Wire Reflect on 40 Years as Punk's Ultimate Cult Band

Their 16th studio album, Silver/Lead – due out Friday, during Wire's Drill Los Angeles festival – finds the group exploring fuzzy, atmospheric synths and more traditional song structures. Wire's members have always fancied themselves to be Dadaists, thumbing their noses at tradition, but here they've created a work of anti-Dada – a stark inverse of Pink Flag, full of regular-length songs with bells and whistles and the heavy influence of Berlin-era Bowie. And yet, Silver/Lead songs like the urgent "Sonic Lens" and throbbing "Playing Harp for the Fishes" vibrate with inexplicable anxiety, Wire's signature since the beginning. It's a testament to the band's insistence on seeing through their vision from all possible angles.

                                                                     

                                                                               

 

Once the chaos cleared, the vision of the group's four members – Newman, Lewis, guitarist Bruce Gilbert and drummer Robert Gotobed ­– came into focus. "I didn't like rock & roll music – to me it was kind of old Fifties music – but I was into psychedelic pop of the Sixties," Newman recalls. "I knew that for Wire, I was going to have to write a very stripped-back type of song. It was very weird in the beginning, because I didn't play guitar well. Bruce, who used to be in a blues group, played only in an open tuning – where you put one finger on the strings to make a chord – so everything was in major chords, and I couldn't be doing with that, so I set about writing material that I thought was a reinvention of the idea of rock music. It was ditching the whole rock & roll thing and making something more straightforward, more brutal."

"We became rather fascinated with the beginning and endings of songs and putting shocking stops in – like the one in '12XU,'" Lewis says. "The shorter songs developed naturally. When the words ran out, Colin said, 'That's it.' We went, 'Yes, why not?' It used to drive the punks nuts. They'd sort of get pogoing, and then it would stop. We always thought it was really funny."
Wire played their first official concert as a four-piece on April 1st, 1977. A recording of the show, released as Live at the Roxy, London in 2006, finds the group playing a handful of raucous-yet-taut Pink Flag ragers, as well as the Ramones-y Overload holdover "Mary Is a Dyke" and hyper-speed J.J. Cale and Dave Clark Five covers. "I must say, the first gig was very inauspicious," Newman says. "I think we played to about three-and-a-half people. I mean, the club was the size of a toilet, but still, three-and-a-half didn't look full."

Most of the songs on Pink Flag came out organically by trying ideas, according to Lewis. "12XU" came from counting off songs "one, two, fuck you." "We thought, 'Wouldn't it be good to invent self-censorship?'" the bassist says with a laugh. "Then the ideas kept spiraling along. 'Let's have an intro in French [as in "Surgeon's Girl"].' Or, 'This song sounds a bit Brazilian ["Brazil"], so let's do a Brazilian version and, there you go, 'Three Girl Rumba.' It was an acceleration of ideas. And as we played, our skill level was going up and we were getting tighter, and the tighter we got, the funnier it was with the stopping and starting.

"Something that's kind of lost in history is that when you would go see the Sex Pistols playing in the pubs around London, the great thing about them is it was funny," he continues. "They were funny. And you either got it, or people hated it. For us, it was very much the Dada tradition, that it should be provocative and it can be nonsense and can be funny. And the Pistols were hilarious. They used to cover my favorite trash songs like 'Here Comes the Nice' by the Small Faces or something by the Monkees. It had that absurdity to it, and that absurdity really appealed to us."
 

"Pink Flag is like a blueprint, and it's simple," Lewis says about why he thinks that era of the group struck so many musicians. "It's unusual in its arrangements and the lyrics are unusual. You have something like '12XU,' which is about queerness and it's transgender-based, not that anybody noticed. Then 'Pink Flag' is a complete piece of imagination, and 'Field Day for the Sundays' is about the real progress of the yellow press, destroying sports stars lives because of their sexual activities. I think it had a more unusual and perhaps inventive view of politics. I think that's what attracted people, as well as the cover. Bruce and I both came up with the same image independently." He recalls that the band's label sent copies of the LP to Bob Dylan and Neil Young, prompting the latter to write back that he thought it was great.

Despite its apparent influence, Pink Flag didn't chart in the U.K. Although Chairs Missing made it into the Top 50 the following year and 1979's 154 would go into the Top 40, an act of music-industry politics stymied the band's progress. After the release of Chairs Missing's "Outdoor Miner" single, the record company was caught attempting to help it along illegally, doing something akin to payola, and the song subsequently plummeted on the charts. Lewis still harbors resentment over the matter and thinks about an alternate universe where Wire went on to play Top of the Pops.

                                                             

Their latest, Silver/Lead – for which Lewis would send Newman text, so Newman could arrive at the studio with finished songs – has been in the works for some time. The group paced its recording sessions so that the LP would be pressed and ready to go for its 40th anniversary. "There's a don't-look-back aspect to Wire," Newman says. "Wire is always about what we're doing now, what we're doing next. And an anniversary could easily be an excuse for wallowing in our own past, but instead putting out a new album and launching it with a Drill Festival in L.A., instead of playing in a basement in Covent Garden, where we started. We've had this plan for about five years.

"With Wire, we approach things as if we were a band in our twenties or thirties, and we do albums quite often," he continues. "We tour as regularly as we can, and we don't get offered those great festival headliners because we're not playing the classical albums. We might not be playing huge venues, but we make it work. I've never had a day job. I think figuring out how to survive as a creative person in his world is quite an important thing to do."

 Rolling Stone

Wire    Silver / Lead

As the originators of UK post-punk enter their fifth decade, they write with a natural-born ease—uncomplicated music cruising under lyrics that question progress and our ability to move forward.

There is one line that gives a clue as to what Silver/Lead is about: “The path that is progress is under repair.” Throughout the album’s 10 tracks, our narrator seems intent on moving forward, but is unsure how, or whether it’s even possible. References to roads and motion make the album feel like a travelogue; there are multiple songs featuring boats and rivers. But Silver/Lead also poses questions it can’t quite answer. As “Short Elevated Period,” one of the album’s few up-tempo tracks, puts it: “My reasons for living were under review...Standing in the road, where would I go to?”

This tension between wanting to move and wondering how to do it enlivens songs that might otherwise feel inert. The pep talk of “Diamonds in Cups” (“The course of creation is often quite strange/Keep your mind open, be willing to change”) gains energy from uncertainty. A similar pressure emerges in “This Time,” which admits that “some folks claim they know all the answers” yet still insists “This time it’s going to be better.” One track, “An Alibi,” is nothing but questions, though its pessimism feels buoyed by the music’s confident swing.

Pitchfork 

Listen to This Time on YouTube

This Time 

All lyrics from LP Silver/Lead 

Their official site : Pinkflag

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