I’ve been listening to Wire a lot recently. It’s nothing new to say this, but their first three albums, recorded in the late 1970s, are great, and in very different ways. The first is stripped down and curt. The second is moody and textural. The third is weird and spacey. I like all of them, although I didn’t always. So, here is the story of how my tastes travelled along the wire, evolving as the band did until I finally caught up with what they were giving out. It’s a brief discourse on how sonic disposition evolves, through gateway records, frames of reference and the slow subconscious creep of the palette.
I don’t remember how I first heard about Wire, but I remember seeing the cover of Pink Flag in a record store in Sheffield and being immediately enticed. Bold, minimalistic... and why they fuck would you call your album “Pink Flag”? However, because I’m a total divvy, I did not buy the record straight away. My first exposure to Wire’s music actually came through The New Bomb Turks cover of ‘Mr Suit’.
This begs the question: why was I listening to The New Bomb Turks? Well, as I came of musical age The Hives, The Strokes and Randy were my gateway bands into the world of garage rock and punk. From there I got into heavier stuff like The New Bomb Turks, The Oblivians and Guitar Wolf. I related to the volume and energy of these bands, whose riffs were hammered home with nihilistic abandon. In fact, I still do. Anyway, an appreciation of The New Bomb Turks cover version spiked my curiosity: who wrote such hate-filled lyrics? I went out and bought a copy of Pink Flag.
On first listen I was confused. The record is an avalanche of hooks and parts (21 songs in 35 minutes), with the attention span of… well, a teenage boy. The New Bomb Turks version of ‘Mr Suit’ sounded nothing like the original, nor did any of the other songs, either sonically or lyrically. What was with the clean-cut jangle of ‘Fragile’? And what the hell was a ‘Three Girl Rhumba’ anyway? Pink Flag did not sound like The New Bomb Turks at all.
But then I began listening to music from the early ‘70s, in particular Television and the Modern Lovers, and Pink Flag started to make sense. I realised that shard-like stabs of guitar and stringy rhythm sections were still energetic, only it was a different kind of energy, like on Television’s pulsating classic ‘Marquee Moon’. And lyrics didn’t have to be a direct show of machismo... you could write something abstract or weird like The Modern Lover’s ‘Pablo Picasso’ and still have attitude. These records gave me the frame of reference to understand, and eventually adore, the fusion of punk and progressive thinking that is Pink Flag. Impatient for more I grabbed hold of their next album, Chairs Missing... and didn’t like it all. The hard no pace, less guitar and lots of swirling noise. 154 bewildered me.
That’s because Wire had moved on while I had not. Having realised their first record so perfectly they were keen to experiment on their sophomore release. Producer Mike Thorne brought in a smorgasbord of effects processors, giving the record a metallic sheen. The songs are slower, inspired by the grooves of krautrock pioneers like Can and Neu! The energy remained, only now it was darker and more brooding, while the lyrics dove further into dada-inspired impenetrability.
Just as I was busy rejecting Chairs Missing I bought a copy of Can’s Tago Mago. I found it captivating, and realised that drone and repetition could contain a hypnotic power. I was also getting into early Sonic Youth efforts and Dinosaur Jr’s You’re Living All Over Me, opening my ears to discordant walls of noise. While not a sudden revelation, the idea that music could be slow, atonal and cerebral began to take hold in my subconscious, until one day I realised that Chairs Missing was my favourite Wire album.
How could I not have seen it sooner? It has their most accessible song, ‘Outdoor Minor’, whose lyrics seem to mean something hugely significant but probably don’t. There are bizarre chant-along songs like ‘I Am The Fly’ and ‘Practice Makes Perfect’ that echo the works of Can and White Light-era Velvet Underground. Then there is the speed-noise bliss of ‘Sand In My Joints’, doing what Pink Flag does, only louder and better. It is a step forward, beating the punks at their own act while creating a new stage that Wire alone occupied.
Being an unoriginal kind of person, I bought their next record, 154, and went through the whole thing again; the album made no sense to me, and it seemed like they had deliberately removed all my favourite parts. Gone were the aggressive noise blasts of guitar that I loved, supplanted by synthesizers. Gone were the accessible hits, with even the most obvious pop song ‘Map Ref 41°n 93°w’ has lyrics so obtuse that singing along is nearly impossible. And Colin Newman’s vocal - an angry nerd wail that I had grown to love - was replaced by the dour spoken-word delivery of Graham Lewis on tunes like ‘I Should Have Known Better’.The reason for all the change lay in Wire’s history: they were products of the UK art-school’s of the ‘60s and ‘70s, more influenced by sculpture, painting and literature than by fellow musicians. In fact, 154 is more art project than album, and the band developed installations and dramatic pieces to accompany the live performances. At the time these were ideas beyond my experience, and I had no web of knowledge in which to catch 154.
However, I subsequently spent more time listening to the Soft Boys, proto-synth like The Normal and the offerings of Magazine - groups who saw themselves as artists with a concept rather than pop musicians with a tune. I also became better versed in art, and read more widely into the history of post-punk. I moved from being obsessed with live performance to appreciating how the studio could take music into strange places. This gave me the handle I needed to grab on to 154, which now has its own special place in my affections. Although it is the Wire record I relate to least, I fully expect this to change as I learn and listen more.
In conclusion, you cannot jump from the start straight to the finish in musical taste, you have to make connections and build a frame of reference. Pink Flag did not work for me until I found out that there was more to music than being loud and over-sexed. Chairs Missing was not my thing until I spent time with the rhythmic yet spacey drive of bands like Can and Neu! And 154 made no sense without learning more about post-punk, art and music as an intellectual pursuit. A web of musical connections must grow in your brain before you can catch the more difficult stuff. In order to really appreciate it, you have to travel... all along the wire...