Authors: Wilson Neate
In search of greater flexibility, Lewis transferred to the Fashion department, where he thrived. He didn’t pursue his attraction to noise but began approaching his work in terms of process and mass reproduction, examining the interface of high and low sensibilities and challenging traditional distinctions between media. “Here were people who were aware of pop culture, and they had no snobbery,” he recalls. “They understood haute couture too but didn’t look down their noses.”
At Hornsey, Lewis encountered inspirational teachers (Brian Harris, who would design the typography on
154
) and visiting art-school graduates now established in fashion gave insight into career possibilities. Among them were Jim O’Connor and Pamla Motown, who’d designed clothes for Roxy Music. For Lewis,
Roxy Music epitomised the rock group’s potential as a vehicle for stylistic and aesthetic experimentation: “Roxy were a good model in that you saw a
project:
the way it was costumed, choreographed, the artwork—all those things together.”
Graduating in 1975 with a degree in Fashion Design, Lewis sought to launch a fashion career, supporting himself with unrelated agency jobs. Most memorable was a period with Ericsson, where he worked as a fitter’s mate and started training to become, ironically, a
wireman
. This brought him into contact with Argentine political exiles and Asian refugees from Amin’s Uganda. “There was a camaraderie of outsiderness. They were people in a precarious situation: they’d lost everything and were working hard just to keep their families going.” Lewis’s time at Ericsson and his interaction with these people informed the writing he’d begun: “The basis for what became ‘Lowdown’ was about that period. It’s about persistence.”
Lewis had also been doing commissions and shopping around samples of his fashion work. He had success with a grip bag, most significantly with
Howie
, the boutique co-owned by Lynne Franks (the inspiration for
Absolutely Fabulou’s
Edina). Franks was impressed and found Lewis work with Jeffrey Rogers. Subsequently, his shirt designs appeared in high street stores and in women’s magazines.
At Hornsey, Lewis had briefly played bass with a Canterbury-influenced band, but it led nowhere. Another opportunity arose on meeting Bruce Gilbert through a mutual friend. Gilbert invited him to rehearse with his emerging group. The rehearsal didn’t bode well (“They discovered that I couldn’t actually play, which I couldn’t see as such a great problem”), and Gill and Newman seemed bent on winding him up: “There was hostility because I was ex-Hornsey, I was in London and I was doing well.” Although the experience was “absolutely dreadful,” Gilbert asked him back.
There’s a hooliganism in Colin’s voice—but a knowing hooliganism. You wouldn’t know whether he was going to slap you on the back and say, “Come and ’ave a fuckin’ drink, you knob” or whether you’d have a deep conversation. It’s clear there’s an intellect there, but he’s not pretentious enough to disguise who he is. That had an effect on me. He didn’t affect anything singing-wise. It’s almost like Colin was the inventor of emocore. He could probably shout about missing his mummy and it’d sound all right.
Graham Coxon
Music critics say Colin Newman sounds like a Cockney barrow-boy, but he was born far from the sound of Bow Bells: in Salisbury in 1954. He spent his early years in nearby Durrington, moving to Newbury in 1962, by which time he was fixated on pop music—especially the distinctive new sounds of the ’60s. He loved the Beatles, and in retrospect sees why: “I don’t count much ’50s music and rock ’n’ roll as particularly interesting. It seemed very formulaic and wasn’t very inventive melodically, whereas the Beatles started an are of melodic invention.” Hearing the Tornados’ “Telstar” in 1962 was also a formative moment: “What was really interesting wasn’t just the music, it was what they said about it,” recalls Newman. “They said it was
the music of the future
, and I got very excited about that.” He became obsessed with listening to every pop music programme available on the radio: “It was like a religion. It was more important than anything.”
