Wire - Punk at art school

Punk's greatness wasn't determined only by its most faithful interpreters, but also (and, in many cases, especially) by those who gradually broke away from it, forging new paths while still respecting its stylistic coordinates. A generation of mutant hybrids, able to blend the urgent, minimalist language of the blank generation with the most disparate sonic grammars (from gothic to electronics, from the avant-garde to funk), sketching out new aesthetics and historical perspectives. They'll call it post-punk or new wave, or both. Certainly, Colin Newman's Wire would represent one of its most advanced expressions.

The friendship with Brian Eno, their background in the academic world of fine art, abstract and experimental shows often bordering on Dadaism, the pursuit of elegance and aestheticism at all costs, minimalism and the stripping away of every superfluous element in composition: these were the defining traits of a unique proposition, one that swarms of musicians would draw inspiration from for years to come. A band that made consistency its reason for being, to the point of paying the price of never breaking through beyond niche circuits.

In the car with Brian Eno

England, early 1970s. Colin Newman is a young design student at Watford Art College. But he has a passion for music, and sound experimentation in particular. That's why he spends hours in the lab fiddling with tapes and all sorts of contraptions, and never misses the chance for unforgettable car rides discussing art and music with his professors and a mutual friend of theirs, one Brian Peter George St. John le Baptiste de la Salle Eno, better known as Brian Eno.

And Watford Art College is the humus from which the Wire project springs to life. The first embryo is born under the name Overload and includes, alongside Newman and guitarist George Gill, audiovisual technician Bruce Gilbert. Some time later, drummer Robert Gotobed (alias Robert Grey, the only member not from art school) and bassist Edvard Graham Lewis, a recent fashion-design graduate and stylist for London boutiques, join the ranks. With Gill gone, the lineup settles into a quartet (Newman on vocals and “second” guitar, Gilbert on lead guitar, Lewis on bass and Gotobed on drums), under the new name Wire. A name chosen for its graphic qualities and its semantic implications (thin and metallic, electrical wires). “It was short and sharp, it would stand out on posters even if we were at the bottom of the bill!”, Newman would explain.

Riding the wave of the infamous “Summer of Hate” of 1976, a band is thus born that, although fully filed under “punk”, already shows itself to be remarkably heterodox: although “non-musicians”, to use Eno's words, the four could boast an academic background far removed from the “street” approach in vogue at the time, a higher average age and far more sophisticated ambitions than their competitors.

Like the Talking Heads on the other side of the ocean, Wire injected massive doses of grey matter into rock's brute force, but – and herein lies the miracle – without ever indulging in cold intellectual posturing or cerebral self-indulgence. Newman puts it this way: “Our music wasn't arty-farty, fuck, what we were doing was art. Punk was art. It was all art”.

These were years of rapid change, both social and musical. Punk spread like a river in flood. And everything happened fast, “here and now”. So in just a few months of 1977 Wire moved at breakneck speed: they debuted at London's Roxy (February), met Mike Thorne of Emi, who selected them for the compilation “The Roxy London WC2”, and by November had already released their debut album Pink Flag, preceded by the single “Mannequin”.

Ironically, the label that signed them was Emi/Harvest, the historic home of the despised progressive scene and of the early Pink Floyd – hence the odd nickname of “Punk Floyd” pinned on them by the British press.

Produced by Thorne, a kind of virtual “fifth element” of the band, Pink Flag is a punk record, yet it already contains the seeds of mutation in nuce. The immediacy and urgency of the Sex Pistols are channelled into oblique, subtly disorienting structures, which let through that sense of anguish and frustration that would permeate the wave era. No overused riffs or vocal ramalama here: Newman & co. play at wrong-footing the listener, buoyed by an inexhaustible compositional imagination and a vivid irony that pillories bourgeois conventions without sparing a few low blows at the era's own “rebels”.

Twenty-one bonsai songs for thirty-six minutes in total (twelve tracks don't even run ninety seconds!). Twenty-one disjointed, dazing miniatures, built around Newman's alienated vocals, a listless bass and minimalist razor-blade guitars. The structures, sharp and geometric, are simple only on the surface: in reality every song is a maze, a puzzle that dissolves right at its peak, like those films that leave the ending suspended, silencing the audience. The maître à penser here can only be Brian Eno, with his idea of art aimed at “exposing the listener to disorientation”. Everything serves that purpose: from the absurdist titles (“Ex-Lion Tamer”, “Three Girl Rhumba”) to Newman's coarse cockney accent. Some typical punk themes do recur – hatred of the media (“Field Day For The Sundays”), political invective (“Reuters”, “Pink Flag”), sex obsession (“12XU”). But the lyrics – written by Graham Lewis – all slide irretrievably into nonsense (“106 Beats That” is even built on the idea of writing a song using a hundred syllables!).

