Wire are a band best described as 'post-punk', although I think there's an argument that UK punk was so brief, and the bands that became successful in its wake have endured so much longer, that the term can no longer apply.
I wasn't aware of Wire's legacy when I first heard them; I just knew them as a band that were on my favourite independent record label, Mute. I bought a compilation called International Compilation Mute in Southend-on-Sea in 1993 and on it was a Wire track, a version of the track 'Drill' which came to define their Eighties-period sound. To say I hated the buzzing, quirky sound of that song would be too strong, but suffice to say it was always the one track I'd never listen to all the way through. I then read about the band in magazines, understood their importance and how they stretched back to 1977, but I just figured that they weren't a band I was ever going to be into.
By the time I arrived at University a couple of years later, I'd built up a collection of electronic music, latterly focussing on edgy yet listenable dance music. In the first term of my first year you would regularly hear Daft Punk's 'Da Funk' blasting out loudly along the corridors from my room, much to the irritation of my neighbours. I found dance music's focus and drive appealing; while my fellow students were falling over themselves for every indie band that seemed to be the feted successor to either Blur or Oasis, I was happiest listening to repetitive beats.
Wire changed that, abruptly. Specifically their debut album Pink Flag, released in 1977 in the slipstream of UK punk's rude arrival. I was shopping with a friend, Kit, in Colchester one day. Kit had been subtly warning me for a while that I was spending too much money on music; I had become a vegetarian that term in order to spend the money I'd have earmarked for meat on records. I didn't listen to him and, scratching around for something to buy in Our Price, came upon Pink Flag, ignored my reservations about the song of theirs I'd heard before, ignored my reservations about guitar music in general, and just went ahead and bought it.
In the space of about two days you were as likely to hear Pink Flag blaring out of my student room as regularly as the likes of 'Da Funk'. Pink Flag has a sound which is very much influenced by punk, and I found some resonance in the repetitive guitar riffs and urgent drums, something which reminded me very much of the minimal progressions of dance music. It helped that Pink Flag didn't contain solos, that the lyrics were so strange and that the pace occasionally dropped into punk-baiting slowness. I also felt smug that while my friends fawned over Menswear's 'Daydreamer' and Elastica's 'Connection', I had the songs that directly influenced those tracks, almost to the point of plagiarism (something our lecturers were always banging on about). I am certainly not alone in having found 'punk' via dance music; a guy I exchanged emails with at Uni did exactly the same, and Wire had been his stepping-on point as well. Wire's de facto frontman, Colin Newman, who I also exchanged emails with at Uni, and who I've since interviewed a couple of times, went the other direction, from art punk to techno and back, repeatedly.
So I fell for Pink Flag in a big way, and over the next few months soaked up their Seventies trilogy of albums – Chairs Missing then 154, both of which were artier than the one preceding it – before moving on to their Mute period and their sundry offshoots and solo projects. It helped that they approached 'punk' from an art-school perspective, rapidly moving from punk's simple lump-headedness into slower, more calculated territories; somehow I found that more appealing than anything current in the indie Nineties, and any guitar-based music I'd ever heard up to that point.
The reason for waffling on about Wire is that I went to see them at The Scala last week. For those interested in reading my review of that gig, my review of the excellent Red Barked Tree (released but a week or so into 2011 and already my album of the year) or my short biography of the band, follow the links below.
Wire - Start To Move - A Short History Of Wire
Wire - Red Barked Tree
Wire - The Scala, 2 February 2011
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