Gang of Four vocalist Jon King [Uncle Nemesis_CC BY-SA 2.0]

RECENT years have seen a proliferation of autobiographical writing from performers who emerged from the frenetic days of punk/post-punk. A welcome addition to this sub-genre comes with To Hell With Poverty!

Author Jon King was the vocalist and principal lyricist for the innovative post-punk Gang of Four, whose debut album Entertainment! bowled over my impressionable 19-year-old self over 45 years ago.

Emerging from an alternative music scene that had developed around Leeds University and the city’s polytechnic in the late 70s, the band became a mainstay of Rock Against Racism gigs in northern England against the backdrop of rising support for the National Front and frequent fighting on the dancefloor.

Purveyors of what one US critic branded “post-industrial, neo-Marxist funk”, the Gang was twice barred from Top of the Pops and BBC radio airplay. The first offending single At Home He’s A Tourist featured an unacceptable (to Auntie) slang reference to condoms, while the 1982 release I Love A Man in Uniform ironically coincided with the Falklands-Malvinas War.

The book, though, is much more than the tragi-comic tale of an idealistic band’s rise and fall. The memoir’s subtitle, A Class Act: Inside the Gang of Four, has real significance as the double meaning of the word “class” soon becomes apparent. A sharp class consciousness suffuses much of the text.

King was born in June 1955 into a poor, but respectable working-class family. He spent his first three years in slum housing in Blitz-scarred Peckham before his parents joined an informal communal effort to construct nine houses on the edge of Kemsing, a village in Kent on the outskirts of Sevenoaks. That town’s elite 600-year-old school would come to feature prominently in King’s story.

By his own account a voracious reader, King is both a working-class auto-didact and the beneficiary of a public (“er, private” as he frequently reminds us) school education. He is an accomplished writer, who injects his prose with acerbic wit, yet can also conjure poignant lyricism.

He writes of the Kentish countryside near his childhood home: “From the attic window, I can see the verdant rolling valley to the treelined horizon and at night watch house martins and bats sharp-turning through the skies like billiard-ball breaks as they fatten themselves on the myriad insects dancing above the fields.”

In a wistful footnote, King informs us that “All this is gone… The susurration of insects and birds has been replaced by the constant thrum of traffic on Tarmac.” The landscape of the 1960s has become part of the M25.

The author sat the notorious 11-plus exam – still used in Kent – and passed with flying colours, which secured him a local authority scholarship as a day pupil at Sevenoaks. He remains bitter for three siblings who “failed” the exam and found themselves consigned to secondary moderns. Nonetheless, King appreciated winning the educational equivalent of a lottery ticket.

The Sevenoaks of the late 1960s and early 70s was at once the scene of brutal corporal punishment and child sexual abuse, and a haven for young creatives. In addition to King, his friend, the late Gang of Four guitarist Andy Gill, attended the school at the time, as did two members of another key post-punk outfit, The Mekons, acclaimed documentary-maker Adam Curtis and Hollywood director Paul Greengrass.

Though something of a misfit, not least due to his class background, King proved more than capable academically and landed a place on a fine arts degree at Leeds University. Amidst the predictable hijinks of undergraduate life in appalling digs, King found himself in a city in sharp decline. He narrowly avoided serious injury after a mounted cop truncheoned him during an anti-fascist mobilisation against a National Front rally.

His student days also coincided with the so-called Yorkshire Ripper’s horrific crimes. King is scathing about the local constabulary – “incompetent misogynists” – who seemed barely bothered so long as the victims are sex workers. He seeks in some small way to honour those 13 women known to have died at Peter Sutcliffe’s hands between 1975 and 1980, setting aside a single-page chapter with the names and ages.

He simply adds: “This is not a time for songs about nothing.”

King finds himself repulsed by the music industry’s rampant sexism – and much worse. Gang of Four joined the short-lived Rock Against Sexism alongside fellow Leeds musicians, the Delta 5.

A gig for the cause at Camden Town’s Electric Ballroom illustrated the limits of good intentions. King and co willingly vacated their headlining spot for an all-female band. Unfortunately, the women played to an almost-empty venue.

By 1980, Gang of Four had found a surprisingly receptive audience in the US and an all too familiar story unfolds of ephemeral success fuelling internal tensions to boiling point.

Still, King’s talent as a raconteur freshens some otherwise tawdry tales. Four decades on from the original band’s disintegration at the hands of a consummate sleazebag of a US manager continues to astonish.

King and drummer Hugo Burnham, the other survivor of the original Gang line-up, bring the band’s farewell tour to the O2 Forum in Kentish Town on June 24.

• To Hell With Poverty! A Class Act Inside the Gang of Four. By Jon King, Constable, Little Brown, £25