Authors: Wilson Neate
Rat Scabies
Like football goalkeepers, drummers generally fall into two distinct categories: flamboyant, larger-than-life showmen and anonymous, interchangeable journeymen. The extremely reserved, self-effacing Robert Grey tends towards the latter, but he’s always been irreplaceable in Wire.
Grey’s total dedication to drumming is striking in its disciplined simplicity, something journalist and drummer Jim DeRogatis notes: “Robert’s one of those Zen personalities: whether he’s planting crops or digging a hole or playing the drums, it’s methodical, it’s beautiful, it’s precise. There’s not a wasted motion.” In his absolute, minimalist focus on his craft, Grey gives the impression that he exists only in the context of that intense relationship, that he considers everything lying beyond it, including ego itself, inessential and extraneous. This registered with bandmate Graham Lewis: “When I first met him he was doing Aikido, and it always seemed that the way he took up the drums was the same—from a natural interest in minimalism.”
Perceptions of Grey’s cypher-like character begin with the ambiguity surrounding his name. Born in Marefield, Leicestershire, in 1951 as Robert Grey, he later changed his surname to
Gotobed
. In 1977, many presumed Gotobed was another nom de punk, but it wasn’t. “I changed my name in 1972. Gotobed had been my family name, but my grandfather had found it a problem to be called Gotobed. People didn’t tend to take you seriously. So he thought it would be better to be called Grey, and that was the name I grew up with, but when I was searching for my identity in my youth I had the option on this outrageous name. So I changed
my name. And then, of course, when punk came, it was like all the other funny names people adopted and people assumed I’d done the same thing. Later, I came to agree with my grandfather. It has its uses, but as you get older, you probably don’t want to have an outrageous name. So I decided
Grey
was much more usable. I feel maybe I’ve got an identity now, so I don’t have to do something like that to establish myself.”
Grey has always had an ambivalent relationship with music, feeling mystified by how one acquires the ability to play an instrument and lays claim to the identity of a musician: “Music was something I’d have liked to do, and I had this interest in drums. It seems like an odd thing to say now, but I always thought that people who played instruments were born to do it. They seemed to come from musical families, and when they arrived at school, they were already playing the oboe or the violin. They just seemed to have this musical ability, which I didn’t have. I didn’t believe I could pick up an instrument and start playing it. I just didn’t have any family background. My dad didn’t like classical music. He wasn’t attracted to anything that you would really call
cultural
. That world happened elsewhere.”
Still, Grey was an avid listener. As a teenager at Oundle School, he became a Cream fan: “I did like that abrasive tone and Eric Clapton’s style, but I would probably have been listening slightly more to the drumming. I wasn’t
only
focused on the drumming, but, out of the group, Ginger Baker would have been my hero.” Despite Grey’s feeling that he lacked musical aptitude, he appreciated very specific features of Baker’s playing: “I noticed that he always had a different arrangement for each song, a different pattern or way of playing that fitted with that song.” Later, John Bonham became another favourite: “Bonham did the same thing as Ginger Baker—he’s got ideas that he’s adding to the song. He’s not just playing a 4/4 beat. You can hear that they’re playing the instrument but also playing with ideas. They’re inventive.”
After several attempts to secure a place to read English at university, Grey settled in London, signed on for a while and did a succession of temporary jobs through the early ’70s. During this period he began attending gigs. This was the start of the pub-rock scene, something Grey found especially attractive since it demystified the concept of the
musician:
“You could be close to the people who were playing and actually see what they were doing. That was new. The musicians were more like the people in the audience, unlike musicians miles away onstage.”
Like his future bandmates, he also enjoyed Roxy Music, and he saw them at the Rainbow in 1974. He saw Eno perform that year with the Portsmouth Sinfonia at the Albert Hall: “That was a memorable occasion. Brian Eno was playing clarinet. I thought it was hilarious because classical music had always been sanctified to such a degree and was so serious. But when the Portsmouth Sinfonia started playing—people who couldn’t play their instruments—it was such a supreme joke.”
