The Stool Pigeon music newspaper

“My generation, the punk generation, are a bunch of fucking tossers,” exclaims Wire’s Colin Newman over the top of his pint. We’ve been talking about the forthcoming embarrassment of yet another Sex Pistols reunion, and Newman is recalling when Lydon’s lot last flogged their dead horse for the Queen’s Golden Jubilee in 2002. While the Sex Pistols hammed through a gig at Crystal Palace and made flatulent proclamations of their own self-importance, Newman was asked to commemorate Liz’s birthday and the quarter century of punk by London arts radio station Resonance FM. He enthusiastically said he’d take two of his then-favourite bands, Liars and Mclusky, into the studio in a desire to show the best new talent, rather than act the punk uncle dancing at a wedding. The beards at Resonance nervously asked if he might do something a little more… arty. But Newman’s choice prevailed.

It’s this spirit of going against the grain, whichever way that grain might run, that permeates Wire’s history since their inception at a Watford art college in 1976, and continues to this day with the release of a new EP ‘Read & Burn 03’. Originally made up of Newman (vocals, rhythm guitar), Graham Lewis (bass, lyrics), Bruce Gilbert (guitar), Robert Gotobed (drums) and George Gill (lead guitar), Wire became a four-piece after Gill was fired, along with his predilection for guitar solos. The remaining members chucked out all of Gill’s songs and sat down in front of the drawing board to spend the next couple of months meticulously planning the Wire sound and aesthetic before their first gig as a four-piece at London’s Roxy Club on April Fool’s Day, 1977. From the departure of Gill onward, Wire were a studied, intelligent band that stood out a country mile from the studded crowd.

“We were far cooler,” laughs Newman. “Look, if you’d seen the Sex Pistols in 1976 it was an era-defining moment. You were either with them or against them. You were standing in some bar or some club where they were playing, there’d be a bunch of lads in rugby shirts heckling John Lydon, and you knew which side you were on. By the end of 1977, when Pink Flag [Wire’s debut LP] came out, every band in Britain wanted to be the Sex Pistols, but of course it wasn’t possible - they were them already.”

While the Sex Pistols may have opened the door, as they did for so many bands, Wire stepped through it to bring far more to the party. “It was very obvious to anyone with a bit of sense about them that it was time to do something different,” says Newman, “and there were bands who were doing something different, and working very hard to push against that.”

And push Wire did. Like those of their contemporaries, Wire’s albums reflected the tension of the era. “The late seventies were a time when nobody was ever friendly to each other - we hadn’t lived through the loved-up nineties,” continues Newman. “Nobody had a good thing to say about anyone - there was sneery aggression everywhere.”

But, as well as this coming across in Newman’s arch, Thames valley sneer, Wire had a tense relationship with their very medium - the music itself. They worked by constantly paring the music down until the bare minimum remained, a tensile bar thrumming against the elements. “When I mix a track it’s all about removing the things that annoy me - it’s really precise,” says Newman of the methods he employs to this day. “It is all about the audio picture.”

This very visual way of working can be seen in the direct minimalism of Pink Flag, its stylish cover and Graham Lewis’s abstract, surreal lyrics. Although best known for the clipped austerity of the Elastica-‘inspiring’ ‘Three Girl Rhumba’ or frantic ‘12 X U’, Pink Flag’s 20 track, 30-minute length also features the title track itself, intended to be ‘Johnny B. Good’ but written with one chord, and the lurking menace of ‘Lowdown’. Following Pink Flag, though, Wire weren’t content to sit still. Chairs Missing arrived less than a year later in 1978, and third album, 154, 13 months after that. The phenomenal work rate saw their sound becoming more expansive, exploring darker territories as the band began to experiment with the potential of new technology. Yet, as well as the oft-brutal pushing of their sound to the very brink and beyond of what their fanbase deemed acceptable, Wire somehow came up with the likes of ‘I Am The Fly’, ‘Outdoor Miner’ and ‘The 15th’, some of the sweetest skewed pop songs of the era.

Newman is keen to stress that he believes the band shouldn’t just be known for their debut. “Pink Flag is the most direct album, but believe me it’s not the favourite of most real Wire fans you meet,” he insists. “Most of those who like Pink Flag and don’t like the rest of them are punk people - they think Pink Flag is a really interesting arty punk record, but anything further than that is too much.”

