The interview is up at Drowned in Sound. The transcript is below. Enjoy yourself.
A band like Wire I see as more like territory or geography than a band…
Graham Lewis: [chuckling] typography…
…perhaps, less brittle maybe…
GL: The thing that first surprised me was when we made the first piece of work we were doing, we stopped working in 1980, was when we became an adjective. That’s quite an extraordinary metamorphosis. You know something you never think of when you first start something. You could actually become an adjective, or a metaphor even. So being geography I like a lot.
Have you ever been a verb, to Wire?
GL: I think we always have been. That’s what we are.
Colin Newman: No I don’t think we ever have been, although one could.. I think the thing is because the word is so common, we chose the name originally because apart from the obvious, it’s so shorn of any kind of meaning, it doesn’t have very much association. But it is of course an incredibly common word so before Google got very smart, which it did in the last five years, if you Googled wire you would never get anything about wire. But it is very common.
It has that sort of infrastructural sense to it, technical bones
GL: I guess if you’re around long enough, that’s what you hope for isn’t it. You don’t get blown away.
CN: It’s pretty terrible. I mean i’m pretty nervous of that process personally, because I like the idea of being free as much as possible, from any baggage, about anything, ever.
GL: But the important thing, a very important thing for artists is that you’ve got to persist, isn’t it.
CN: And provenance. You can say the work has provenance, so that’s one way in which you can use that particular kind of backdrop. But y’know that’s my Modus Operandi, is to be as slippery as possible.
Wire sort of has continuity and discontinuity about them, the Wire archipelago. Ideal Copy your 1980 return, was that in some way a challenge to provenance?
GL: It came out of Like all of these things it sort of fell out of the ether really, at the time I was really fascinated with photocopying. I was making an awful lot of work using that machinery and technology. And Bruce and I we’d been talking an awful lot about.. it was the period where fake and piracy started to become very, one was aware of that in the world, because it was around that yuppy period when there was a lot of money to be made in making fake goods fake anything, so that was around, but I think it was Bruce who nailed this. The ideal copy is DNA and that’s where it really came from.
DNA breaks down, bad replications…
GL: ..But DNA is it. Everything else, including us, is rather transient and not terribly important, and the whole ambition the whole drive against inertia etc. is DNA.
Aspect of being the purest design…
GL: Yeah of this design that mutates and continues and crucially wants to live. So that’s where it comes from “when it’s cold I feel cold / when it’s hot I feel ambitious”. This sort of.. microbial insistence but as large as it is microscopic.
So talking of ambition, and art, I have a plan for this interview to be collaborative article. Now as Wire are more like territory I want us to create something in the model of a travel article. But a specific type of travel article, a cliche of the genre. It’s usually called a “Tale of Two Cities”, usually begins “city x or country x is a city/land of contrasts” and it elaborates these entirely false two cities and refuses to connect processes. So rather than a chronological mapping of 1970s Wire1, Wire 2, 3…
GL: …We’re up to Wire 4 now. or 3.2 is it?…
CN: Let him.. I’m interested in his travelogue idea..
Well it’s less a travelogue, rather a concept map, working on these falsifiable dichotomies, so we’d have provisional Wire A and Wire B, which wouldn’t remain identical to themselves…
GL: this is like Quantas physics
In that it’s liable to crash
GL: Depends whether it has a rolls royce engine.
Errr.. well crashing is sort of the point
GL: Go for it.
Innovators vs. establishment
GL: Innovators make no money. This has always been a starving land.
You’ve travelled serious amounts of aesthetic and processual ground within “the band”, even within individual periods, this exploratory spirit that has made Wire “not fit”.
GL: That makes it very difficult, what shall we say, for the establishment to invest heavily because they like things which do not move and can be easily exploited. That’s a different kind of production, we’re in the production of art. And art is a question that is continually moving, and formulating and responding to that is really, all you can do.
And where does that come from? There’s always been an enormous sense of confidence, and coherence, about Wire’s experimentation
GL: I think it does help if you’re your own cartologist.
