Gang of Four's Jon King on the Bob Dylan Record That Changed Everything

Jon King, co-founder and singer of British post-punk band Gang of Four, has traced the origin of his songwriting back to age 11 — the moment he heard Bob Dylan's 1965 album Highway 61 Revisited playing in his school's open-plan art room. King says there was no record player at home and his parents didn't listen to music, so this was the first time he grasped that music could be subversive. The anecdote was compiled by Far Out Magazine from two interviews: Goldmine (2025) and the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette (2005).

From art student in Leeds to post-punk frontman

King recalls Leeds in the late 1970s as a first-rate city for live shows, but one with soot-blackened buildings, the Yorkshire Ripper still at large, and visible tension between the National Front and South Asian communities. He says he saw swastikas painted on walls and was struck by a mounted police baton during an anti-NF march.

It was the era when the Sex Pistols, the Clash and the Damned convinced students they could start bands of their own. King describes Dylan's album as a mix of Beat poetry, biblical allusion and social observation delivered with a "stoned cool sneer" — for him, it was "the sound of rebellion against authority and boredom."

The influence was in the words, not the posture

Highway 61 Revisited is seen as the closest Dylan ever came to punk — not just for going electric, but for its rougher recording approach, letting the musicians' instincts shape the songs, as with the accidental laugh left on the tape during "Ballad of a Thin Man."

But for King, the real influence was lyrical. Gang of Four's early track "Natural's Not In It" critiques capitalism's corrosion of human relationships, including a line referencing the biblical story of Lot's wife turning into a pillar of salt — a style of layered allusion in line with Dylan's own approach.

On the bands that followed

A wave of bands influenced by Gang of Four emerged in the 2000s. King told the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette that most of them imitated Andy Gill's guitar sound or his own vocal style, but few tackled what the band had actually cared about most: writing about subjects beyond "boy meets girl, then it all falls apart." He pointed to Dylan writing "Like a Rolling Stone," the opening track of Highway 61 Revisited, as something that was just as radical to audiences accustomed to King/Goffin-style teenage love songs.