In mid-1975, Grey joined old schoolmate Nick Garvey (who’d just left Ducks Deluxe) in a pub-rock group called the Snakes. By chance, he ended up as the vocalist. The band lasted a year, playing the London circuit and releasing one single, a snarling cover of the Flamin’ Groovies’ “Teenage Head.” Given the
anti-rock
’n’ roll path Wire would take and the understated role Grey would assume, this is an ironic artefact: adopting an American accent, he drawls about being “California born and bred,” boasts that his woman’s “a teenage love machine” and warns that he’ll “mess you up for fun.”
After the Snakes disbanded, Grey dabbled in acting, but punk refocused his attention on music. He borrowed a drum kit and started practicing, playing briefly with the Art Attacks, but still he insists, “I really didn’t know anything.”
At a party in Stockwell in summer 1976, Grey met Colin Newman, who coaxed him into rehearsing with the embryonic
Wire. Although excited by the prospect, Grey was uneasy. “I didn’t have any experience. I thought playing songs in a group was way beyond my ability, but if they wanted me to do it, then I’d have a go. It was just what I wanted as an opportunity, but living up to the opportunity was a bit of a problem.” In spite of his misgivings, punk’s democratising spirit gave him heart: “I suppose punk meant you didn’t need to be able to play your instrument to be in a group, and you could still get away with it.” Nevertheless, he remembers little about the first rehearsal: “I think the panic has erased the memories I had of it. As far as I could tell, they could play and had some experience, and I was just bluffing, really.”
His limited skill notwithstanding, Grey endeavoured to bring something to the band: “I’d try to come up with things that fitted the songs, but if you haven’t got playing abilities, it has to be more of an
idea
that you can put into it—it’s that difference between an idea and technique. If I’d had technique I suppose I’d never have been in Wire. It would have been just wrong or it would have unbalanced what we were doing.”
What Grey did have was a signature style. “He was like a drum machine. It was post-human in a way,” is graphic designer Jon Wozencroft’s assessment. This emphasis on the mechanical, the metronomic, the robotic has become the standard characterisation of his playing. However, while Grey’s drumming certainly has these aspects, there’s more to what he does. Mission of Burma drummer Peter Prescott makes this point, stressing Grey’s idiosyncratic approach: “He’s a fascinating drummer. He’s extremely minimal, but I don’t think he sounds anything like a drum machine because he has too many strange little tics, like the way he’d do rolls. He tended to stick to the hi-hat, kick, snare, but there was always a slightly odd feel to it. I’d never have confused him with a beatbox. He was too distinct.” From a slightly different perspective, Gang of Four’s Hugo Burnham also rejects
notions of Grey’s style as affectless and mechanical: “Robert had a great ‘I’m not a slick drummer who knows all the rudiments’ vibe to his playing early on, but he was solid as fuck. I loved that. It was an essence and style too often missed then (as now) by all the hit-anything-that-you-can-as-often-as-possible merchants sitting behind drum kits. I’ve always tried to stick to that same principle.”
I liked the fact that Graham seemed quite middle class. That was amusing, particularly when he lost his temper at the Roxy and told somebody to fuck off in a rather genteel voice.
Jon Savage
Born in 1953 in Grantham, Lincolnshire, Graham Lewis had an itinerant upbringing owing to his father’s RAF career. Until age four he lived in Germany and Holland; on returning to England, his family moved around as Lewis senior was posted to bases along the east coast.
Lewis’s childhood memories of pop music are unusual. It wasn’t hearing individual songs on the radio that made an impression but the experience of a dynamic, chaotic sonic landscape: “We were living in Mablethorpe, a seaside town full of amusement arcades and funfairs. This was where I first heard music, through very loud sound systems for the dodgems, carousels and those kinds of things.” It’s tempting to view this as the origin of Lewis’s interest in ambience, industrial soundscapes, mechanical reproduction and the pleasures of random noise. Like Gilbert, he wasn’t content to listen passively. Instead, he actively explored the aural environment’s possibilities, probing methods of transformation: “I remember finding places between rides and different
sound systems and hearing sounds and music in a very peculiar way—depending on where you stood, you could get the most peculiar mixes.”
