Authors: Wilson Neate
They’re still the art world’s favourite punk band.
Jon Savage
In general, however, British art rock preserved the hierarchical distinction between popular music and art by attempting to make rock that rose above its genre and laid claim to the status of art. Only a handful of British artists approached that distinction from the opposite direction: dispensing with the almost ubiquitous
anxious need to make a case for rock as high culture, these musicians created popular music with a high-art mindset.
Making music with an emphasis on concept and working processes, Eno is one of those who have consistently disrupted the established hierarchy of mass culture and high art. Wire were similarly inclined. They came at the intersection of art and rock from the perspective of art: operating within rock, Wire manipulated and rearranged its vocabulary and grammar, using it against itself to remove cliché and to discover new possibilities. Instead of simply the matising or evoking other arts—putting them at the service of rock—they often built their creative process around extra-musical conceptual strategies. They put rock at the service of art, using rock as a medium for greater artistic exploration.
Wire’s fine-art starting point can be heard in how they treat their songs’ components. Although this became more apparent on
Chairs Missing
and
154, Pink Flag’s
largely harsh, noisy surfaces belie a meticulous painterly or sculptural aesthetic, frequently prioritising texture and structure over melody or the song’s overall movement towards closure. Given Wire’s relatively shaky skills in 1977, their work sometimes suggests non-musicians comfortable primarily in the plastic arts, making music but thinking about it through a fine-art lens. In places, they paint and sculpt in bold sweeps: Gilbert’s weighty, droning guitar strokes; the primitivist noise chunks on “12XU”; Grey’s endlessly reproduced beats. Elsewhere, it’s all about detail and precision: Lewis’s ornate bass-lick punctuation or the numerous intro and outro devices with which Wire inventively framed their tracks. These few examples are symptomatic of a band reimagining the song-based form through other media.
Wire progressed very quickly, but most punk bands never changed.
Robert Pollard
So not only were Wire too arty for punk, but their particular practice was more truly experimental than that of many art-rock bands. This experimentalism also played out in Wire’s rejection of artistic personality. They didn’t establish a stable identity or a familiar sound. In under 22 months between 1977 and 1979, their drive for originality yielded three divergent albums, each itself multifaceted.
Of course, there were precedents; rock history’s artier side had seen numerous performers with restless creative identities. Bowie in the ’70s offers an obvious example of the thoroughly postmodern pop star with his multiple artistic personalities. Paradoxically, though, his changing persona
was
his identity; Bowie was always Bowie, regardless of the character he played. He was the supreme Romantic auteur, the individual creative genius, overseeing successive characters who, in turn, fitted within desirable and highly marketable Romantic rock-star typologies. Onstage and off, Bowie enacted rock’s myths and clichéd storylines. Experimentation aside, he was never at odds with the context of pop music itself as Wire often were.
They always seemed prepared to burn their bridges and alienate their audience—absolutely not afraid to shoot themselves in the foot commercially. That was one of the main points of punk, surely? To head off in whatever direction held the most appeal at any given moment rather than worrying about what the audience or the record company may think of you or want from you.
Matt Johnson
Wire flouted the expectations of their chosen medium. They didn’t market themselves in terms of the customary rock image, they didn’t appear on the front covers of their records, they released singles grudgingly, they barely interacted with audiences, their early interviews were occasionally elliptical and strangulated: they didn’t cultivate a personality so much as an absence of personality. As McNeill wrote in the
NME
in December 1977, “They’ve got absolutely nothing going for them
except
their music. No image, no charisma, no mystique, no following, no gimmicks, and virtually no press.” The music itself was the character, its identity more radical than Bowie’s serial selves.
If journalists like McNeill accepted the absence of a conventional authorial identity, others were less enthusiastic. In his
Pink Flag
review, Greil Marcus commented, “Satisfying on some formal level, it’s never moving; the band doesn’t dramatize itself right off the album, as great rockers always do. You hear cleverness, wit, irony, but not personality.” Marcus faults Wire for privileging surface and play over deeper authenticity. He’s right that
Pink Flag
lacks an identifiable affective core that might unite its 21 tracks (a discrete “personality” functioning as a consistent marker of identity). However, his seeing the absence as negative says less about Wire’s music and more about his discomfort with their postmodern aesthetic.
