King attended Sevenoaks School, where he was a member of the 'Art Room' that produced musicians Tom Greenhalgh and Mark White of The Mekons, along with Andy Gill of Gang of Four, documentarian Adam Curtis, and film director Paul Greengrass.

Jon Pareles in The New York Times described King's lyrics as "bitterly analytical, infused with theories from Marx, Adorno, Baudrillard and Godard, and the band was determined to puncture pop romance with the consciousness that people are manipulated by power, economics, media and marketing.

[3] Referring to the influence of Situationist ideas on Gang of Four's work, Jon King remarked, in a 1980 letter to Greil Marcus, that "where I think that Situationism was good was in the development of its revolutionary tactic: 'reinvesting' the cultural past.

King said in the same feature: "I remember when I was 15, I got incredibly excited when I found some grubby old book in a secondhand bookshop about the revolution in Paris in 1968 (...) There was a picture, which I still cherish – it was a photograph for some kind of perfume and a very glamorous-looking woman on this poster, and someone had written on it in French: "You know I know I'm exploiting you, but I'm not doing it on purpose".

King was primary lyricist in the band and wrote words to almost all their most influential songs, including "Damaged Goods", "Natural's Not In It", "I Found That Essence Rare", "What We All Want", "I Love a Man in a Uniform", "Call Me Up" and others.

as one of 100 greatest British albums of all time, said that King's "lyrics performed the minor miracle of rendering deconstructionist slogans - Marx and Engels by way of Guy Debord - into telegrammatic rock'n'roll rabble-rousing".

[6] "In other words, pop songs as false emotional advertising and ideology as everydayness are themselves grounds for inquiry", as King told Greil Marcus, because "unless you have an awareness of your views as political manifestations, you won't believe you can change them".

King created the cover art for many of their albums, including the outer sleeve designs for the Damaged Goods EP, "At Home he's a Tourist", Entertainment!, Solid Gold and A Brief History of the 20th Century.