The opener “Reuters” is the report of an imaginary war correspondent (“Prices have risen since the government fell/ Casualties increase as the enemy shells/ The climate’s unhealthy, flies and rats thrive/ And sooner or later the end will arrive”), with Newman's detached declamation set against a wall of percussion and fuzz guitars. It's the intro-manifesto of the record, even though it runs well above the average length (almost three minutes), just like the heavily distorted title track, which revisits the idea of life in wartime over dark guitar detonations, culminating in a terrifying final acceleration.

Wire also prove to be masters at dishing out instantly gripping hooks (“Ex Lion Tamer”, “Fragile”, “Mannequin”, “The Commercial”) using the barest of means. No song has a single note more than necessary, some even feel like unfinished sketches. Yet this total pruning of frills doesn't erase the traces of a broader repertoire, which pays homage – in its own way – to the entire history of rock: “Mannequin” is a freeze-dried version of the Byrds' “Why”, “Feeling Called Love” attempts a cold clone of the Troggs, the boogie of “Strange” winks at the murkiest Velvet Underground, “Lowdown” looks to funk and blues, and “Pink Flag” – by Newman's own admission – is “Johnny B. Goode rewritten with a single chord”.

Dulcis in fundo, there's “12XU”, destined to remain one of the band's anthems: the relentless punk gallop shatters into a sexist pantomime (seen through a gay lens) for one minute and 55 seconds of pure fun. While the Pistols' blazing trajectory draws to a close, Wire are already “beyond”, and the definitive break from their cousins' no future would be sealed across the next two, equally legendary, albums.

The “Punk Floyd”

The mocking nickname coined by the British press concealed a truth. Newman himself revealed it: “Emi/Harvest thought we'd be part of a new psychedelia, that we'd be the new Pink Floyd”. Could one of the bands most despised by punks really be held up as a model for the movement's own offshoots, however eccentric? A heresy that, judging by Wire's second effort, wasn't so absurd after all. If there's one of their records to which the term “psychedelia” can be attached, it's precisely Chairs Missing (1978). An album “disturbed” from the title onward (slang referring to mental instability), with its catalogue of delirium and unsettling imagery: cold, pain, suicide, a sick childhood. The cover – the first designed by the fortunate duo Gilbert-Lewis – depicts a viola on a stage with the black curtain half-open, a tribute to the band's “theatrical” taste.

Chairs Missing severs the remaining ties with punk, bravely turning towards new experimental horizons, not too far from the spectral Berlin of Bowie & Eno. Song lengths stretch out and the sonic spectrum widens, with new instruments and far greater attention to production. The main architect of this shift is the “fifth man” Thorne, who introduces keyboards, synthesizers and futuristic American-imported gadgets: Mx-R distortion units, flangers and new effects like delay, chorus, pedals. The result is a much deeper, more atmospheric and hallucinated sound, which sharpens the sense of disorientation even further, and which connects with the work of other wave pioneers like Magazine and Ultravox!.

It only takes a few notes of “Practice Makes Perfect” and the listener is already lost in this vortex: dark, obsessive drumming, the guitar's stubborn chords backing Newman's alienating vocals, then everything warps as in a piece of theatre of the absurd, amid sinister screams and cackles, with a purely delirious epilogue. A web of sinister guitars wraps around “French Film Blurred”, which nonetheless suggests a way out, opening up into a more airy refrain, almost Barrett-esque in character. But the catatonic litany of “Marooned” plunges back into a vertigo of anguish, almost mimicking the shipwrecked protagonist's slow sinking into the Arctic (“As the water gets warmer, my iceberg get smaller”): a few listless guitar chords, fatalistic vocals, a coldly metronomic bass. This is the dominant mood of the record, reaffirmed by the leaden synth intro of “Being Sucked In Again”, by the convulsive bass pulses underpinning a morbid, Suicide-like chant in “Heartbeat” (which wouldn't go unnoticed by the Jesus & Mary Chain), and by the menacing nursery rhyme of “Mercy”, where the roar of the guitars masks a sense of looming drama. A tension that reaches almost paroxysmal tones in the single “I Am The Fly”, a sardonic proto-industrial caricature sung by Newman in a garish cockney accent, over a laminated slab of guitars, android handclaps and assorted noises, evoking the insect protagonist.

The nervous, petulant rhythms of “Men 2nd”, “Sand In My Joints” and “Too Late” remain the only link to the dazed punk of the early days. The chorus of “Outdoor Miner”, on the other hand, proves once again how Wire could easily have carved out a brilliant career as pop songwriters.

A crucial turning point in the evolution of punk into post-punk and gothic, Chairs Missing makes room for meditation, for the silent processing of revolutionary dictates that would be flaunted even more openly on the following 154. This is why it would throw diehard punksters off balance. “They've regressed from Pink Flag to Pink Floyd,” Monty Smith would write in the NME, in one of their historically off-the-mark reviews. New wave had already begun, and they hadn't even noticed.

After a few dates in Britain, Wire seize an opportunity too good to pass up: supporting Roxy Music on the 16 dates of their spring European tour. Their performances are pieces of chilly avant-garde, with the four of them dressed in white, black or grey, under white spotlights. Newman embodies a frontman sui generis, at times motionless, his gaze lost in the void, at times playing the part of the insincere, posturing rockstar. The effect is strikingly evocative and helps fuel the band's underground cult status.