Inevitably, Newman harboured his own musical ambitions: “I wanted to be in a band ever since I could remember. I was doing it in my head. I was always onstage, and there were other famous people I was in a band with. I also used to compose in my head. I thought that certain productions were almost perfect,
but others I could have obviously improved. It’s kind of absurd, but you need a level of arrogance and self-belief to ever do anything.” He met his first musical collaborator, Desmond Simmons, at St Bartholomew’s Grammar School. According to Simmons, their bond was “an interest in music and the inability to get a girlfriend.” They formed several short-lived bands, but just two names survive: CNDS and Tyres. “Tyres only lasted a summer,” Newman remembers. “We didn’t play any gigs, and we only had two songs.” Nevertheless, they applied themselves diligently: “We had to rehearse and practice recording so when we got our record deal—because we obviously would—we’d be ready. This was dead serious.” During the early ’70s, the pair also attended concerts, Newbury being a routine stop for touring prog- and art-rock bands.
In 1973, Newman began a foundation course at Winchester School of Art. It was
the
logical step: “My idea was that I’d go to art school because that was a good way to get into a band. I subscribed to that myth 100%. All the musicians who excited me had been to art school. You needed to be where there was a creative environment.” He recalls his first day: “One of the tutors played a tape of Steve Reich’s
Piano Phase
. I’d never heard anything like it, and it blew me away.” On another level, though, Winchester proved slightly disappointing. One factor initially contributing to the school’s appeal was that Eno had studied Fine Art there: “I thought they’d be proud that this guy from Roxy Music had been there, but they weren’t the slightest bit interested. I’d heard Steve Reich for the first time there, and there wasn’t much of a step between that and Terry Riley and then Terry Riley to John Cale and John Cale to Eno. For me, that link was obvious. Eno was an important artist, and I couldn’t understand why they didn’t take him seriously.”
Newman was also disappointed that his art-school group hadn’t materialised: “I thought I’d walk in the door and my band
would flock around me.” By year’s end, however, he’d been accepted onto an Illustration course at Watford School of Art—another opportunity to find his band. He’d intended to study design as part of his master plan: “I had this idea that I’d have a complementary skill of graphic design, so I could not only be in the band but design the album covers as well. I had no concept of graphic design—I just thought it was nice pictures. I didn’t know anything about typography or the detail of it.”
For a time, he commuted to Watford from Hendon, where he lived with a girlfriend and Simmons. In keeping with the great rock narrative, Newman’s girlfriend kicked him out, and he retreated to Watford with his guitar. There he moved in with fellow students George Gill and Slim Smith (who would later design Wire sleeves, among other things). Newman quickly lost interest in his coursework, but certain tutors and visiting lecturers still made it worthwhile. Watford offered students access to accomplished individuals. In addition to Newman’s second-year tutor—the typographer Hansjörg Mayer—Peter Schmidt, Charles Harrison and Michael Werner were on the faculty. In the ’70s, along with Brian Eno, guest lecturers included Mark Boyle, Abram Games, Tom Phillips, Eduardo Paolozzi and Dieter Roth.
Watford’s faculty was instrumental in the development of a younger generation of artists. “Hansjörg shared a way of thinking with Peter Schmidt, Michael Werner and Brian Eno, in particular,” remembers former student (and art director/producer) Cally Callomon. “They encouraged what we called
intuitive orienteering:
a quiet way of saying, ‘There are no boundaries, and you’ll only discover something new by trying new things.’ It wasn’t airy-fairy-do-what-you-like-and-discover-yourself; it was hard-line and quite strict.” Harrison was another key Watford figure, with whom Newman studied; he was a member of Art & Language, a group that had a major impact on conceptual art, emphasising the discourse surrounding the art object as much as the actual object.
Facets of Wire’s work clearly intersect with the ideas, attitudes and working methods of Watford’s faculty—but when Newman acknowledges Mayer’s significance, he doesn’t speak as the beneficiary of his expertise. Rather, Newman credits Mayer primarily with facilitating the mythical art-school existence: “He was very indulgent of me. I was always having these absurd, ridiculous ideas about who I was and where I was going. He kept the authorities off my back and enabled me to not go in for the last year and just get on with stuff.” Newman seems to value Mayer and others to the extent that they confirmed he already was an artist: “Hansjörg used to give me a lift back to Hendon. He’d always give Brian [Eno] and Peter [Schmidt] a lift, too, and often I’d be in the car with them and we’d just chat. More than anything, Watford gave me the sense that I could be with those people who were artists and had their own level of importance—not just Brian but the others as well—and they didn’t treat me like some stupid student. I could talk about what I wanted to talk about. There’s a process by which individuals go from being just a general person to being someone who can inhabit the kind of life you need to if you’re an artist. I went through that process there.”
