Practically a fifth member of the group, Thorne also played keyboards on
Chairs Missing
. In 1978, keyboards were still widely regarded with suspicion as somehow unpunk, but Wire got into the idea when they realized that their guitars were so heavily treated they might as well be synths. Soon it was vice versa, says Thorne. “We put synths through distortion pedals and got this electric sound that wasn’t a guitar or a keyboard but somewhere in between.” This disorienting uncertainty about the instrumental provenance of particular sounds added to the album’s hallucinatory feel.
For a towering postpunk classic,
Chairs Missing
garnered a surprisingly mixed reception in 1978. Praised to the marmalade skies by some reviewers, it was lambasted by others for its keyboards, for the lyrics’ trippy whimsy, and for having longer songs (the opener, “Practice Makes Perfect,” made a statement by being four minutes long, while “Mercy” almost reached six).
NME
’s Monty Smith accused the group of degenerating from
Pink Flag
to Pink Floyd in less than a year. But apart from the odd Electric Prunes–like guitar sound, the only real sixties throwback on the album was the single “Outdoor Miner,” all Byrdsy honeyed harmonies and idyllic chiming chords. It was the closest Wire ever got to having a hit.
Liquid with assonance and internal rhyme—“face worker, serpentine miner, a roof falls, an underliner, of leaf structure, the egg timer”—the lyric to “Outdoor Miner” sounds like sensuous nonsense, a typical example of Wire reveling in language’s melt-in-your-mouth musicality rather than meaning. In fact, it’s obliquely inspired by a BBC radio program during which Lewis learned about a bug called the serpentine miner who lives inside holly leaves and eats chlorophyll. “When I listen to my singing on that I just crease up,” Newman told
NME
. “I should be singing ‘she loves me’…but what I’m singing about is insects.” The genesis of other songs was equally whimsical. “French Film Blurred” came from Newman’s attempt to watch a foreign movie on a TV with reception so poor he couldn’t read the subtitles, forcing him to make up the dialogue, while “Marooned” was a fantasy vignette about an Arctic castaway resigned to his fate (“As the water gets warmer my iceberg gets smaller”).
By their third album,
154,
Wire’s music was growing almost oppressively textured. The glaze of overdubs and guitar treatments produced a ceramic opacity, forbidding and impenetrable. The sessions were tense, too. The pop-minded Newman and Thorne jostled with the abstractionist Gilbert and Lewis (who’d been making pieces at home on tape recorders and venturing into the ambient zones later explored in their post-Wire project, Dome). “The vessel we were in just started getting a little small for all of us,” recalls Thorne, “because it was starting to cramp the ways in which we wanted to develop.” The tension seemed to infuse the songs, which were unusually cold-blooded even for Wire. Sung by Lewis in a doomy baritone, the opener, “I Should Have Known Better,” expressed animosity with steely precision: “I haven’t found a measure yet/To calibrate my displeasure yet.” Newman’s “Two People in a Room” depicted emotional conflict as stratagem and maneuver (“Positions are shifted/The cease-fire unlifted”) and obliquely evoked the disintegration of Wire into rival aesthetic camps. Ideas relating to number, measurement, and cartography limned the record, from songs such as “The 15th” and “Map Ref. 41°N 93°W” to the album title itself.
Released in September 1979,
154
garnered universal acclaim. The album possessed a sheer size of sound that suggested Wire could become a major band, but the group’s first real brush with the big time—a sixteen-date tour supporting the re-formed Roxy Music, a group they’d once admired greatly—soured them on the industry way of doing things. If the traditional high-stamina rockbiz route to success (heavy touring in order to build a fan base) wasn’t an option for Wire, neither was the pop strategy of daytime radio play and hit singles. All densely overdubbed guitars and stacked vocals, “Map Ref. 41°N 93°W,” the single off
154,
was majestic but its beauty was oddly remote, just like the cartographer’s-eye-view lyric, inspired by a flight over Iowa. As pop choruses go, “Lines of longitude and latitude/Define and refine my altitude” doesn’t exactly scream “chart potential.”