The Last Storm

1979 is a feverish year for Wire. Returning from tour, in September they release the third chapter of the trilogy, 154. Another memorable cover, this time on a white background, with a fine abstract design of sharp outlines and pastel tones. It's the record that completes the definitive passage from the punk “template” to a sound that is just as disorienting and decadent, but with unthinkable openings towards pop avant-garde. A work that “disfigures” punk-rock, dragging it to the edges of industrial psychedelia. It echoes with the rumble of a polluting storm within a decadent civilization. An immense, shattered work of art, a spectral mirror of a generation enslaved to perishable matter.

154 is everything that would later become the soft dark sound of the Cure's “17 Seconds” or the noise-pop of Sonic Youth's “Dirty” and “Washing Machine”. But it's also what certain electronic ideas of Neu! and Kraftwerk, or certain uniform sonic carpets of Velvet Underground and Television, had already been before it. The formula remains one of concise, stripped-down songs, but the instrumental arsenal grows further still, enriched with flute, English horn and electric viola.

A dark bassline and an almost reggae-inflected guitar à-la Clash propel the overture of "I Should Have Known Better", a spirited act of contrition entrusted to Lewis's baritone, who also takes the lead on "The Other Window", where effects-laden guitar and heavy drumming conjure a suffocating atmosphere (and the lyrics are no less oppressive, dealing with a traveller who shifts to "another window" so as not to witness the death throes of a horse caught in barbed wire).

"A Touching Display" is already full-blown dark-wave, a dark recess of arpeggiated guitars torn apart by feedback, tribal drums and desolate declamations. And the zombie chorus of "Indirect Enquiries" anticipates years and years of gothic witchery to come.

The simple, pounding melodies of "The 15th", "Map.Ref.41 Degrees North 93 Degrees West" and "Blessed State" are set against the obsessive studies of "A Mutual Friend", with Newman's spoken delivery riding a psychedelic carpet of organ and guitar, or "Once Is Enough", rock dynamite wrapped in clouds of noise and industrial haze somewhere between Pere Ubu and Throbbing Gristle. These are tracks of secular mysticism and raw tension, schizoid pieces for rock's "day after". The farewell of "40 Versions" leaves behind a melody, but also a generous dose of unease.

The overall approach to the songwriting is intellectual, whispered, ironic and oppressive, yet it settles into formal structures that are almost always linear and "comprehensible". Wire take the decisive step toward lyrical and instrumental perfection, peering into the darkness and lacing it with gentle photons of natural "ease". It's hard to find such a run of flawless songs, in so many respects, that makes the record paradoxically unique at times. It is, in other words, a frenzied display of elements repeated at set intervals, broken up by bursts of grimy spoken-word and obsessive guitar riffs and basslines.

Colin Newman rises to the rank of orator of a despair born of light, prophet of the programmatic tenets of a movement that would count among its disciples the likes of Robert Smith, Thurston Moore and Steve Albini. The musicians' extraordinary versatility and the clash of genres make 154 a ledger of twenty years of musical transactions, placing it squarely at the midpoint of that span.

The diaspora

At the peak of their creativity, though, the band collides head-on with EMI over the promotional strategy for 154. Wire, forward-thinking on this front too, want to focus on the visual side. "You can't sell music on television, we tried," came EMI's blunt reply. The split is imminent. The final act plays out at the Electric Ballroom in February 1980: Newman & co. perform in front of a horde of punks, but throw the audience off balance by staging deranged Dadaist pantomimes involving goats, gas stoves and inflatable rockets. The crowd turns hostile and bottles rain down on the stage. It will remain Wire's last gig for five years, immortalised on Document And Eyewitness (1981).

The four find temporary shelter at Rough Trade, who release the single "Our Swimmer/ Midnight Banhof Café" that September. But internal tensions also tear them apart, between Newman's "pop" soul and the "noise" faction (Gilbert and Lewis). Without officially splitting up, then, the band divides into these two factions, with the frontman going solo while the other two pursue parallel projects and multimedia performances.

Among the first to go solo, Colin Newman lands at Beggars Banquet, releasing A-Z (1980), flanked by Wire "survivors" Gotobed on drums and Thorne on keyboards, with guitarist Desmond Simmons rounding out the line-up.

A twelve-track LP that distances itself with real class from the mother band's travails. Steeped in bold strokes of stylistic rebellion, the album shines brightest in its more restless episodes, where Newman's voice paints scenes of wonderfully irritable new wave ("& Jury"), always shadowed by a dark presence drifting above fragile structures often held up by just a handful of elements.

The urge to lay bare repressed souls surfaces whenever darkness takes hold ("I've Waited Ages", "Alone"), and it's precisely here that rhythmic contractions set against a distant screech surprise with their imagination and compositional insight. The at-times shamanic anthem of "Order For Order" exalts with real force, before plunging into a leaden, airless mood with "Image".