Ultimately, Newman feels he took little of substance from Watford; he already had a sense of himself as an artist, and the environment was mostly incidental to the path he was on: “There are myths about what’s good about art school, how it’s encouraged generations of British musicians, and my story could support that myth; but some very valuable stuff had been done before art school. I was already writing songs, even if they were rubbish. I already had some kind of idea.”
Newman’s band finally arrived: Overload, soon trimmed down to a trio. “It was me, Bruce and George in my room on the ground floor of this house I lived in,” Newman recalls, “pounding away: three guitars and vocals, all through one guitar amp.” When it came time to add bass and drums, Lewis and Grey
weren’t the obvious candidates, since they weren’t from Watford and couldn’t play. For Newman, though, they were perfect precisely because they weren’t local. “There was a nexus of people around Overload who could have been drawn into it. Graham and Rob were the defining people because they had to travel and make a commitment to turn up to rehearsals. The fact that they had to take it seriously meant we had to take it seriously.”
There was one last piece of business. “I remember having band names written on bits of paper all over the walls. We quickly came to the conclusion that the human body and items of clothing only made for very stupid names. There were two final choices: Wire and A Case. Wire was chosen because it was easier. A Case sounded a bit pretentious. Wire was Bruce’s suggestion.”
People tend to have very limited definitions of punk that have to do with youth or a particular musical template or class base, rather than the idea of constant reinvention. People are rather fundamentalist about punk, which seems peculiarly pointless. I always thought punk was about being new, which was why I liked Wire in the first place.
Jon Savage
Pink Flag
seemed like the missing link between punk and the future. It was so smart, so catchy and so inscrutable.
Robert Poss
Wire emerged late in punk’s day.
Pink Flag
may have been the first post-punk album, although—or because—it embodied punk’s most radical spirit.
By the time Wire debuted as a quartet at the Roxy on April 1, 1977, British punk’s seminal events had taken place, its most creative phase was over and it was a tabloid staple. In summer
1976, Wire had been inspired by punk’s early rumblings, excited by the space and access this cultural revolution promised. “This was something that one had to be paying attention to,” asserts Colin Newman, while Bruce Gilbert was guardedly intrigued (“I was less excitable”). Wire shared punk’s general consensus that music had become stagnant, a closed corporate shop, open only to those displaying
musicianship
or meeting the labels’ short-sighted notions of commercial viability. Punk seemed fresh and democratic since anyone could get involved: “There was excitement about a new type of music,” remembers Robert Grey. “Punk was the biggest influence at the time, and with our musical abilities, what other options did we have? I certainly couldn’t say I was a musician.” Gilbert agrees: “The idea that there was a new way of making music which meant you didn’t have to learn, say, 400 songs seemed very attractive.”
The nascent Wire had been caught up in the initial excitement. The bandmembers and their eventual producer saw the Sex Pistols and others at the 100 Club on September 20, 1976. This was “something unique,” according to Grey, who recalls a clear sense that “something was happening.” Gilbert, too, was a willing participant. He appreciated early punk gigs as vibrant spaces where the audience contributed to the rich, dynamic canvas as much as the performers: “I viewed it as a bit of a laboratory, not musically but culturally, because the people were experimenting with themselves: with their behaviour, their appearance and their clothes. Everything was up for grabs.”
Nevertheless, Wire’s maiden gigs (still with George Gill) in December 1976 at the Nashville Rooms and St Martins School of Art didn’t augur success. Their first performance was denounced by the singer of R&B headliners the Derelicts (Susan Gogan) as “the death throes of cock rock,” laughs Grey. The meagre audience remained apathetic. At St Martins, the students pulled the plugs on them. As Gilbert explains, “The audience for this kind
of thing hadn’t really developed. They were still expecting pub rock.” Newman soon saw more encouraging signs when Wire played at the Royal College of Art: “Somebody smashed up a chair. I think that was Shane MacGowan. The smashing up of the chair was meant to be telling us how good we were because, obviously, that’s what you do.”