Authors: Wilson Neate
You’ve set yourself a bit of a task. Obviously, you want to make it as balanced and accurate as possible, but there’s something very attractive about creating a total fiction of history—the absurdity value. The definitive story is impossible.
Bruce Gilbert
I was 12 in 1977, growing up far from London. Thanks to the tabloids, I’d heard all about the civilisation-threatening phenomenon of punk rock, but it wasn’t easy to hear what it actually sounded like. Although by mid-year punk was making inroads into the British singles chart, it received scant airplay: John Peel was the only DJ giving it national exposure, but his programme aired from 10 until 12 on weeknights, a problem for me as I’d fall asleep after 20 minutes. Fortunately, I discovered another option on Saturday evenings—Stuart Henry’s
Street Heat
on Radio Luxembourg. I listened religiously, adjusting my transistor aerial endlessly in a vain attempt to improve the abysmal reception.
I first heard Wire on
Street Heat
in early 1978. It was their second single, the jagged, woozy “I Am the Fly” (which would appear on
Pink Flag’s
follow-up,
Chairs Missing
). It was unlike anything I’d encountered.
By then, I had some familiarity with punk: I had singles by the Sex Pistols, the Clash, the Stranglers, Generation X, the Adverts and the Jam. To my ears, it was all fresh and exciting. Feeling adventurous, I bought Television’s “Prove It.” I’d read that they were American punk, but apart from the vocals, it didn’t sound very punk to me; I immediately sold it and got a
proper
punk record, the Cortinas’ “Fascist Dictator.” I’d attended my first gig, the Jam at the Bristol Locarno in December 1977, and I was given the Clash’s debut LP for Christmas.
As for Wire, I’d come across their name in the music papers in late 1977: it was austere, minimal and monochromatic—very different from all the vivid, colourful punk names. I’d also seen the cover of their first single, “Mannequin,” in
Sounds
, and I was struck by its strangeness. It was a harshly lit Polaroid of a naked dummy, its face disconcertingly human and its chest adorned with a heart-shaped appliqué, standing in a squalid room by a bed containing a silhouetted form. The effect was alien and sinister.
So I heard “I Am the Fly.”
While punk stripped things down, rejecting musicianship and polish, it still relied on a well-thumbed set of blueprints, churning out fairly standard, riffcentric rock. “I Am the Fly,” however, was devoid of customary rock gestures. The guitars were barely recognisable as guitars, alternating between grinding, abrasive metallic textures and tinny, off-kilter carousel patterns. And in contrast with the punk records I’d heard, this was weirdly leaden and stodgy, simultaneously wonky and robotic, all its sonic components sticking out awkwardly. The ponderous bass-throb and the rudimentary, rigid beat suggested some undocumented hybrid of glam and Oom-pah music. There were even handclaps. The
vocals managed to be menacing
and
moronic. The singer whined Rotten-style, turning into a Dalek on the silly sing-along chorus. I had no idea what he was on about. (’The song was actually about punk’s demise, I’d later learn.)
It seemed designed to annoy, instantly. With its simplistic, repetitive structure and its dumb karaoke aspect, it might have been a perverse pop song. This wasn’t a record you’d want to buy or even listen to, really. The erratic reception on my radio rendered it all the more irritating and uncanny. I assumed the track’s odd noisiness was a result of that—until, inexplicably, I bought the single.
I didn’t know what to make of the song. I couldn’t find a frame of reference in my limited musical knowledge. But I understood why Stuart Henry played it: it was born of the same attitude and spirit I loved in punk. Other than that, it was a unique, perplexing musical proposition.
I knew Wire had released an album,
Pink Flag
, in November 1977, and I duly bought it. It was nothing like “I Am the Fly.” It could have been by a different band. Like “I Am the Fly,” though, it was by a band that was both of its time and beyond it. It somehow combined punk and its
other:
it was immediate, urgent and visceral but also controlled, detached, complex and intelligent. The punk groups I knew threw all their cards on the table immediately and left you little to mull over, after their two minutes were up. Rather than go in one ear and out the other,
Pink Flag’s
tracks lodged in my brain: they had an obliqueness that gave them traction and durability. The punk albums I’d heard were transparent, exhaustible collections of individual songs;
Pink Flag
was something greater—a constructed, multifaceted whole, a largely opaque, inexhaustible work that never fully revealed itself.