…so mapping yourselves, retaining the relation from A to B…
GL: Well that’s what you’re doing. If you’re setting off on your own adventure you are continually redrawing the map and erasing it as well, amending it. And you’ve got to be optimistic, in that [philosophical] sense.
CN: If i can get a word in edgeways. My personal geography. I sat in my bedroom in Watford in 1976 and decided I wanted to invent rock and roll, with the arrogance that only a 22 year old can have, and latterly I’ve described that process as taking the “and roll” out. because there was an awful lot of frippery, I don’t actually like rock and roll I don’t like it all, I hate 50s music, I hate black and white. I like colour. And I’ve always just thought, yeah, this is it. I felt that I was on the point of something, totally within my own head, nothing to do with the rest of the world. But I think what I’ve brought when I bring material to the band is a kind of confidence, you know, they’ll all laugh at me, they’ll all just think I’m an idiot, because i’m prepared to stand there with an acoustic guitar and electric guitar and play these ridiculously shorn things, and then they join in, and something happens. You’ve got to be very brave to do it. When we started to do this album. Iphone, acoustic guitar, some words from Graham, some words I had myself. Sent a bunch of stuff out to these guys. Robert said “It sounds like the seventies”. Graham said “I hate acoustic guitars”. Within a day of being together, playing that material, we were already well on our way to making a great record.
GL: As Colin said, quite often it’s the case, if nobody laughs you know it’s not going to fly. If they’re going hmmm, mmm in agreement. Because that’s when there’s usually something in it that’s worth exploring. Whether it’s absurd, worrying…
CN: Then you get into a mindframe of being convinced that you’re right, basically. If you’re not the mainstream, it’s because everybody else has got no idea.
GL While Colin was having his epiphany in his bedroom in Watford, I was at art college in London, at Hornsey. And the thinking was that it would always be a good idea to have a group because it would give you possiblity of working in something which at that point didn’t exist, which was basically like a multimedia world. Because it would give you access to doing all of the things you liked, which included you know, obviously music and noise and words, and image clothes, design. All sorts of logistics, performance all of those things. And a band became a good vehicle. What we did have was that everybody had loads of dislikes, things they didn’t want to do,. and lots of people had very specific ideas of what they did like. And even though we didn’t really have very great conventional music skills, what we did have was great curiosity and the energy to criticise, and criticise very heavily ourselves, and I think that’s where the “confidence” comes from, because nothing can get through.
There is a sense in which Wire are establishment as well, a touchstone, historical marker, longevity with a measure of security..
CN I dont know if that’s necessarily our fault.
GL: That’s not exactly establishment is it, that’s like saying DNA is establishment.
in that you’ve formed the structures of music
GL: Godlike more than establishment
CN: To use the grand Churchillian phrase we are the most unlikely victors of history. In 1980 EMI had written us off, the world had pretty much written us off. We’d made a brilliant album and then done some very arty performances that everyone thought was shit. And then we broke up. There was very little in the way of legacy about what we had, nobody was really interested. History happened to work in our favour, American Hardcore, and y’know British Indie, and then it just became almost de rigeur to somehow drop Wire, but half of that is just like ticking a box. You’re not credible until you’ve ticked that box. I’m playing devils advocate here, there’s a wide range of people claming Wire influence who I personally hate musically.
GL: But there you go, otherwise you have to be a dictator and go round their house and kill them.
I find it interesting when a band like yours has that encounter, that DNA mirror moment, birth perhaps…
GL The disappointing thing is when people copy, when they copy the DNA and they haven’t looked very closely, and they make something tacky and vulgar out of it. Like Menswear or something. Who’ve taken all the bits but it’s a fucking ugly creature. I really like it when people say it was a big influence, and you go “how” like that song you did about so-and-so it made me think about this and that’s why I did that, and you go “yeah, that’s the way I work”. Because that’s how you steal, inspired by somebody else’s work, you take it and digest it and then you reproduce it, you don’t copy it, unless you want to make a point of taking it.
I’m also interested in bands that have reached the kind of critical stature of Wire, in how that band negotiates its own history. Does it become a burden, how do you manage it without it becoming heritage.