Growing up around military installations during the Cold War shaped Lewis’s psychology, and he recognises that some of his Wire lyrics reflect the foreboding attached to those surroundings: “The dread came from living on the RAF base. We’d have these alarms:
the Russians are coming
or some attack. The Russians always chose a very, very inconvenient time—three, four o’clock in the morning. I’d been brought up with that. You’d get to school bleary-eyed and they’d ask what happened and you’d say, ‘Oh, we had a nuclear attack last night.’”
Throughout the ’60s, pirate radio fed him a diet of random rock and pop. In his teens, he started collecting singles and developing an interest in the bass. “It was through listening to Motown. The bass was what I focused on, and then, in rock, I became aware of Jack Bruce—someone who actually sang
and
played bass. Later, I became aware of Andy Fraser in Free. Not surprising really, because his roots were in the Motown playing: it was as much what he
didn’t
play as what he
did
play.” This attention to space and a restrained approach would characterise Lewis’s style and, generally, Wire’s
Pink Flag
sound. Fraser was also known for prominent, melodic basslines, a signature of Lewis’s playing that anticipated the instrument’s pronounced role in post-punk.
Having moved to Newcastle in his mid-teens, Lewis began making his own sounds, thanks to a local coffin-maker, Jimmy Moore, who gave him a homemade bass: “I used to plug it into a valve radio. It produced an intriguing noise—it wasn’t terribly musical.” As with Lewis’s exposure to the noisescapes of the funfairs, his early bass experiments highlight a fascination with sound
qua
sound, a thread weaving through his other teenage explorations and beyond: “I also discovered the power of locked
grooves, using a pin on a
Motor Magazine
diagnostic flexi disc. Changing its speed, frequency and tone on the Dansette was a marvellous way to kill time, a portal to the parallel world of noise and gratuitous repetition.”
If Moore’s gift would have long-term repercussions, the coffin-maker also had a more immediate influence, encouraging Lewis to apply to art college. Lewis’s curiosity was further piqued by a teacher at his grammar school who’d known Eric Burdon at Newcastle College of Art, embodying the connection between art education and rock. Upon leaving school in 1971, Lewis began a foundation course at Lanchester Polytechnic in Coventry.
Lewis had already started learning about Dada and Surrealism. From Duchamp in particular, he absorbed an emphasis on concept and process—“the questioning, the freedom and the notion that the ideas are as important as the object.” Also crucial was a sense of “the absurdity of language and trying to break it, to make new metaphors and understanding that commonplace things can hold as much interest as what one considers exotic. When you put them in the same place, you can get something more.”
At “the Lanch,” Lewis was introduced to new cultural experiences—for instance, a tutor played the students Stockhausen: “I remember thinking, ‘This is intriguing.’ You were there to learn how to think. Art college was one of the few places where that was promoted as the number-one thing.” Eno also entered the picture, as a guest lecturer, and Lewis remembers being struck by his approach: “He was putting forward the idea that he was interested in the avant-garde
and
doo-wop and that this was perfectly reasonable.”
During his foundation year, Lewis immersed himself in early ’70s art rock, seeing acts like Roxy Music, Van der Graaf Generator, Pink Floyd and Kevin Ayers. He also worked on the college’s entertainments production crew, staging wildly eclectic
shows and even DJ-ing an event featuring the Ken Campbell Roadshow, Roland Kirk and Marcel Marceau.
Lewis went on to Hornsey College of Art in London to study Textiles. There, he brought a fine-art perspective to bear on screen-printing, investigating intersections with different media. “You got freedom to experiment,” he remembers. However, this was true only up to a point, and his tutors started questioning his direction after a summer spent working in a factory that produced fascias for stereos. “Four or five guys worked on these incredible compressed-air machines: you put a flat piece of metal in and out came a shaped piece. They used to get into a rhythm, and the sounds and the process were something I found extremely attractive—in terms of seeing multiple machine-made objects and this sound—so I recorded it.” Back at college, Lewis recounted his vacation experience to his tutors: “I said, ‘I’ve been working in this factory and I’ve taken photographs of this mass production and I’m interested in pursuing these noises’—that didn’t go down terribly well.” His teachers suggested he might belong at music college. His reply probably didn’t clarify matters: “That’s not what I want. I’m interested in the
noise.”