Even those lauding this aspect regularly failed to grasp Wire’s transformations from record to record. This is evident in the commonplace assertion that Wire continually
reinvented
themselves. Although intended to characterise the band’s dynamic, adventurous spirit, “self-reinvention” still assumes a self that can
be
reinvented. That model, with its associations of continuity and certainty, was anathema to Wire, who were interested not in the illusory stability of the
self
but in the discontinuous, uncertain realm of the
other
.
Not only did Wire never look back, they rarely paused to contemplate themselves in the present. Rather than allow their image to settle into focus, they moved relentlessly forward, as if seeking to make the band and its sound unrecognisable, even to itself. At its most vital, between 1977 and 1979, Wire’s music was an exploration of instability and ambiguity, documenting an ongoing state of becoming other and encountering otherness.
They understood minimalism. There’s not a lot on
Pink Flag yet
it doesn’t lack anything. I can’t think of anything I’d want to add. To me, it’s a perfect album
.
Henry Rollins
It’s always reduction, and that’s what appealed to me about Wire in particular: it’s about always withdrawing
.
Robin Rimbaud
Wire’s aesthetic was built on subtraction, a consistent withdrawal of superfluous elements. “The reduction of ideas, the reduction of things down to the minimal framework—it just seemed completely natural,” explains Colin Newman. “By closing down possibilities, you very often open up possibilities. You have infinite possibilities of simplicity and subtlety within a frame.” Natural minimalists, Wire pursued a negative sensibility, defining themselves in terms of what they were
not
. Their creative choices and strategies were motivated by a desire not for familiarity—an
identity based on similarities with other artists—but for otherness and difference.
“The only things we could agree on were the things we didn’t like,” observes Bruce Gilbert. “That’s what held it together and made life much simpler.” Recalling some unofficial Wire rules, Graham Lewis summarises this negative self-definition: “No solos; no decoration; when the words run out, it stops; we don’t chorus out; no rocking out; keep it to the point; no Americanisms.” This preference for shunning the familiar and paring down their work was evident from the start of Wire’s four-piece incarnation. If they were a “living sculpture,” it was a sculpture whose logical conclusion was perhaps its own disappearance as they chipped away at it. Robin Rimbaud noticed this: “It’s as if they wrote songs and thought: ‘How much can we take away to make this as simple as possible?’”
Most of all, Wire strove to avoid reproducing characteristics identified with punk. “We challenged the orthodoxies of the time,” reiterates Gilbert. “We were all reading from the same page in terms of rejecting things that were clichéd and knowing we were right.” The disciplined, purposeful artistic decisions taken to emphasise Wire’s difference weren’t expressed as a manifesto, but subsequent listeners inferred them from the music. The Futureheads’ Ross Millard, for instance: “I get the sense that, even if it wasn’t specifically written, there was some sort of policy, some rules to what they were doing. That’s fascinating. When you’re making music as an artistic expression, then you’ve got to come up with something a bit more interesting.” He continues, “If Wire influenced us, it’s above all in that sense of purpose, that there’s no bullshit, no solos, no flabbiness to the music, it’s all about economy and immediacy.”
Wire’s style failed to make a noticeable impression on British rock until the ’90s, but its effects were felt sooner in San Pedro, California, as Mike Watt and D. Boon took a page from the
band’s slim book. According to Watt, the Minutemen’s pursuit of a similarly lean sound saw them ostracised by their own punk community: “People always said, ‘You’re not a punk band,’ and it’s all because of the debt we owe Wire. We wanted to channel our ideas into very strict shorthand and have no filler, and this is what we get from them—you distil a song to the bare
nada
. We took that ethic right to the tune and boiled it all down. We have to acknowledge Wire for that simple idea, what Wire did with format. It seems like a simple idea, but, you know, the bicycle’s only a couple of hundred years old, even though the chariot’s thousands of years old. They had two wheels for a long time, but they never thought of putting one in front of the other. That’s what Wire did. A simple, elegant idea—but nobody had stumbled onto that shit before.”