CN: basically what we do, since we’ve set up our label which I run, there are two basic strands to what we do. There’s a strand which deals with the biggest possible audience we can get to which is your new album your tour, and there’s a second strand which deals with the core fans. And we’re bang into releasing illegal bootlegs, where you get them to subsribe and you can release those over a period of time. So the people that want everything we have to figure out a way.. and they don’t distinguish between Jeanetta Cochrane 1979 live recording, and that’s really exciting, and a new album.. it’s all just “stuff”.
GL: You were talking about it being a burden, and there were times when you certainly felt that. And i think it is very much pre-this it was, now is everything available on the same level, that freed us from a considerable amount of history. Because we’ve just put out some old new bootlegs, and at the same time a new album, and people are talking about that for them, it’s the same thing, and for us it’s the same thing. You don’t have that hierarchy of time and technology, that was against you before, because you were continually fighting to go forward and to allow to make the space, so that you could actually go forward.
so the digital estate has freed you up
CN: I think something interesting happened in the 90s with regard to how artists operated within their own market place, which probably came out of fine arts, is that an artist should know their audience and know how to interact with their own market. And it didn’t have that awful 1950s thing which was [affects posh voice] “oh no, we don’t have anything to do with commerce, we’re artists”. I started to run a label in the 1990s and it was natural to take on doing a Wire label, then it became a thing where we could release any kind of damn thing we wanted to release. As long as it’s Wire. On that label. And we worked out strategies for that, and we’re not saying oh we have to make a single now to please the record company, the record company doesn’t give a fuck either way. So actually we know very well, what our market wants. And there are two markets, one very interested in a new Wire thing, a new Wire thing plays very well. Escpeically if it’s a good thing.
GL: And I think that relates to.. going back to when we started, we were like the first generation who had been brought up on pop. And to us there was no question as to whether pop was art or whether it wasn’t art. Particularly in relation to its mercantile qualities as well. I mean we are all related in that way to Duchamp and to Warhol and to what they suggested. And so all of these [pop] things become natural, it’s becoming a naturalised citizen in a country of your own wishes, or dreams, the one that you wanted to get to.
CN: So in a way we’re senior citizens in our own land, but we’re not sure how that land interfaces with anybody elses.
GL: We’re just waiting for immortality.
CN: I’m very good at your pat one liners, and Wire is the most famous band you’ve never heard of. If you know about it, you know quite a lot about it. But there are a lot of people who have never heard of us, who are serious music fans, who probably like a lot of the bands who we’ve influenced but don’t know us.
GL: Well that’s probably because.. [canny] we were never terribly successful at one thing. At one time.
Spectacle versus art
There’s one story about Wire which Simon Reynolds relates in his Rip It Up and start again, where you Colin, while at art college in watford, shared a car with Brian Eno, and it was on those journeys where rather than just being a student, or we might say in the broader context of music -just a guy in a band, began to feel that you were an artist, that you could suddenly talk about that without sounding pretentious, that you were legitimate…
CN: There is a step that everyone has to go through, like someone that you know, you’re at school and you’re just like one of the people, or you’re someone down the pub, and you’re sort of 18 and you declare you’re an artist, I think “wanker” would be the first thing someone would say to you. So how do you get from there to being the kind of person who calling yourself an artist without any embarrassment or shame. It wasn’t just Brian, it was also Hansjorg Mayer and Peter Schmidt. And they were all artists, and we’d just, when Brian was in, going down to central London because I lived in Hendon and they used to drop me off. And we just talked, and I began to realise that they were talking to me, not as if I was just a student and they were tutors, we were just some people talking. And the penny dropped for me at that point.
GL: That’s probably the scariest moment really, that’s when you commit and understand you’re taking on quite a tough job really.
CN: It seemed natural to me at the time, I felt, I remember getting very excited that we were going to make, me and my mate slim were going to make a remake of the Cabinet of Dr Caligari, I think the idea was it involved taking quite a lot of speed and staying up all night. And painting everything black and white, except one scene in which there was extra blood. It wasn’t very thought through…
GL: Was Eno in it?
