If a single word could describe Gang of Four’s Andy Gill—who led a version of the group from their formation in the late 1970s right up until his death on February 1—it might be “steely.” It captures everything from his innovative and massively influential guitar style, which sounded like metal splintering, to his stern stage persona, to his brisk, no-nonsense demeanor in interviews. A guitar-hero for a “no more heroes” era, Gill saw rock as an agent of change: a hammer to reshape reality, not just reflect it.

As the name implies, the original lineup of Gang of Four were sonic equals: Hugo Burnham’s drums, Dave Allen’s bass, Jon King’s voice, and Gill’s guitar were all given the same prominence in the mix of their classic-era records. But when it came to ideology and attitude, the core of the band was Gill and King. “Me and Jon were running the show,” Gill asserted in one of his last ever interviews. “We had the concept and we wrote the songs.”

Although Gang of Four formed in the Northern city of Leeds, the friendship between Gill and King dated back to their youth in the South of England. At Sevenoaks School, they gravitated towards the art room. Then they and a bunch of like-minded friends (later to form the shambolic DIY group The Mekons) went up to study at the famously progressive and freethinking Fine Arts Department at Leeds University.

There, Gill and King assimilated the anti-capitalist critique of the Situationists, a radical French group active in the ’60s whose focus was analyzing the alienating effects of mass media and entertainment. They also imbibed the rigor and savage irony of Art & Language, a collective of artists and critics who aggressively dismantled woolly-minded Romantic ideas about art as a spiritually uplifting force. Avant-garde film was another influence: King and Gill ran the student film society, where they encountered the work of Jean-Luc Godard, whose movies deliberately disrupted the conventional structures of cinema.

Although the idea of starting a band had occurred to Gill while he and King visited New York and spent time at the legendary punk club CBGB, Gang of Four was really forged in a Leeds bohemian pub called the Fenton, where Gill and his future bandmates spent nights awash in amiably fierce debates about politics and art. All of the members of Gang of Four enjoyed a good argument, but none more so than Gill. “Andy had really mastered the art of the put-down,” Hugo Burnham told me in 2001. “He would bait you. You get that sense from his guitar-playing—it’s very prickly.”

If a left-wing pub had a formative effect on Gang of Four’s sensibility, pub rock—the pre-punk UK scene of bands that played intimate gigs in grubby bars—informed their initial sonic bearings: “Fast rivvum & blues” is how the fledgling group once described their sound in an advert looking for a bassist. Gill’s role model was Wilko Johnson, the guitarist in leading pub rock band Dr. Feelgood, who had devised a uniquely spiky style of rhythm-as-lead playing where he percussively slapped the guitar strings with his hardened fingernails rather than a pick. Gill amped up the staccato jitteriness, punctuating his slashes and gouges with great gaps of space: an aesthetic of emptiness absorbed in part from his love of reggae but also from another great British guitarist, Free’s Paul Kossoff, who used silence and spacing in his riffs to great effect.

During the post-punk era, maximalist virtuosity was deemed a decadent display of macho self-preening. But few went as far into stringent minimalism as Gang of Four. Gill told me they had “anti-solos—when you stopped playing, just left a hole.” His guitar was so rhythm-oriented, it made sense to see all three instrumentalists in the group as the rhythm section, not just drummer Burnham and bassist Allen. “Before Gang of Four I couldn’t decide whether to be a drummer or a guitarist,” Gill said. “So inevitably the whole thing was very rhythmic.”