For “Map Ref. 41° N 93° W,” Wire decided to avoid the usual thing bands did to promote a single (conduct a short tour of the U.K.). Instead, they organized something special, a show called
People in a Room
that ran for four nights at the Jeanette Cochrane Theatre in London (part of the Central School of Art and Design). The show started with solo performances by each member of the band. Gilbert’s piece involved a black pushcart and a glass, into which a series of people poured water, while Newman’s Glenn Branca–style guitar drone symphony featured five people playing E, five playing A, and five playing D. When the band itself finally took the stage, Wire played a new fifteen-minute composition called “Crazy About Love.” Their gigs generally featured a high proportion of new material, but at the Jeanette Cochrane Theatre, Wire only played a couple of songs from
154,
destroying any promotional aspect to the event and pissing off EMI.
People in a Room
was effectively a career suicide note. In February 1980, a terse announcement appeared in the music papers, accompanied by a scowling shot of Wire. The group and EMI had parted company, it declared, because of “a breakdown of communication” and the label’s “reticence to consolidate future plans and projects.” Wire were impatient to move forward, to shake up the standard industry ways of doing things. They’d conceived an ambitious advertising campaign for
154
—enigmatic posters on buses, ten-second advertisements on TV, all featuring nothing but the cryptic number 154—but EMI rejected the idea as too expensive.
According to Thorne, most of the more open-minded people at EMI had left, as the company took a turn at the end of the seventies toward playing it safe and putting out bottom-line-oriented releases. But Newman says Wire felt like they “were engaged in a creative project and had this very rich record company that we assumed would be excited by new ideas. We
wanted
to sell records. We were talking about video. This was before MTV, but I’d seen from watching children’s TV shows that pop videos were becoming very important. We had an idea for ‘Map Ref.’—hugely expensive, but we could probably have been persuaded to do something a bit cheaper if there had been a budget. But EMI said, ‘You can’t sell music on television, we’ve tried.’ Hilarious, considering what happened a year later with MTV! In hindsight, I can see how Wire really suffered from being ahead of our time. By 1980, if we’d been on a label that was willing to put money into a video, we would have been amongst the first generation of MTV bands, alongside Talking Heads.”
Unwilling to spend what it would take to make Wire happen as a pop group, EMI was equally disinclined to fund their more esoteric side. Their proposal of a sublabel similar to Eno’s Obscure imprint through Island (an outlet for a steady stream of experimental side-project releases, limited in appeal to hard-core Wire aficionados but cheap to produce) was rejected. “The head of EMI put it quite succinctly,” recalls Thorne. “Something like, ‘A record company is not an Arts Council.’ And to be fair, Wire had lost touch with the fact that a large record company has to show a return on their investment.”
The press release about the Wire/EMI split also announced an upcoming show at London’s Electric Ballroom in late February 1980. In a final impressive feat of perversity, instead of using this as a showcase to get another record deal, Wire decided to stage an absurdist extravaganza redolent of the dadaist cabaret revues of the early twentieth century. Each song in the virtually all-new set was accompanied by a daft spectacle. For “Everything’s Going to Be Nice,” two men tethered to an inflatable jet were dragged across the stage by a woman. Newman sang “We Meet Under Tables” dressed in a black knee-length veil. Lewis growled “Eels Sang Lino” accompanied and lit by an illuminated goose. During “Piano Tuner (Keep Strumming Those Guitars),” someone attacked a gas stove, while “Zegk Hoqp” featured twelve people with newspaper headdresses playing percussion. The audience, which contained a sizable contingent of people who still pined for
Pink Flag
–era punk ditties such as “12XU” and “Dot Dash,” were either baffled or chucked bottles at the stage. It was Wire’s last gig for five years. Without ever formally disbanding, the group dispersed. Newman pursued the melodic side of Wire across a series of solo albums. Meanwhile, Lewis and Gilbert unleashed a torrent of experimental albums and EPs under the names Dome, Cupol, and Gilbert/Lewis, their abstract sound paintings often paralleling Eno’s ambient series for the EG label.
SOME POSTPUNK AFICIONADOS
consider Mission of Burma to be the American equivalent to Wire. Experimenting with song structure and sound texture with a similarly dry, methodical approach, the Boston band loved to play games with form and expectation. Unlike Wire or Talking Heads, MoB weren’t an art school band as such, but they were definitely arty (as songs such as “Max Ernst” and the Magritte-inspired “This Is Not a Photograph” indicate). Their conceptual bent came from a different kind of high-art background, classical music college.