CN: Yeah, yeah, and everyone in the car nodding sagely. And it surely wasn’t going to be very good but it didn’t matter.
GL: It’s so funny. I remember having a similar experience at Hornsey with a tutor called Brian Harris who did the inside of the 154 album, with the typography, somebody wanted to buy some work off me when I was at college. And the tutor was excited, and thought it was fantastic, and I asked “how much should I charge?” and he said, “how much do you think you’re worth?”, and I thought “fuck, this is more difficult than I thought.“ It’s not just doing it, you’ve got to know why you’re doing it, and what you want for it. And that’s it “welcome”, then it’s art. It’s not a hobby any more, and it’s not arty anymore, because that’s not good enough.
Graham, you once mentioned in interview a thing called the “X-Factor” that Wire were seeking in their music, a place of uncertainty, a sort of alter-space.
GL: I think you’re always navigating towards things you haven’t done. And that can be worrying, for you and your audience, but you just do have to do it.
thinking of your audience and tugging them into new places
GL: I mean thinking about your audience is a peculiar kind of conceit, I think one is aware of people who like what you do. I mean hopefully the people who stay around, our constituency or whatever you want to call it, which is changing all the time, those people expect that. It’s really interesting when, we just did the Lexington a while back and it’s interesting to see what people write about it, and people were going “oh yes and they played all these new things.. which were fucking great” and someone else is going “I would have preferred it if it had all been new and they hadn’t played that stuff they played last time.” And that’s it, that’s a good audience I think to have, because it’s one you don’t have to cultivate in the same way.”
You could become a cult of novelty
CN: Well there are plusses and minuses to everything
There’s a coy reference on your wikipedia page to Situationism, is that haywire
CN: Well I found our wikipedia page about 5 years ago, someone had put something about Wire was a political punk band from the 1970s very influenced by Throbbing Gristle, so like okay, this was written by a TG fan..
GL: or Genesis even
CN: So I started kind of changing it but they only let you do so much, and gave up after a while because ti was so full of untruths, because i think they’ve got better but there used to be a point where someone could decide to put the boot into someone and write a load of crap.
GL: But it’s funny the situationist thing and how it crops up, because it’s like if you say “no” then people say “but surely you were ware of it” and you can go “of course”, and “yes”. But it’s like saying are you influenced by Dada, “yreah”, or “noo”. Because we certainly weren’t situationists, but of course we were aware of tactics and abilities, but if you want to go into that stuff you should go and talk to Bernie Rhodes or Jamie Reid or someone, people that carry it, have armbands for it.
Did you guy see the University of Strategic Optimism? Explains.
GL: I caught this recently.. there’s an art group in St Petersburg now who are working with the idea that police are no longer there to defend the public, they are there to exploit the public, they are just another arm of the mafia in Russia. And this art group, and philosophers as they started off as, the things they are doing are just so fucking good. What do you call those bridges.. cantilever, and there’s one across the river there and its fucking huge, and what they did they painted on the underneath a 75m penis, so that when the bridge comes up it does this.. and do you know what it’s opposite to? The Russian secret police station. Now is that situationism? I think it’s fucking genius. And they’re doing things like this all the time.
Your gigs at the Electric Ballroom in the 1980s, you dismissed them earlier as perhaps just arty, but it seems they were in some way dealing with the relationships of spectacle…
CN: Yes, there’s definitely a moment there… We’re just about to next year we’re going to re-release document and eyewitness show, and part of that comes from those shows, and those at the Jeanetta Cochrane which were slightly more worked out versions. And they were all done by theatre students, so it was all very nice, nicely staged, and we did four vignettes followed by the band playing, and the Electric Ballroom thing was a slightly more provocative thing. And wasn’t exactly my favourite gig to be honest. It was more of a concept than a…
GL: But it was an incredible contrast from thing which was enjoying a great deal of financial support and something else which was done for sixpence. But both being one offs.
CN: Well the Cochrane was a four-off
GL: Well it was never the same
I couldn’t find descriptions of these
GL: The ones in the music press were really anti. They fucking hated it.