The stark contrast between the ramshackle schizophrenia of the middle section and certain more daring compositional episodes never feels jarring, so well do they fit within a context of controlled madness. One genuine gem stands out, the gorgeous "Troiseme": wrapped in a dreamlike membrane, steeped in bold tones, it dissolves into a myriad of melodic lines before being led out by a faint rhythmic construct. As an integral part of a slender body of work, toward the end of this flash of brilliance that is A-Z comes the lengthy "Second To Last", with an instrumental coda sealing a moment of unimaginable beauty. Buoyed by a hugely varied musical inventory, the record wraps up in a flash with its last three tracks ("Inventory", "But No", "B"), which go by sharp and immediate, very much in 154 style.

The 1988 reissue would add three tracks previously released as singles over the years, plus two unreleased songs left in the drawer since the album's original 1980 release. The quirky, almost comical "Classic Remains", along with the brief piano sketch "Alone On Piano", are taken from the "B" single released in 1980. The metallic beat of "This Picture" seduces amid unsettling fog and reverb, also lifted from a 1981 release. The two previously unreleased tracks mentioned above ("Not Me", "Don't Bring Reminders") tread carefully between acid post-punk territory and distorted pop.

Newman is by now a guru, "a technological Barrett, whose madness is now held captive by machines and by an alienation far more devastating and far less poetic", as the British press would describe him.

Having moved to 4AD, Newman released two more albums within six months of each other. Provisionally Entitled The Singing Fish is a single instrumental suite in twelve parts, presenting itself as a clear homage to Eno's ambient music. Written and performed entirely by Newman, the record stands out above all for its touches of Barrett-esque psychedelia on "Fish 1", the android rockabilly of "Fish 5" and the Eastern spices of "Fish 7".

Not To, on the other hand, reverts to a full-band format: Gotobed returns on drums, while Simmons replaces Thorne on arrangements. The result is a messier pot-pourri, but not without interest, where repeated guitar loops intertwine with dark basslines and Newman's reverb-drenched vocalisations. Some tracks are reworkings of 1980 Wire outtakes ("Safe", "We Meet Under Tables", "You, Me and Happy"); the cover of the Beatles' "Blue Jay Way" feels off the mark, while the instrumental "Indians", featuring Bruce Gilbert as well, proves more evocative.

Meanwhile, Newman produces the Virgin Prunes' masterpiece "...If I Die, I Die" (1982), writes "Not Me" for This Mortal Coil's "It'll End In Tears", and returns to the production chair for "Raging Souls" by Minimal Compact, whose singer, Malka Spigel, would become his wife.

On the other front, Gilbert and Lewis push the experimental insights of Wire to their extreme consequences, seeking out new cross-contamination between industrial and electronic music. Both their solo work and their output under the Dome name aim to revive Eno's amorphous, rarefied soundscapes, exploring new research into synthesized sounds and recording techniques.

Dome, in particular, abandon the song format in favour of a tangle of mechanical noise, musique concrète and anaemic beats, in which only scant melodic fragments survive, manipulated in the studio.

3R4 is a sort of long, four-part ambient suite modelled on drone-music; Dome is an avant-garde symphony for noise and processed instruments, essentially replicated the following year on the next chapter, Dome 2 (1981), while Dome 3 (1981) infiltrates drops of psychedelia, noise debris and flashes of tribal drumming.

The final act, Will You Speak To This World: Dome 4 (1983), is a fresh brew of ambient drones, combining the minimalism of the early works with the ethnic shadings of the third chapter. The result is a kind of progressive concept album, singular to say the least for erstwhile punksters. Side one is entirely taken up by the suite "To Speak": after an opening sealed by Arabic-sounding violins and an atonal sax, an acoustic guitar enters, sustained by a tribal drum drone, until the sound frays into textures that spill over into alien electronics. Side two, on the other hand, offers six tracks alternating drum rhythms and assorted noises, generated by a jumble of instruments.

The 71 minutes of 8 Time assemble the contents of 3R4 with two singles released under the name Cupol.

The pair's ambitions stretch as far as the experimental project Mzui/Waterloo Gallery, the album made with artist Russell Mills exploring the relationship between sound and environment, gathering chance noises recorded in a London art gallery.

The Duet Emmo project, meanwhile, is the fruit of a collaboration with Daniel Miller, head of Mute Records (the name is an anagram of "Dome" and "Mute"). Its only legacy would be Or So It Seems, which oscillates between atonal electronic collages and D.A.F.-style synth-funk pulsations.

Lewis also devotes himself to the audiovisual project He Said alongside producer John Fryer, poised between ambient music and ethereal vocalizing. Two albums result, Hail (1985, with Brian Eno as "guest star"), and Take Care (1988, with the surprise rap of "A.B.C. Dicks Love").

Gilbert, meanwhile, churns out a series of solo albums, alternating technological experimentation with music for ballet. This Way is a composition for choreographer Michael Clarke (who had already worked alongside Fall and New Order), built around the three-part suite "Do You Me? I Did", arrhythmic and dissonant, accompanied by two further electronic pieces that drift out of sync.

