think there are parallels between us and Velvet Underground, where you have an act that didn't actually sell millions of record, but most of the people who bought your record went off to form bands. As serious musicians we were never driven by the desire to make loads of money. Obviously, we wouldn't have written songs like "Anthrax," if we had hoped to be a play-listed band. You can't enter that arena. We were driven to try to make great music that changed people's worlds in some way or another. When other musicians do that -- and such a range of great musicians; I love Franz Ferdinand -- it is something you feel good about it. I think of these bands as being a bit like the Babel Fish in "The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy," they somehow translate Gang of Four to a difference audience. What we found that has been a real blast is that our audience is two-thirds between the ages of 15 and 25.

Q: One thing those bands haven't done is bring in the kind of content you did. How do young people react to the lyrics and content of your songs?

A: What I've found is that the reaction to Gang of Four lyrics has been very deep. What I found surprising is how few bands now care to write about anything outside a narrow palette of boy meets girl, boy gets [sex] and it all goes horribly wrong. There's this narrow palette, which there always was. And it surprises me with all the things you can write about that people are still writing in that mode. Then again, that was always the case. Getting back to the Dylan scenario, when he wrote "Like a Rolling Stone," it was pretty outrageous to people who were brought up on King/Goffin songs about teenage true love.

I didn't write political songs, I didn't write any songs about Margaret Thatcher or unemployment or Ronald Reagan or any of those kinds of things, because that's not really very interesting. I wrote about what ... horrible compromises we make or the issues around that stuff. Those subjects -- 'please send me evenings and weekends' -- have become even more a feature of our lives as we're even more frenetically pursuing desires that, when we get them, we don't want.

Q: I remember your lyrics used to send me to the library to read more about what you were talking about. All these years later, I'm still trying to decode them. Are they clear to you?

A: Very often artists aren't the best people to explain their own work. There were times when I had a pretty clear idea of what I was writing about. The idea of "Return the Gift," I knew very much where it was coming from. But you're not trying to be didactic. You're trying to get some poetic meaning, with all the ambiguities and grayness, so you toss in images that are sometimes surprising or have hanging meanings.

"At Home He's a Tourist," I came up with that line first and the rest of the song falls out the back of it. Or 'Natural's Not in It,' all the biblical imagery. I haven't rethought that actually. The general gist of the song, which emerged from writing it, was the things you think are natural are actually taught, learned, and your views of sexuality are pretty much invented. I think that, culturally, there's such an interesting world out there. It's a world of consumption and defeat and sexual ambiguity, it's strange that people have such a narrow palette.

Q: So you still relate to the words as you sing them on stage, even though you were young and anti-establishment and anti-capitalist back then?

A: I don't know that I was anti-capitalist, as such. I've never been a member of a political party. Certainly, there's the sense that the world you live in is an uncomfortable place and we make uncomfortable compromises, and we try sometimes to do the best we can and realize we're like an automaton, working. You dial up some distant call center and you press 1 for happiness, and press 2 for sexual pleasure and 3 for whatever it is and you act out these little scenarios. Sometimes you come to a moment of clarity where you observe yourself observing yourself.

Looking at the lyrics for the re-recording of "Return the Gift," what I found was that I was coming up against my younger self. Unlike reading letters that one might have written to a lover when you were a teenager, and you might be embarrassed by your point of view, I thought yeah, the material is very strong, because it's not about current affairs.

One of the songs which actually -- I'm just contradicting myself -- had a current affair was "Ether" which made reference to Lock Kesh. It's obvious you could draw a parallel to Abu Ghraib with what was going on in Northern Ireland. But you got smart people out there in the audience listening to the music and they can draw their own conclusions. I strongly agreed with the point of view of me at the age of 23.

Q: When I first heard you were re-recording this stuff, I thought, "Oh no, tell me they're not going to do that." Now that I've heard it, it's brilliant. What made you guys do this?