How can you take rock music seriously? So much of it’s rubbish.
Colin Newman
Beyond punk, Wire endeavoured to evade categorisation as a rock band and avoided positioning themselves in an obvious lineage. Of course, no group escapes its progenitors completely, and other bands’ work inevitably informed Wire’s. Nevertheless, they resisted replicating what they enjoyed, often ruthlessly: “Everything you heard would make some impression, but if something started to sound familiar then that would be stamped out,” remembers Grey. “There was always a feeling to try to avoid rock clichés. That was a working method we had.”
When Wire’s work did develop in relation to other music, that relationship wasn’t about imitation but, rather, abstraction. Their aim wasn’t to incorporate another artist’s sound but, frequently, to pursue an
idea
it suggested. Such ideas served as creative foils for subversion or transformation: Newman often describes the
minimal chord structure of “Pink Flag” as a bare-bones version of his rock ’n’ roll nemesis, “Johnny B. Goode”; “Brazil” was a love song that lyrically skewered the love song. Other tracks likewise followed a paradoxical logic: in the Martin Hannett “faster, but slower” tradition, “Lowdown” was a funk number drained of funkiness. These reimaginings were partially satirical; Newman comments, “There’s an element in
Pink Flag
of taking the piss out of rock music.”
With a bigger drum kit, you’re doing more and the group becomes more of a rock group, which isn’t what I would want.
Robert Grey
Wire’s minimalism and their orientation towards difference were also crucial to distancing their live performances from both punk and traditional rock. Their minimisation of movement, interaction and lighting, as well as the suppression of familiar numbers, colourful attire, drinking and smoking, can all be read not only as attempts to eradicate gestures conventionally associated with rock concerts, but also as negations of personality and image—usually to the fore onstage. In that environment, Grey’s kit epitomised Wire’s subtractive bent: if it was sparse in 1977, he continued to simplify it in the ’80s, ditching tom-toms and cymbals and retaining just a snare, bass drum and hi-hat. “As groups get better known, the drum kit gets bigger,” he explains; “I thought I’d take the opposite route. I was interested to see what you could do with less. Also, it’s less of a rock drum kit if you take those things away. Wire work within the area of rock, but the less of a rock group we are, the happier I’d feel. The large drum kit is another rock cliché.” To break associations with rock even more, he meticulously concealed the chrome on his kit with satin-finish paint: “Chrome and sparkle look dramatic under lights, but I’m against all that.”
Their artwork wasn’t about them. The iconography was so distilled. It had
a
Brutalist nature. It felt like art. Everyone else had a smash-and-grab attitude, the smell of revolution or irreverence. But Wire’s sleeves were about absolute reverence. It was iconic. It had an architectural feel.
Richard Jobson
Rock’s ideology has always been most explicit in band names and on record covers since they’re inextricably linked with image construction. Wire wore their spartan aesthetic on their record sleeves, and the name
Wire
itself was unmistakably minimalist. Band names encapsulate rock’s core values: for instance, a dominant strain of rock has always been tied, at some level, to Romantic notions of creativity, self-expression, individuality, the artist standing in opposition to society—think of the litany of outlaw, masculine names, from the Rolling Stones to the Black Rebel Motorcycle Club. Many punk names bought into that same Romantic narrative: the Damned, the Unwanted, the Outcasts, for example, connoted alienation and outsiderness. Alternately, some channelled the postmodern zeitgeist: the Adverts, the Cortinas, X-Ray Spex were readymades recycled from contemporary consumer culture; other found-names derived from the language of the UK’s economic and political crises (999; the Clash; Social Security; Dole Q).
Romantic or postmodern, such names referenced specific, often vivid concepts or phenomena—generally preceded by “the.”
Wire
had a different quality. It was atypical for the period in its lack of obvious connotations, its lack of association with a particular image.
Wire
is generic, its metallic referent connoting, if anything, the absence of identity. It signals Wire’s self-contained nature: it returns the focus inwards, towards their music, reflecting their pared-down, hard-edged, industrious ethos.