Closer to the Dome approach is The Shivering Man, a collection of largely instrumental sound fragments, some commissioned by artist Angela Conway, a dancer with the Paris Opera as well as a singer for He Said and A.C. Marias.

This Way To The Shivering Man is a compilation gathering roughly half the tracks from Gilbert's first two albums, while Insiding contains two pieces for ballets by choreographer Ashley Page.

His discography also includes an album under the name P'O (Whilst Climbing Thieves Vie For Position).

Robert Gotobed, finally, besides his appearances on Newman's records, plays with Fad Gadget on "Incontinent" (1981), also composing the track "Manual Dexterity".

Dugga time: the return

Although heavily committed to their respective solo projects, the members of Wire kept nurturing the idea of a reunion. The first signs appear in 1984, when Newman, back from India, gets in touch with Gilbert and Lewis. It's the prelude to a full-quartet "reunion" on the occasion of a performance at the Museum of Modern Art in Oxford, where Wire present new songs, such as "A Serious Of Snakes" and "Drill", which would end up on the Snakedrill EP two years later. The seal of officialdom comes with the gig at the Hammersmith Clarendon in July 1986.

Released by Mute, Snakedrill unveils a new sound, making extensive use of sampling and a para-funk rhythm the band nicknamed "dugga". A devastating showcase of this is the single "Drill", which Wire would later revisit in nine different versions on the monothematic The Drill in 1991, and which would be reinterpreted by a whole host of fan-artists on the bizarre tribute album "Dugga Dugga Dugga".

The time is ripe for a new album. The Ideal Copy (Mute, 1987) comes out in April 1987. Despite a title alluding to DNA replication, the sound of this incarnation of Wire is far from cerebral compared to the opening trilogy, retaining only a taste for rhythmic exploration (here much less angular and far more danceable). The new Wire fall in step with the fashions of the day and relaunch themselves with a glossy, dancefloor-ready sound, Newman's voice rendered velvety and seductive à-la Dave Gahan.

There's no shortage of refinement ("Point Of Collapse" is classy new wave, the single "Ahead" is an extremely catchy hit), but the record soon shows signs of fatigue, caught between toothless synth-pop ("Madman's Honey", "Still Shows") and echoes of 154's most avant-garde moments ("Feed Me"). Luckily, two highly effective tracks raise the overall level: "Ambitious" — built entirely on repetition — and "Cheeking Tongues", with a solid melody and electronic flourishes.

The Ideal Copy inaugurates a turn that was perhaps necessary for their trajectory, updating their sound to the times (a danceable new wave, full of electronics and futuristic atmospheres), but certainly not one of any great significance in absolute terms, especially compared to the glories of the opening trilogy.

A year later comes the single "Kidney Bingos", awash in cheerful, lighthearted pop, trailing the new album A Bell Is A Cup Until It Is Struck. Despite convoluted stream-of-consciousness lyrics and a production that tends to foreground atmosphere at the expense of melody, the record is above all a fresh showcase of the band's pop skills, here emphasized by layers of softer, treated guitars expanded into sonic flows punctuated by Gilbert's hammering bass and Gotobed's now almost dance-like drumming.

And so airy choruses blossom ("Silk Skin Paws", "Come Back In Two Halves"), psychedelic vignettes appear ("The Finest Drops"), pop deconstruction exercises unfold ("Follow The Locust"), but there are also new, depressed litanies, such as "A Public Place" and "The King Of Ur And The Queen Of Um", which allude to the cultural decline of the United Kingdom.

While lacking the depth of the magical opening trilogy, the record nonetheless confirms the new cohesion the band had achieved, even compared to the previous effort.

Not content with having left posterity one of the most unsettling live albums of all time, Wire indulge in yet another dig at the clichés of live records with It's Beginning To & Back Again (1989), in which the original performances are dismantled and rebuilt in the studio using the most advanced technology available. Meanwhile, they release another dance single, "Eardrum Buzz", followed a few months later by "In Vivo".

Meanwhile, as if to recall a phase that had by now irretrievably faded, Harvest releases the compilation On Returning (1977-79), featuring tracks from the three early masterpieces.

But the present is the computer-music of Manscape (1990), by now completely detached from the post-punk of their golden years and drained of the diseased charm that had made the band great. Syncopated beats, synths and sequencer riffs are the main course, while Lewis carves out more space for himself on vocals. Sophisticated as they are, tracks like "Life In The Manscape", "Small Black Reptile" and "Torch It" fail to leave a mark.

Gotobed doesn't take to the new direction and leaves the band, replaced, somewhat mournfully, by a drum machine for the subsequent tour, in which Wire turn into an assault guitar trio, even programming the bass parts.

Starting Over From Three: Wir

Sealing the band's new lineup, the final "e" is dropped and the name becomes "Wir", as Lewis "explained": "We were basically a new entity by then, in the sense that there were only three of us left worrying about the project. Other parts had to be generated, we needed to constantly reinvent ourselves."