A lot of great albums came out in 1977, but
Pink Flag
is one of a handful—alongside
Low, “Heroes”, Before and After Science
—that remain objects of fascination to me.
Bruce plays from an extremely deep musical place, pulling that much sound out of a guitar with muscle and heart and soul. It’s not a technical thing; it’s a musical thing. It can’t be taught. You can practice scales, arpeggios and chord substitutions all you want, but if you don’t have what he has, then you’re not gonna have it.
Page Hamilton
“I hate using the word
band
.” Bruce Gilbert is uneasy with rock vernacular. Words like
record
and
song
also fall ironically from his lips. His preference for terms like
project, piece, work
and
object
epitomises his view of Wire as a broader aesthetic venture. Characterising Wire, he invokes the idea of the
living sculpture
, albeit in a wider sense than that developed by artists like Bruce McLean and Gilbert & George: each manifestation of the band, from recordings to cover art to performance, forms part of a
greater artistic continuum. “I always thought Wire was a living, breathing, noisy sculpture. It sounds pretentious, but it was the only way I could look at it with any self-respect because I thought being in a band was naff. It seemed slightly peculiar. It was an art project as far as I was concerned. We were determined to make objects—I always call them objects—which were the songs, albums, seeing how far we could go.”
Born in Watford in 1946, Gilbert inherited his mother’s passion for books, film and music, but his relationship with these media was unconventional. “My mother was obsessed with film, and I was exposed to all sorts of things I shouldn’t have seen. From the age of four, I was taken to films that were ridiculously adult, for the time at least.” Just as Gilbert’s exposure to cinema saw him encounter material he’d have found difficult to grasp, his introduction to fiction followed a similar pattern: “I was a manic reader when I was very young. I ploughed through my mother’s collection, reading books that were far too old for me.” It’s not hard to imagine how these first cultural forays might have impacted Gilbert’s young consciousness. His experience of narrative would have been alienating, as plots and characters’ psychologies would be barely comprehensible. This introduction, via cinema and literature, to an unfamiliar, disorienting world in which events perhaps appeared arbitrary resonates in Gilbert’s subsequent work.
Although Gilbert’s mother, a former jazz singer, made music part of his early life, his appreciation of it was far from traditional. Rather than hear a
song
as a unified amalgam of rhythm, melody and lyrics, he listened idiosyncratically, singling out aspects. These discrete aural objects of his attention were often elements that struck him as extraordinary: Gilbert didn’t listen to them as musical components of a compositional whole but as
sounds
with autonomous value. Later, Gilbert would find in the blues everything that fascinated him: repetition, noise, otherness and also imperfection:
“It was a sort of dissonance. A lot of blues records are just slightly out of tune, which made them sound exciting and raw. Also, the backbeat, the very simple rhythms and the repetitiveness—all that attracted me. And, of course, some of the singers had these incredible voices, as if they’d come from another planet”
Gilbert’s initial attempts to make music or, better put,
sound
were as atypical and obsessive as his first listening experiences. Although his parents had a piano, they never encouraged him to play it. Instead, he experimented, using it to produce intriguing minimalist noises: “I used to spend an awful lot of time underneath the piano with my head against the soundboard, hitting the low notes. I loved it. That was 20 times better than any music.”
His first tape recorder afforded Gilbert the opportunity to pursue his unorthodox inclinations, enabling him to intervene in pieces of music, to isolate, excise and manipulate elements. His maiden composition was a primitive remix of Duane Eddy’s 1960 version of “Peter Gunn”: “It was a record I really, really loved because of the repetitiveness and that massive guitar.” Considering it too short, he made an extended mix by recording it off the radio three times, consecutively.