So what was it that inspired Wire to, post-Pink Flag, risk alienating their fanbase and keep pushing the envelope? “There was no future in being punk,” says Newman emphatically. “It was just obvious to anyone who was a student of pop culture, and we were students of pop culture, that punk wasn’t being clever. I think the generation that grew up through punk and became post punk were the first critical generation: they looked at that and thought, ‘Where do we go from there?’”

Yet a lot of them didn’t. That side of punk is held in such high regard…

“Because people are stupid! And it’s not snobbish to say that. Most of those bands that came afterwards were just rubbish! Who would want to idolise Slaughter and the Dogs?”

Probably a lot of the bench quenching punks dribbling White Lightning down their fetid Sham 69 T-shirts. Why did they hate Wire so much back then? According to Newman, a lot of the animosity came from Wire’s refusal to conform to punk gig etiquette:

“All the punks hated us because we kept stopping, so they couldn’t get their pogo going. They didn’t understand what we were - we looked weird, we behaved weird and it was very obvious we weren’t like them. When we started one of the ideas was that I didn’t play guitar as I wanted to put on a performance. I’d been a big fan of the Small Faces back in the seventies and Rod Stewart was always throwing these rock poses. So I thought, ‘Okay, what I’m going to do is throw rock poses, but what do you do if you’re going to make rock poses the most un-rock thing you can do? Not move at all. So in the beginning I’d just stand there in front of the microphone and then there were movements and cues that were very jerky and seemed uncoordinated. I’d written the tunes, so therefore I knew all the changes, and I had to give the others signals as to where they were. I didn’t want to count in, because that’s a bit crap, so I thought, ‘Well, I’ll put my arm up, and I turned that into my thing.’”

Wire also spurned, both in music and image, the macho element of punk. Newman, who now dresses like the kind of chap you’d find in your local ironmongers of a Saturday morning, once sported a stage outfit that involved, he says, “very tight trousers and bare feet, so I looked like a ballet dancer, and I had nice hair [cut by a fancy Knightsbridge hairdresser]. I looked quite, well… definitely not rough - a rather nice boy - and that rankled with them because I was shouting at them. The music was so ‘toktoktoktoktok’ that there was really no other way to give it. They’d start to get a bit nervous because there was just this wall of noise, and I’d be giving them this cold stare, which would sometimes provoke quite a negative reaction.”

Of course, pushing yourself forward against the cultural climate, the desires of your record label and even your own fanbase is never going to be without risk. By 1979, tensions were mounting within the group regarding the band’s future direction, with Newman and Gotobed keen to explore Wire’s pop tendencies, and Lewis and Gilbert wanting to take matters even further down an experimental path. A series of events that were more experiments in performance art than standard gigs increasingly alienated those members of the fanbase who merely wanted to bounce on the spot for the 90 seconds of ‘12 X U’.

“It was a very weird period,” Newman explains. “We’d done a thing that was a very nice idea, though we should probably have done something more rock to go alongside it. There were four parts, each of which was a performance piece followed by Wire playing. Most people who had anything to do with rock music found it deeply pretentious, and were actually very cross. We went in six months from having made the best album of our generation with 154 to being washed up.”

Things soon got worse:

“We’d done a tour supporting Roxy Music. Wire in ’79 supporting Roxy Music in ’73 or ’74 would have been an amazing double bill, but it was Roxy Music in 1979, so it was Bryan Ferry and a backing band. Eno was long gone. We were playing to huge stadiums full of people who hated us, which was really soul destroying, yet as far as we could see that’s all there was for us. We weren’t selling any more albums in 1979 than we were in 1977, there were no opportunities coming our way, and EMI were giving us the feeling that there was trouble. They wanted to sign for a fourth album but didn’t want to give us an advance. We’d have had no money at all. It was all a bit strange and desperate.”