And indeed The First Letter (1991) reveals, if nothing else, a burst of inventiveness. The three of them funnel their guitars into the MIDI system, creating digital loops structured like songs. Vocal parts are now relegated to the background, in favor of intricate synthetic soundscapes ("Take It", "So And Slow It Goes", "Ticking Mouth") that won't win over the public, but will at least help Newman develop a new career running a techno label, Swim (with artists like Ronnie & Clyde, Lobe, dol-lop, Pablo's Eye).

So, as the group's activity wanes, solo and side projects move back into the spotlight.

Newman, in fact, never actually stopped working on his own material. In the second half of the Eighties he released Commercial Suicide (1986) and It Seems (1988), showcasing his more romantic, decadent side with a series of refined watercolours à-la Japan, embellished by unusual electronic timbres and vocal contributions from his wife Malka Spiegel, rhythmic work from Gotobed, and horn parts from Luc Van Lieshout (Tuxedomoon) and Marc Hollander.

Next came the productions under the names Oracle and Immersion, the Ep Voice and the album Bastard, still instrumental, though melodic lines and guitar patterns resurface here, with the techno pulses of late-period Wire merging with a hazier, more atmospheric electronic sound ("May", "Spaced In"), edging close to trip-hop territory ("The Orange House").

Gilbert and Lewis revive the Dome partnership with Yclept (1999), where the industrial rhythms of "Virtual Sweden" sit alongside the massive bass loop seasoned with vocal noise on "Vertical Seeding" and the noisy loops of "Virtuous Speed", plus a handful of historic rarities from the band. 8 Time, on the other hand, gathers material recorded by the pair's other side projects (Cupol, 3R4, P'O).

Lewis coins the new electronic monikers HALO and Ocsid, and joins the Swedish avant-garde duo Omala in the electronic project He Said Omala on Catch Supposes (1997).

Gilbert, meanwhile, splits his time between DJing in London clubs and a series of releases covering the most disparate territory, from the dance sounds of Music For Fruit to the monolith of Ab Ovo, from the Ordier sessions, recorded in 1996 and released eight years later, to the ambient pieces of Orr, the fruit of his partnership with Robert Hampson and Paul Kendall. Among the "minor" works are a noise mini-CD (The Haring) and a long instrumental theme on In Esse (1998).

In 1995 the Wire name returns to the spotlight when Elastica sample "Three Girl Rhumba" for their hit "Connection".

And as proof of their vast influence on the following generation, there's the tribute album with the explicit title Whore – Various Artists Play Wire, released in 1999, featuring an exceptional cast of alternative bands. Beyond the more obvious names (Mike Watt, who had already paid tribute to them several times in concert), there are leading figures of shoegaze (My Bloody Valentine, Lush) right through to genuine surprises (Main with a fantastic closing "Used To", Lee Ranaldo with a sped-up "Fragile", not to mention Godflesh!).

The covers rarely match the quality of the originals (Bark Psychosis, for instance, disappoint, ruining the stunning "Three Girl Rhumba"), but each one reveals how thoroughly the Wire lesson was absorbed by bands from every scene, be it Fudge Tunnel or Band Of Susans. Alongside this tribute should be placed the more recent A Houseguest's Wish: Translations Of Wire's "Outdoor Miner", in which various acts reinterpret the same song ("Outdoor Miner", precisely), as well as all the Wire covers recorded by the most varied artists over the years (in the Eighties Big Black covered "Heartbeat", Rem covered "Strange"...).

The Fire of the 2000s

On the threshold of the new millennium, just as the curtain seemed to have finally fallen on the Wire saga, comes another twist: the original lineup reunites for a series of concerts (which yield The Third Day) and for a new project, Read & Burn, split into two volumes and released on the new label Pinkflag.

At a time of rampant wave revivalism, Wire reclaim the space that's rightfully theirs, leaving plenty of young, arrogant imitators eating their dust.

The two Eps (2002) are crystalline, unassailable blocks of punk wedded to electronics, startling even in the clarity of their intent and musical choices. Back are the minimal patterns that made them famous, Gilbert's swarming guitars ("The Agfers of Kodack"), while certain maelstroms ("I Don't Understand", "Comet") also wink at the heavy contemporary rock of bands like Ministry and Nine Inch Nails.

Officially celebrating the resurrection is Send (Pinkflag, 2003), which collects many of the tracks from the two Eps plus four new ones. The first new addition, after the opening "In The Art Of Stopping" (a blistering three-chord firecracker that already opened the first "Read And Burn"), is "Mr Marx's Table", a gem of ever-mounting tension, with a tight rhythm and an atmosphere that partly recalls the alienation of 154. That's the stylistic signature running through the whole album. "Comet", "Nice Streets Above" and "Spent" are relentless examples of cyber-punk edging into Ministry territory. The guitars fire off hyper-saturated riffs, the rhythm is dry and martial, often launched at full speed, seasoned with electronics expressed through a mixture of drones, industrial vapours and leaden atmospheres. Newman's and Gilbert's voices trade off, often resulting in terse, angry phrases, filtered and processed so as to merge into the wall of sound.