These early endeavours more than hint at Gilbert’s innate Dadaist spirit, manifest in a playful quest for the uncommon amid the quotidian; a taste for the absurd; a tendency to subvert received ideas and conventional structures and an emphasis on process over product—all of which would permeate his future working methods.
After secondary school, Gilbert enrolled in a pre-foundation/foundation course at St Albans School of Art, eventually moving on to Leicester Polytechnic. He began a Graphics course there, but it proved unfulfilling: his real interests lay in Fine Art. Having dropped out in 1971, Gilbert undertook a series of “strange jobs,” ending up as an audiovisual technician at Watford School of Art.
He painted throughout this period, with the same experimental
orientation that distinguished his earliest sonic explorations, transforming the familiar into the unfamiliar: “It was mostly figures taken to extremes. Very bright colours. Completely abstract.” His canvases expanded, literally, as he sought to accommodate his particular vision, but he ultimately found the medium limiting: “My paintings got bigger and bigger, more abstract, and I also started doing 3-D things. It occurred to me that this wasn’t enough, there just weren’t enough dimensions—and this is going to sound corny—but I wanted to paint and sculpt with noise.” Consequently, he began experimenting in Watford’s sound studio, “creating quite violent sonic landscapes.”
Gilbert’s definition of what it means to experiment shows a line of continuity extending from his first projects through to later work, always in pursuit of otherness: “One way I describe experimentation to myself is
curiosity
and taking advantage of accidents. I think of it as a journey through my machinery: pushing machinery and sounds to the limit, until you get that
strange recognition
—you recognise something as being something you haven’t heard before. It’s about how far you can push a sound, how radically you can change it and if another structure appears, another texture; if you take it as far from the original sound as possible, during that journey one finds all sorts of intriguing, novel sounds. Well, hopefully.”
Notwithstanding his abstract, experimental work, by spring 1976 Gilbert had become involved in a more mainstream undertaking, joining—as a guitarist—a large, loose-knit band named Overload. This included Watford students George Gill, also on guitar, and vocalist Colin Newman. After one chaotic performance, Gilbert was talked into continuing with just Gill and Newman, all three now playing guitar.
By that summer, punk’s DIY cultural shift was underway, but Gilbert took his lead from the pre-punk theory and practice of Brian Eno, who was a visiting lecturer at Watford. Eno would
become an intellectual and artistic touchstone for Wire. “I have a lot to thank Brian Eno for in terms of the idea that you could operate in music without a great deal of musical skill. I thought this was an ideal opportunity to experiment and see what happens, albeit with song-based, word-based material.” Gilbert also found early Roxy Music appealing, especially Eno’s role as an artist functioning almost as a separate entity, towards the avant-garde end of the spectrum: “They were the most interesting band at the time, and, in Eno, they had a non-musician doing squiggly noises and processing other musicians’ stuff. It seemed almost perfect.”
Gilbert initially saw punk as offering the opportunity to create a project that negotiated between art and rock. He acknowledges certain models: “My sense of the Velvet Underground was that it was a piece of art. It seemed much more to do with art than with music. There was an element of that with Roxy Music too—the Pop Art angle.” This notion of a larger artistic identity was key to Gilbert’s vision of Wire: “My objective, if I was going to be involved in a group project, was to create something of not necessarily lasting value, but something that felt valuable: an exploration of what was possible and how far you could stretch something before it becomes invisible.”
Abstraction and minimalism were core obsessions defining Gilbert’s approach to Wire and to his instrument. “He was an
inverted
guitarist,” says Robert Hampson (Loop, Main). “He played in the gaps where nobody else played. Without his inverted take on the guitar, I don’t think Wire would’ve been as strong. I don’t think anyone else had such overt minimalist tendencies. He threw all caution to the wind.” Band of Susans’ Robert Poss also recognised Gilbert’s uniqueness: “Bruce’s
Pink Flag-eta
. less-is-more, simple but not simplistic approach to guitar playing…uh…strikes a chord with me. Basic open-tuning chord formations and incisive rhythms with spaces left at all the right moments—that’s a great deal of the quintessential Wire sound.”
He was unique. They couldn’t have done it with anyone else.