And so in 1980, Wire called it a day, perhaps feeling that they’d rather retire than starve - after all, says Newman, they’d always vowed to never become “one of those bands that records three albums and then goes crap”. But was the decision to split a rather hasty one? Just a few years later in the mid-1980s, Wire were being cited as one of the biggest inspirations to the nascent US hardcore scene, and signing to independent labels started to become a viable way of releasing records.
“It’s true we were a few years ahead of our time,” says Newman ruefully. “It’s like the cartoon where the guy runs off the cliff and just stays there. If we’d just hung there for two or three years then the cliff would have come out to meet us, because suddenly there’d have been all the indie people who would have had the money and the vision.”

When Wire did get back together again in 1985, it was to new indie Mute records, the label formed by Wire fan Daniel Miller, that they signed. Yet the next 20 years never quite saw Wire reaching the same level as they did in the late seventies. All four members explored creative avenues in music and beyond - Newman in his Githead project - but though Wire’s name drifted in and out of fashion, the musical climate was changing and the band were left as cult spectators. Newman, who follows and enjoys new music from Field Music to Liars to Burial and the grime records he hears via his teenage son, believes that a “terrible conformism in music in Britain” has taken hold in recent years, a problem brought about by one particularly troublesome member of society. “He likes his tunes, the British Bloke,” Newman laughs. “Bands almost sound like that bloke who’s coming back from the pub and he’s had a few - that kind of slightly rowdy singing, but a bit more tuneful.”

Newman saw this manifested at a Kaiser Chiefs gig: “By the end, everyone was onstage. I realised that it’s got nothing to do with the music - the audience and the band were the same. That’s actually what most people want - they want somebody ordinary like them so they can see themselves up there. When you have somebody like Wire who are doing something they don’t get, it alienates them, and I think that’s why we’ve perhaps not had more success. Musicians understand it, but I think people who buy records because they need something to put in their stereo just have no connection.”

That’s not to say that Newman doesn’t sometimes find all the adulation heaped on Wire by those who do get it a little much. “Some of the things people write are a bit ridiculous,” he says; “‘I love Wire, you love Wire, we all love Wire, their last record was so amazing that I listened to it and had to go and hit myself with furniture.’ Ha ha!”

Yet he’s justifiably proud of the inspiration Wire have been for so many artists across the musical spectrum: “I’ve dealt with so many musicians in anything from, I don’t know, Detroit techno to you-name-the-genre… maybe not the opera stuff, but people will tell me that they’ve been influenced by the attitude, or just love the music.”

And Newman’s resolutely humble about it. “It’s my life,” he says. “At some point you just accept that this is the reality you’re going to live with. I would never have thought when I started the band that people would still be into us.”

Yet it has only been recently that Wire have seen any financial return on their creative investment. “High regard doesn’t pay any bills,” Newman says. “I don’t want to sound like a depressing old git, but I think if you’re an intelligent artist you’ve got to work out how business is done, because if you don’t you’re a sucker and someone else is going to make all the money and you aren’t. It’s the obvious thing - cut out as many middlemen as possible and go directly to your audience.”

Which is exactly what Wire have done with their new EP, ‘Read & Burn 03’. It’s being sold exclusively through their own Pink Flag web presence and Newman’s Post Everything mail order business, and has been brought into the world with the minimum of press fuss. “We don’t want to be coming out of every fucking media portal we can,” Newman insists. “Those who want to find it know where to find it and can come and get it.”

‘Read & Burn 03’ makes for an enticing prelude (or “bung”, as Newman calls it) for a new Wire full-length, as yet untitled and due in the new year. For the four-track EP (only 10 minutes shorter than their 21-track debut) is arguably among the best work Wire have produced since 154. Where much of their output through the 1980s (collected on The A-List compilation) in 2007 sounds a little too much of its time, or 2003’s Send possessed a brusqueness (interestingly, inspired by the energy of Liars and Mclusky) that didn’t always gel, ‘Read & Burn 03’ is a refined, elegant record that Wire themselves describe as a “seismic shift” towards a “newly defined aesthetic sense”. They’re moving forward yet again, but what’s the significance this time? “It’s the idea that we can do tunes,” says Newman. “There are two or three basic ideas, which are widescreen and Technicolor, rather than monophonic and black and white, and let’s not be afraid of having some tunes. I can’t say truly pop, because it never can be. It’s always going to be pop in inverted commas.

“I’ll be fascinated to see how we do. It’s bound to upset people because they’ll say it’s not as good as Pink Flag. They’re not getting the point, but since when did they ever matter?”

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