Audio Journal : 07/02/2011

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

Audio Journal by MJA Smith : 30/11/2009

Go to: My Other Blog / twitter.com/mjasmith

One of the albums I've returned my attention to this week is the seminal Yankee Hotel Foxtrot by Wilco, which my good friend Martyn gave me a few years ago. Yankee Hotel Foxtrot is in many ways the yardstick by which all subsequent alt. country albums should be judged, deploying all manner of effects and sounds ordinarily restricted to the more esoteric reaches of modern electronica and sampleadelica. The opener, 'I Am Trying To Break Your Heart' is a case in point – a fragmented, clipped ballad that hangs together for almost as long as it threatens to fall to pieces (which it ultimately does), whereas 'Heavy Metal Drummer' is a blissfully straight up slice of lo-fi folk rockery. Other strong tracks are 'Kamera', a cheerful Sixties-esque upbeat track, and 'War On War' which has an unexpected middle eight almost entirely comprised of buzzing synth firework chaos.

Further out, Ubuweb delivered an obscure Yoko Ono piece in the last fortnight or so. 'Coughing Piece' was recorded in Tokyo in 1961 and comprises a bed of rich background environmental sounds – traffic noise, subtle feedback, muffled conversation – over which someone (possibly Ono) occasionally delivers various coughing sounds. The overall effect is one of considerable sonic depth but claustrophobic edginess. Over the length of the track the sporadic coughing becomes more pronounced, and as a listener you can't help but feel short of breath yourself; a bit like contagious yawning, I found myself coughing along at one point. At just over thirty minutes in length, it may appear excessive but as a piece of avant garde sonic art it is nevertheless thoroughly absorbing.

Wire's IBTABA – shorthand for It's Beginning To And Back Again, a line from the song 'German Shepherds' – was an album I bought on vinyl from Andy's Records in Colchester on a 1996 summer's day after finishing my first year of degree exams. Of all the band's material from their second coming, IBTABA is perhaps the most comprehensive. The electronics which first emerged on The Ideal Copy and the spindly, frantic 'dugga-dugga-dugga' guitars of 'Drill' – a track which would, when performed live, take on an entirely amorphous dimension and length – are all present, as are some of their most obviously elliptical lyrics. Principally containing new versions of tracks taken from the earlier album A Bell Is A Cup Until It Is Struck, the album was conceived as a way of presenting the tracks in the studio the way they were realised in a live setting. Accordingly, the superior slow-building version of 'Boiling Boy' is probably my favourite track from Wire's entire 1980s / 1990s period, inspiring me to use the title as a moniker for a single electronic pop track I wrote a few years later.

Earlier this year I found myself at Piccadilly Underground station one balmy summer evening after a client event at the Royal Academy. Descending the steps from street level I saw a large poster containing the words 'Pop Will Eat Itself' and my pulse momentarily quickened – was this the return of the Stourbridge band that I listened to almost constantly throughout my A-levels? Sadly not; it was some sort of Art On The Underground installation. My friend Jon got me into PWEI, recording me tapes of the band's samples-and-punk-meets-Brummie-hip-hop albums, sizeable chunks of which I wound up sampling for my own tracks. The swansong album Dos Dedos Mis Amigos ('Two Fingers My Friends'), with its characteristic Designers Republic sleeve, found the band straddling the wry, cynically humorous elements of their sound with more robust, serious material – the single 'Ich Bin Ein Auslander' is an anti-Nazism rant while 'Familus Horribilis' (a play on the Queen's apocryphal 'annus horribilis' speech) casts the Royal Family as a Simpsons-style dysfunctional family. It shouldn't work, but it does. The bleak 'Everything's Cool' remains my anthem of choice for a hypothetical post-apocalyptic world.

Midlands band SixtyFiveMiles released a seven-track mini download album via the usual sites on the frequently pleasing Cherry Red label, one of the UK's most enduring independents. Finnish Tango is a small slither of indie-rock brilliance from the fourpiece band, key tracks being the Foil-esque opener 'Found Out' and the arid negativity of 'Don't Want You Hanging Around' which reaches the same depths of weary dystopia as Interpol, and knocks spots off the NYC band's hopeless copyists – and fellow Midlanders – Editors. 'Butterflies' and 'Manhattan' are, in contrast, upbeat and gleefully optimistic pieces. Definitely a band to check out. An interview with Simon from the band should appear here next week, but in the meantime check out SixtyFiveMiles's tracks on their MySpace.