Closing the album is the splendid "99.9", which begins darkly and menacingly with a dull pulse of bass and synth, scratched by echoes of distortion and electronic drones, before unfolding into an accumulation of intensely angry vocals and music.

Wire show themselves no mercy and get back in the game honestly and courageously, essentially starting over with the same attitude as their 1977 debut.

Meanwhile Newman continues his frenetic side activity, joining Spigel and Robin Rimbaud (aka Scanner) in Githead.

In 2007, Read & Burn 03 doesn't add anything dramatically new, but it's a solid snapshot of the state of the art for Wire, who by now had been constantly evolving for thirty years.

The four tracks on the EP sit exactly halfway between the elegant-punk itch of Pink Flag and the dark aestheticism of 154, without the distortion and rage that gave greater character to those previous two chapters, but with their refinement and obsessive attention to sound fully intact.

The opening track "23 Years Too Late", clocking in at almost ten minutes, seems to provocatively disown their usual modus operandi. "Our Time" is perhaps guilty of an excess of martial stiffness, both in its musical structure and in the cadence of the vocals. The real gem is then "Desert Diving": it sounds like one of those tracks built to take off and conquer the world, but Newman and co. stay true to form and, for the umpteenth time, deliberately refuse to craft a hit, leaving the track without the pathos-laden crescendo finale that would have turned it into an anthem.

A year passes, and here comes a new album, Object 47. Right from the title, Wire seem keen to underline the longevity of their journey: it is in fact their 47th work. Without guitarist Bruce Gilbert, the band crafts one of the sunniest, most melodic albums of their long discography.

The centrifugal trip-hop of "Hard Currency" almost evokes Massive Attack on amphetamines. The opening "One Of Us" is a clear statement of intent, where clean brushstrokes are laid onto a canvas steeped in wave echoes. "Perspex Icon" is another infectious moment, with Colin Newman's voice letting us glimpse mirages of the band's glorious past. As usual, Newman trades vocal duties with Graham Lewis, who takes center stage on "Four Long Years".

There's also room for funk-oriented moments, as in "Mekon Headman" and "Are You Ready?". "Patient Flees" and the circular "Circumspect" are more forgettable, while the closing "All Fours" is a successful example of stadium-ready anthemic rock, built on simple but highly effective riffs.

Rock lessons for the new generations

In 2011 it's time for a new album, Red Barked Tree, on which the band presents itself as fresh and new as ever, with a few well-established trademarks, but with the drive of an up-and-coming act that makes the whole thing feel remarkably contemporary.

Elegant and refined, as on the opening "Please Take", rhythmically protean, as on the following "Now Was", or melancholically power-rock as on "Adapt", which could well rise to the status of the band's new official anthem, Wire once again prove themselves a group of superior stature. The musical trajectories are varied: from the granite-hard riffs of "Two Minutes", a razor-sharp cut that had sat in a drawer for almost ten years, to the missed opportunity of "Clay", which implodes in our hands right when it could have become a shoegaze apocalypse, to the swift roundness of "A Flat Tent".

"Smash" arrives toward the end and manages to pull off the tricky feat of giving the whole album its definitive leap in quality, lending it just the right dose of catchiness without ever slipping into cheap shortcuts. The finale is left to two slower tracks, which gives the record a more lyrical tone than the Wire average. And while "Down To This" might come across as a bit tedious, the title track closes things out sublimely, with its psych-folk gait and unexpected acoustic guitars.

The lyrics, modernist and urban, never banal, speak to us of climate change, the failure of financial markets, cynicism, the inadequacy of British public transport ("Bad Worn Thing" is almost the account of a difficult journey across British lands), urban dysfunction, technological disasters. Realistic visions of contemporary society, calibrated with extreme care.

In 2013 Newman, Lewis, Grey and Matthew Simms, who had replaced Gilbert, set to work on old, never-released drafts dating back to sessions from 1979/1980.

That material, duly re-recorded, forms the thirteen tracks of Change Becomes Us. Measured against Wire's unmatched opening trilogy, these pieces lose the comparison dramatically, and they lose it too against many of the band's later, brilliant efforts. Take, for example, the stadium-rock guitar of "Adore Your Island", and notice how objectively out of place it sounds, despite being punctuated by calls to pogo. But the languid moods of "Re-Invent Your Second Wheel" also seem, rather than proposing new artistic directions, to be announcing retirement age.

It works better with the punk drive of "Stealth Of A Stork", a clear outtake from "Pink Flag", or with the decadent touches of "B/W Silence" and "Time Lock Fog": both would have found an appropriate home among the folds of 154, and it's no coincidence that they're placed in sequence halfway through the tracklist, as if to acknowledge their centrality to this project.

For the rest, it's a journey of highs and lows, moving between well-rounded solutions ("Magic Bullet") and flimsy post-punk martial airs ("Eels Sang"), with the occasional tear rolling down the cheek in remembrance of a youth now gone.