Bourgeois art-wank?
GL: All sorts of objections. I mean they couldn’t understand what we were doing so it had to be shit. Because in those days art wasn’t a very good thing England…
That’s tricky for a band like Wire
GL: That’s very tricky because that’s what we did. We never made a secret of it. But you’ve got to remember this was pre YBA know what I mean. In those days there was no art market, there was no art industry as such. People had to go to America to see art. There was nothing.
CN: I mean the problem was the band was disintegrating at the same time. It wasn’t part of an ongoing process, there was no sort planned avenue, more a culmination of “let’s go down.. being weird” if you will. There’s a version of it which was cut with various bits of speech, there’s a version of just the gig on its own, which will come out as document and eyewitness naked, as a kind of.. joke. But musically, I mean we were not over-rehearsed, but between those two shows, Electric Ballroom and Jeanetta Cochrane there is some amazing material that wouldn’t have got recorded.. It’s really a story about the fourth Wire album that didn’t happen. because EMI didn’t want to take up the option. Well they may have taken up the option but they didn’t want to give us an advance, so at that point we had no money.
It was around that time you first wanted to started your own label, an EMI imprint
CN: But they didn’t want to do it.
GL: They didn’t know what they were doing. They were disintegrating.
…They didn’t understand you did they…
CN: …Obviously they didn’t understand us…
GL: Well [exhales with slight exasperation]. They didn’t understand what they were doing. We’d got knocked back from them. When they said 154 it’s obviously a work of genius, y’know. There are five singles on here, y’know, which one should we choose, talk about cup runneth over. And they said well, what do you wanna do? And we said, well we want to advertise it, on tv. That’s how you should spend the money.
A new media, this was right before MTV.
GL: Exactly, and they were like oh no no. You can’t sell music on tv, at that point artistically you knew that the creative relationship had finished, and then they got.. well [chuckles] unfortunately what happened then is that MTV did come along and EMI got bought because they were in disarray. Because they just didn’t move, they didn’t see it coming.
and post-punk, which you were a part of, did shake the majors
GL: Well no, it was more MTV that did that
CN: We were just too ahead of the curve to be honest. I mean, if we’d stuck around for just another two years kind of almost reading water, then we would’ve been absolutely in the right place.
GL: As it was with Duran Duran
CN: But there was no will in the band to do that. We could not at that point move collectively, because there was no agreement about where we were and what we were trying to do
GL: But it was so difficult, the thing was we had a real problem with like where could we go, y’know?
Did at any point you want to become Duran Duran, take your synths to the states…
GL: [chuckles] No, no. What we wanted to do was advertise on TV. Because what we wanted to do advertising. And we had this great music which we thought would make a fantastic soundtrack for the things we wanted to do. I mean we were fans of the guys at JWT, like Putnam and all those kind of people, in advertising.
Creatives, the burgeoning creative class
GL: Yeah, because that’s where i used to hang out. That was where the interesting things were happening. As Colin said we just two years ahead, and EMI didn’t see it. However Duran Duran, who just happened to be DJs at the rum runner and big fans of Wire they were there at the right time. And that’s soimething you can;t fuck with. That’s just tough luck.
Musically, your first return saw you sign to Mute and you were beginning to embrace synths a bit more…
CN: If there was any sense of ourselves as being sort of cutting edge in some way, we’d want to be engaging with whatever the tools of the moment were. At the point when we were recording Ideal Copy was just about the time that pro 24 for the Atari came out, you were just getting the S900 Akai sampler, and you could put two of them together, and go stereo and that was the big news at the time. That you could do that thing. And we wanted to do things that way. In hindsight it didn’t produce all the best work. But there was a problem, I mean post 154 up until fairly recently actually about the band having anya greed direction. There have been moments of freefall. I think one of the reasons that we did miss out at the end of the seventies and the early eighties is that band wasn’t really there, we were really screwed by doing a support tour for Roxy Music which was horrible. We earned no money from it, we were shafted more and more ervery night by their crew, who gave us less and less of everything, it was winter we were playing in these horrible sheds, y’know enormous sheds, and a pairing of of 1979 Wire and 1973 [Eno} Roxy Music would’ve been a pairing made in heaven, but 1979 Roxy Music were a different thing altogether. Brian Ferry and his backing band.
