Wire Of The Tastiest Kind

Wire Of The Tastiest Kind

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Richard Grabel

Colin Newman and Graham Lewis, of the nearly living legendary beat combo Wire, are amiable, approachable guys who nonetheless make no attempt to hide their art-school backgrounds, throwing around aesthetic theories and references to Duchamp and who-knows-who-else with abandon.

And why not? Wire’s first three albums comprise a kind Of Holy Trinity of Art/ Punk. Pink Flag (1977), their first, took the rough and tumble rawness of Brit punk and opened it up with a cool, detached irony to create a brilliant and vicious new music.

Time and time again, on meeting and talking with the leaders of my favorite post-punk bands, I’ve found that they share my passion for this record. Bob Mould and the late, lamented D. Boon, for example, have both mentioned Pink Flag as a record that helped change their minds and their lives. Add in the members of R.E.M., the Feelies, Sonic Youth and just about any other bunch of thinking-man’s guitar-bashers into the list of those who cite Wire as a formative influence.

Colin Newman looks back at it this way:

“One of the musical concepts we were dealing with on Pink Flag was basically a trashed-up history of rock music, using everything that had happened but perverting it. Stripping it, as the Ramones had done to a certain style of music, which was basically blues-based rock, taking that and knocking the cack out of it. And I thought, ‘Why not do that with everything, all the references, the object being just to say, bye bye?’

“And then a year later, the Residents were right there kicking the shit out of the remains. Rock music died then. The corpse keeps crawling out and making lots of money, but there’s nothing new in it.”

Wire’s second album, Chairs Missing (1978) left minimalism behind and created a chilling, trippy aural landscape. With 154 (1979), Wire started pulling in too many directions at once, playing with an over-elaborate experimentalism. But here, too, their orchestral synthesis of punk and art-rock has gradually seeped into the mainstream. New Order and any number of other synths-and-guitars bands took cues from late-’70s Wire. And now Wire’s newly-released single, “Ahead,” a sure, floor-filling dance rocker with a distinct edge of strangeness, sounds uncannily (even uncomfortably) like the best of New Order. Things come full circle.

Those early Wire records were never commerically huge, but as I’ve said, they were widely heard by musicians on both sides of the Atlantic. In 1980 the four members of Wire—Newman, Lewis, Bruce Gilbert and Robert Gotobed—left off being Wire in order to pursue various solo projects.

And now theylre back. Late last year, they released the Snakedrill EP, wherein “Snake” evinced a fresh melodicism tinged with a loony humor that haunts the edge of the song in that weird Wire way. Then came a new album, The Ideal Copy, an eerie disc thoroughly drenched in art, atmosphere and attitude.

Now that they’ve hit the interview circuit, they’ve been asked the ‘how do you feel about being a living legend?’ question so many times it has become an inside joke.

“The only thing I can put it down to is attitude,” says Graham Lewis. “When we started we couldn’t play. We had limited skills. But we had passion, and eventually we had a purpose as well, which was to do something you wanted to do for yourself.”

To these ears, what has consistently distinguished Wire’s records has been that they always sound both very much of their time and very unique.

Newman: “One is always working with the currency. In technical terms, and in whatever other terms, the cultural terms of the time. You’re plugged into the times. But with an eye to being something more. Obviously, the techniques and the currency of the time are going to be in there because you can’t avoid it. But one is attempting all the time to put something into it that will last forever.”

Lewis: “Duchamp said he reckoned that nobody could really evalute his work until 25 years after he was dead. Because then all the critics of tfie time and anybody else who had a vested interest in the work would be dead too. Duchamp was brilliant on that one. He said no to the Museum of Modern Art because they would only guarantee him 10 years.”

Wire took six years off, but its members insist the group never broke up. They were just doing other things. Among them, along with several solo records, was a trip by Colin Newman to India to work on a photographic documentary project of that country’s cultural shrines.

“Going to India and losing a lot of crap was very cleansing,” Newman says. “Inevitably, being in the rock business and being a member of a famous cult group feeds the ego somewhat. You can walk around with a big label saying ‘I’m Colin Newman.’ You can’t do that in a country where that means nothing, and that was fantastic. And that continues to have an effect on me in that I don^t take it quite so seriously.”

The new° album, The Ideal Copy, despite the presence of two upbeat dance tracks in “Ahead” and “Ambitious,” is mostly a somber, rather brooding affair.

“We didn’t know what it would be when we started,” Lewis recalls. “We had a crisis hammering out what the philosophy was in making this record. It was blood on the walls, to put it melodramatically.”

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Strangely, it sounds just the opposite, conveying the impression of great deliberateness.

Newman: “This may sound egocentric, but... there is a certain attitude I have about singing, which is, I refuse to dump any shit on people when I sing. I try to be very clean about my vocal approach. And I think a certain amount of that comes through on the record, which I think mends up some of the cracks.

“It’s a particular attitude I have towards singing, which is, that I have a responsibility not to dump personal crap onto people, not to do it in an egocentric way which says, look at me, I’m important.”

Wire has often been described as intelligent rock. What is it in rock or pop that signals “intelligence”?

Newman: “I’ve got a theory on that, too. I think the very odd juxtaposition of my singing and Graham’s lyrics creates a distance of some kind, which has a kind of authority, which sort of sounds intelligent. Also the way the backing is organized, or at least thought about, so that you get these two forces working.

“But you get these labels. It’s nice to be thought of as intelligent, but I would say that with the exception of Bruce, none of us are intellectuals. Bruce is more of a head person. Graham and I are dealing more with emotion in various ways. And Robert is very physical.”

That reputation of intellectualism is furthered by Wire’s lyrics, which on their new record are more abstract and obscure than ever.

Take the song “Ambitious.” On it you’ll hear the refrain “the ideal copy is CIA... PLO. . . KGB.. . IMF. .. ” and so on. But Lewis says they left out the key.

“The ideal copy is DNA. But Bruce had a dream about it and decided we had to take that out of the song.”

Newman: “Despite all the elipticism, there is among the members of this group a love of directness and clarity. You can do that on the sort of moronic level of the ‘I love you’ sort of stuff that is straightforward but it has been said so many times in popular music, so to make it convicing is another thing. So one has to go through, it’s a kind of zen. You go through all this complexity, and then the mountain is the mountain and the tree is the tree, in the end.”

Lewis: “And on that note, I have a message for America from Bruce Gilbert. He says, ‘A bell is a bell, until it is struck.’ Is this, a wind-up?”

That, reader, is up to you to decide.