In the midseventies, guitarist/vocalist Roger Miller had started a composition major at CalArts—“writing very complex piano scores and pieces for percussion trios,” he says—only to quit because “academia didn’t suit me.” By early 1978, Miller had moved to Boston, his plan being to do experimental work involving tape loops and prepared piano. Instead, he joined a New Wave band called Moving Parts. He hit it off with the group’s bassist Clint Conley, and the pair, keen to do more aggressive music, split off in 1979, recruiting drummer Peter Prescott, who’d previously played in the art rock band the Molls (in which the lead instrument was bassoon!), to form Mission of Burma.
When punk rock came along, Miller had been “just blown away by these people who could barely play guitar. I could play complex pieces by Schoenberg, but things like the Sex Pistols meant more to me than complexity.” But in Mission of Burma, the complexity slowly crept back in. “I think we’re just a closet prog-rock act that happened during punk,” laughs Conley. “We were attracted to the velocity and volume of punk, but at the same time Roger and I were both really attracted to composition.” As the raw blasting power of punk gave way to postpunk’s unlikely amalgams of minimalism and sophistication—Wire, Gang of Four, the No Wave movement, Pere Ubu, all admired by Mission of Burma—Miller’s training suddenly became relevant. The result was “avant-garde music you can shake your fist to,” as one critic famously put it. Live, Mission of Burma were an art
attack,
playing their music with dispassionate ferocity and at earsplitting volume.
Where Conley tended to write and sing the more melodic, shout-along tunes such as “Academy Fight Song” (MoB’s debut single) and “That’s When I Reach for My Revolver,” Miller’s tunes resembled partially dismantled anthems. The sheer noise assault of the MoB live experience seemed to signify rock, but their songs generally frustrated the simple rock-out impulse. This combination of visceral and cerebral meant that Mission of Burma were “sort of an acquired taste,” Conley told one interviewer. “We heard it over and over again throughout our career that people would see us the first time and it just wouldn’t make any sense at all. Listening to our live tapes, I know what they’re talking about. Sometimes it’s just like chewing gravel or a visit to the dentist’s office.” Miller recalls playing Danceteria in New York “with four hundred people in the room, and by the third song there’d be six left!” Says Conley, “I always felt like we were just interrupting people! They’d be dancing to the latest sounds from England, and we’d come on and make a big mess, and then they’d go back to their fun.”
After existing as a power trio for a brief period, Mission of Burma acquired a fourth member, an Eno-like figure named Martin Swope who intensified the group’s arty aura considerably. His role wasn’t to act as the group’s producer, though, but was closer to Eno’s position in early Roxy Music. Swope contributed tape treatments and phantom sound effects, both in the recording studio and at live shows, but he never appeared onstage with MoB, working instead at the venue’s mixing board. “What Martin did,” Prescott explained, “was tape something that was going on live, manipulate it, and send it back [into the sound system] as a sort of new instrument. You couldn’t predict exactly how it would sound, and that got to be the really fun thing.” Audience members would hear eerie sounds within the group’s onslaught of noise and be unable to work out which member of the visible trio was responsible. But other sound mirages were also being generated by the sheer volume at which the group played, and by Miller’s and Conley’s fondness for open tunings. “Just between the way Clint played bass, the wash of Pete’s cymbals, and my harmonics, you could hear new melodies in there,” says Miller.
In his classic book
Rock and the Pop Narcotic,
Joe Carducci wrote about how he “never felt MoB were truly a contemporary band,” that underneath the postpunk trappings, they were a throwback to psychedelia. Indeed, as a teenager at the end of the sixties, Miller had played with his brother in Sproton Layer, a band heavily influenced by Syd Barrett–era Pink Floyd, while the early seventies saw him exploring free jazz and drumming in the post-psychedelic experimental band Destroy All Monsters. The collision of all these freak-rock influences with the more “dry” postpunk sensibility explains the conflicted quality of the Mission of Burma experience. The music invites the listener to lose himself in its headfuck noise, but this flip-your-wig impulse is checked by the Gang of Four/Wire–like qualities of tension and rigor.