A: There's a whole bunch of reasons. If I were you I might have thought the same thing. The funny thing, there's something about rock music that's very conservative. Jazz musicians and blues musicians constantly record and re-record their songs over and over again. It's so common, you wouldn't blink about Muddy Waters recording one of his tracks again, or Miles Davis or Ornette Coleman -- it's a matter of course. Rock music, it's been unusual in that people have got such tight record contracts that you're not allowed to. It's actually contractual that you can't re-record your content. The only time that musicians have been able to reinvest their material or re-possess their material has been through the live album vehicle. But often that's a bit of a sloppy sound and they want to mix in the applause from the concert in Bangladesh in the background.

What we wanted to do was do something with our favorite things that sounded more like us live -- big drums, loud intense guitars, punchy-funky bass, vocals that have a lot of clarity about them. Not to say that we don't love the sound of "Solid Gold" and "Entertainment," 'cause we do, but those are crystalline, brittle artifacts very much rooted in a particular point of view. The re-recordings are saying this is what we sound like. It's like a studio live album.

We also wanted re-possess our catalog from the record company because -- for whatever reason -- we never benefited from any of the sale of any of our records. We never made any money. We did it because we could and we did it because we wanted to.

We had a track that we recorded back then that we were pleased with which was "To Hell With Poverty." We wanted the whole record to sound like the "To Hell With Poverty EP." We haven't changed any of the arrangements or any the lyrics.

Q: Was there a temptation to do that?

A: I thought about it for a while. Andy and I were always keen when we wrote the songs to get a level of authenticity and without any window dressing on these things. I don't want to change it from Lock Kesh to locked in Abu Ghraib. It's not necessary. What you're talking about is something which is a structural part our lives -- our lives of beautiful consumption at the expense of the darker things that happen somewhere else behind a wall.

Q: You drew from the first few releases for this record. Do you stand by the later stuff that you had put out or do you recognize, like your fans, that this is the strongest stuff?

A: Well it is the strongest stuff, yeah. I think When Dave [Allen] left, something intangible -- well not intangible, it was quite tangible -- left the band. Sara [Lee] was fantastic to work with, but I think she had a more pop sensibility about her and a softness. When we came to do 'Hard,' we had originally booked Nile Rodgers to be the producer, but it all fell apart in the last 48 hours before recording. He ended up going off to work with David Bowie on "Let's Dance." At that time, Nile Rodgers was not seen in the rock world as someone anyone would want to have as a producer because he was a disco producer, and disco always provoked dumb responses particularly from the punk world. Of course, I always loved Chic and Sister Sledge and the like.

The objective of the "Hard" record would have been different, a lot closer to "Let's Dance" than how it turned out. The next person we approached was Arthur Baker, and it was a toss-up between us and New Order. In the end, we worked with the Albert brothers, and they'd worked with Aretha and the Beach Boys. That wasn't the right decision. The idea of making a strange mutant version of disco music with all its interest in sex would have been fantastic. I think the first three albums are strong. And I would say "Hard" was a glorious failure.

Q: How does the bonus disc sound to you?

A: It's really interesting. We wanted to do something that was just challenging and interesting, so we put the word out that if anyone had a strong idea about remixing the songs we would give them the backing tracks. All kinds of bands came forward, from the Dandy Warhols to the Yeah Yeah Yeahs to Ladytron and the like. Some of them are really interesting. Ladytron's remix of "Natural's Not In It" is fantastic. Aesop Rock has done a great hip-hop version of one of the tracks. When people buy the album there is a remix CD and they get a code to the Gang of Four site to download other remixes. They're still coming in.

Q: Do you foresee making any more new music?

A: When we set off to do this we were quite clear we'd be like the Pixies and not do any more stuff. Andy and I said only last night, "Let's have a go at writing stuff." We've been asked to write the title music for a big movie and we're still under discussion. What we don't want to do is slip back. We want to make sure that it has that driving dance flavor with loud guitar and a narrative that has some kind of emotional and brain impact. If it's great, we'll do it. We're just going to see.

Q: You once were so physical on stage I thought you would kill each other. How is it different now?

A: I think it's probably more extreme, at least as physical as it was. One thing we wanted to make sure was that it was not relaxed. It's very full-on.