OBITUARIES
AndY Gill 1956-2020 Sevenoaks School 1967-74
Gill : contemporary in every sense
It would be easy to look back to the late 60s and early 70s at Sevenoaks School and bathe it in golden nostalgia : bizarre straw hats ; arcane rules ; obsessive teachers demanding boys get their hair cut . Andrew Gill , Gill to those who knew him then and for ever afterwards , won ’ t fit any type of nostalgic retelling , he was always abrasively contemporary . Gill was never a ‘ boy ’ either , he was always seemed to be a young man even at 11 , still apparently a young man for that matter at 64 . Which makes it difficult to think of a world without Gill in it . So , the young man I sat next to in the Sevenoaks Art Room , in the Fine Art studios at Leeds University and in too many pubs and clubs across the world to mention , what marked him out ?
Once you heard his guitar playing , that aggressive , sharp rhythmic attack , you knew you were hearing something excitingly different , something new . That guitar and the group it came from ( the Gang of Four , a joint effort formed in Leeds by Gill and another Sevenoaks Art Room contemporary , Jon King ) changed things .
If you drew a line through bands like U2 , The Red Hot Chili Peppers , Franz Ferdinand and so many more , it ’ s the influence of the Gang of Four that links them . That combination of immediately recognisable aggressive guitar playing and political / social analysis , odd in a pop song don ’ t you think , where did that come from ?
Bob White , Head of Art at Sevenoaks , taught us to strip back any idea , any process to the fundamentals . He taught us to search for the right ‘ form ’ for any circumstance , to tease out an image ; radical content demanded radical form , politics is life . You could see this in one of Gill ’ s last paintings at school , a series of white vertical stripes , each stripe a different type of paint , different luminosity , texture and density , but all white . It was a characteristic Gill combination of commodified materials and clarity of thought .
You could hear that in anything by the Gang of Four too , each instrument clear and of itself ; the popular song taken to bits , analysed and reconstructed , and you could dance to it . Politically charged , witty lyrics informed by a Sevenoaks A-level education in English , Art and History from Jon King , and this staccato slicing guitar noise from Gill , trained in the unusual combination of Art , Economics and Physics . All bound together by what we learned in the Art Room , without that , I doubt those subsequent groups would have existed . Everything was up for questioning ; anything was possible if you could defend it vigorously enough . How many other guitar heroes would naturally compare James Brown ’ s ‘ Sex Machine ’ to a Jackson Pollock painting ?
Most of us who clustered in the Art Room round the record player ( Hendrix , Dylan , Velvet Underground , Trojan Records , Motown ) had passed the 11-plus to pay our fees and we naturally gravitated away from prefects , rugger and cheery thuggery . Sevenoaks then was split between an Edwardian public school ethos with some fairly medieval brutality and something radically new . I would go from an English lesson sat next to Jonathan Bate ( scarily clever then , an eminent academic now ), to ancient punishments like writing lines to arguing about films with Adam Curtis and Paul Greengrass , who became directors themselves . There are two sounds I associate with that period , metal boot studs on tarmac as the 1st XV pushed their way through to lunch and the whiny treble of the Art Room record player , the playing arm weighed down with old coins to stop it jumping on the warped records .
We did work hard , especially in the Art Room , but we also enjoyed ourselves . I remember the laughter , the fun , the excitement more than anything and Gill was an exciting young man to be around , always in some sort of trouble . Bob once described Gill as looking like he had been thrust into a drawer at night then shaken out and sent on his way in the morning . Gill was a magnet for attention . He had an unlikely obsession with North American Indians , carrying a copy of Bury my Heart at Wounded Knee under one arm and the Axis : Bold as Love LP under the other . Wearing a black armband on the day Jimi Hendrix died was heavily frowned upon . Playing a reggae version of ‘ Jerusalem ’ in assembly also went down very badly .
We designed the Sennockian during the Upper Sixth ; in those golden days the Art Room put the school magazine together . Actual cut and paste with scissors , Sellotape and Letraset . Ours was a proto-punk affair heavily based on the Whole Earth Catalogue ; we chose the cheapest newsprint , a scribbled cover and handmade titles . I expect we called it a ‘ democratisation of the process ’ or something similar ( art students !). Our clientele was not impressed , nor were the great and the good when we went up to get the traditional reward for the designers , the Sennockian school prize – horrors – Gill ’ s tie was undone ; proto-punk indeed .
Mark White ( OS 1974 )
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