"Doubles & Trebles", "Keep Exhaling", and the catchy "Love Bends" and "As We Go" are good tracks, but nothing more, only underlining the band's inability to truly astonish again.

Instead, the closing pair "& Much Besides" / "Attractive Space" is an excellent way to wrap things up, blending lightness and drama, perhaps as a bridge into the band's next project.

In April 2015 their fourteenth studio album came out, and the first thing that stands out is the choice to title the record with the band's own name — a move that might seem banal for such celebrated intellectuals, but on the other hand underscores how important this album is for the quartet, as if it were a fresh start. The tracklist has the virtue of letting short, catchy episodes like "In Manchester" coexist quite naturally alongside far more intricate ones: the sumptuous closer "Harpooned" runs past eight minutes, pouring the entire Wire sound into a psychedelic mould, while "Sleep-Walking" oozes palpable tension, at times even verging on the unsettling (yes, these gentlemen can still pull that off!). And while some might grumble about the excessive over-production lavished on "Shifting" and "Burning Bridges", plenty will jump in their seats at the tight rhythms of "Joust & Jostle", the Smiths-like guitar jangle of "Octopus", and the successful starting point entrusted to "Blogging".

Wire aspires to be a project meant to reconcile every generation of fans that has followed over the years, although expecting to find among its grooves the punk revolutions of "Pink Flag" or the new wave decadence of 154 would be pure folly.

Twelve months later the band returns to surprise its audience with a new project. Nocturnal Koreans (2016), at a mere twenty-six minutes, could easily be filed away as a mini-album, but for the English band these eight creatures, kept apart from the conciliatory atmospheres of Wire, are the expression of a creative situationism that defies the rules of planning itself.

Jagged, blunt, mysterious, Nocturnal Koreans is closer to the alienating electronic tortures of Chair Missing and 154 than to the sumptuous pop architectures that have ennobled their output since the artistic resurrection of Send.

The band sets aside its vast melodic wealth and toys instead with slender riffs, never harmonically complete, hurling them into an orgy of sound in which the density of guitars and keyboards matches the force of the rhythm and the almost noir groove of the bass.

Eight tracks that seem irreconcilable and disparate, yet all pushing toward a more emancipated musicality: the jarring minimalist uptempo of "Numbered" and the mighty three-chord vigour of "Still" are two sides of the same coin.

Wire have descended once more into the underworld to steal the devil's finest songs, and they did it without fear of getting their hands dirty. The electronic pop-beat-twist of the title track is a surreal rereading of their most recent output, a landing point for younger fans and an emotional jolt for anyone who was struck down by Pink Flag.

The epic, warlike tone of the kraut-tinged "Internal Exile", the languid stylistic shedding of "Forward Position" and the glittering naive grace of "Dead Weight" sweep away, in one stroke, years and years of imitators, confirming that this 2015 comeback is far more than a simple declaration of good health — it's a genuine declaration of war on mediocrity and routine.

The celebration of forty years of recording activity is marked by a new album, accompanied by a lavish limited edition. Silver/Lead could be dismissed as their most romantic and velvety album, but that reading only makes sense in relation to the unusual, unexpected emotional charge running through Colin Newman's intense vocal performance on "Forever & A Day".

In truth, Wire have simply shifted their attention to detail, developing those micro-tonal variations that often separate melancholy from boredom.

The band's fourth decade could not have gotten off to a better start: the energetic "Short Elevated Period" and the synth-pop of "Diamonds In Cups" rank among the best songs they've written since 154, and it is precisely in this proto-pop dimension that the band's new stylistic identity resides.

Awareness and mastery are a fundamental part of the lyrical philosophy of Silver/Lead, an album that's perhaps devoid of surprises, seemingly harmless and languid.

One has to wonder: how many neo-psychedelic bands would kill to open an album with the same brilliance as the opener "Playing Harp For The Fishes," and how many pop groups would sell their soul to the devil for songs like "An Alibi" and "Sonic Lens" (which, incidentally, are the two "weakest" tracks on the record)?

In the end, what truly astonishes is the fact that, forty years after their debut, Wire still have so much to say. The third incarnation of Newman, Lewis and co. thus continues sailing full steam ahead, with the protagonists of this adventure confirming themselves as tireless seekers of formal perfection, pioneers of indispensable musical revolutions, architects and driving forces of the finest European avant-garde movements. No longer as influential as in 1977, but still tirelessly creative and inspired, now ever more seasoned and self-assured, constantly searching for new paths, always with great authority and unshakeable command of their craft.

Contributions by Alessandro Biancalana (“A-Z”), Alessandro Nalon (“The Ideal Copy”, “Whore – Various Artists Play Wire”), Angelo Franzese (“154”), Paolo Sforza (“Send”), Claudio Lancia (“Read & Burn 3”, “Object 47”, “Red Barked Tree”, “Change Becomes Us”, “Wire”), Gianfranco Marmoro (“Nocturnal Koreans”, “Silver/Lead”, “Mind Hive”)

Bibliography:

Simon Reynolds – Post-punk 1978-1984 (Isbn)

Ira Robbins – Trouser Press

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