GL: Is this what we’ve got to look forward to?
CN: Is this what we’re doing it for?
GL: No.
CN: This looks shit. Is this what we’ve got to do to make money? No one signed up for that, nobody wanted that. We just had nobody around us, there was no culture, there was no “Indie” music culture, which could’ve just said, guys what you do is fantastic you don’t need to be doing things like that, because there’s another gnereation coming along and they see things differently or whatever. There was noone there toi say that to us. We just looked at that and thought that was really terrible, we don’t want to do that.
GL: It was really bizarre because, as Colin said, there was no indication that is was completely practical, for the rest of your life you could go on playing in front of 1500 people, in really nice places which are acoustically built for the job and it’s not against the law. It’s no crime. There wasn’t because there was this sort of pyramid trajectory of how you were supposed to “progress” as a band, ever onward toward the summit.
CN: It’s just the way it was.
Back to 1977 the first album, a year away from the winter of discontent. I see parallels between then and now; a government in crisis, ideologically worn out, growing unrest, a protest movement..
GL: I think there were definitely references to it in the material, yeah. There’s an absolutely extraordinary set of photographs, taken by an American photographer, which were in Leeicester Square with the bin bags and the rats and the Starlings and the birds were shitting every where. Really dark photographs, of course EMI didn’t use them very much, because they weren’t quite what they were trying to say I don’t think.
It feels in the early stuff there is this trauma in Wire that shaped the band, maybe it’s a trauma that is shared by punk, but that in Wire process and method was a method of overcoming.. rather than say pure negation or nihilism..
CN: Yes, but Wire were never a punk band. We were a year too late to be a punk band. British punk was 76, and we’re a 77 band.
GL: This is a thing that is a misnomer…
…I mean that you shared a… social trauma with punk… and parodied punk in 12XU and Mr Suit, you began with punk pseudonyms, Klive Nice as opposed to Johnny Rotten..
GL: …We were talking about Jeanetta Cochrane and the Electric Ballroom the reason we were able to do that in 1980, was that in 1976 and 77, when we were playing in front of people they were throwing bottles and glasses at us. And I know there was a lot of copycat stuff going on, but I don’t think it was out of affection. We were there, and we still try to bear witness about what happened, but we were not a punk band. And we said so, and no one seemed to believe us..
…your first NME cover bore the headline “no punks please, we’re Wire”..
GL: I mean would you call Pere Ubu a punk band?..
A couple of years ago I saw their opera based on Alfred Jarry’s Ubu Roi, and it seemed to fit a certain portable set of ideas…
GL: …Would you call Jonathan Richman a punk band? Patti Smith a punk band? The Ramones are arguably not a punk band. Are the Saints a punk band?
There are expansive definitions…
CN: …But it’s such an overused word. I mean what’s punk is it No Doubt? Is it Gwen Stefani?
GL: I think the reason you’re using this word and saying that, is that there’s alway’s been a proportion of what in the work has a reportage quality to it. Because that’s obviously what one’s stimulus is, if you come to write text or whatever, you have to ask the question what is going on? Sometimes it’s from the imagination of course, but that’s rather refined at times isn’t it. One’s dreams to tend to have some root in a twisted version of reality anyway.
I say it because I think punk and post-punk might be useful again. Okay last question, on the most recent album, the closer “Are you Ready” has lyrics which capture that oblique confrontational quality of Wire. References to being “part of the band”, the “future”, the “brand”. Is that a band manifesto of sorts?
GL: Sometimes one has to write about those things. Lowdown became a band manifesto although I didn’t know it at the time. Much of Wire, in its gestures and acts is about that.. Back to Punk for a moment, I tell you who were punk, have you ever heard of The Monks?
Yes, two guys was it on forces radio..?
GL: Yeah, American GI’s who were made into a group by German conceptual artists
Julian Cope writes about them
GL: He must do, there’s a great film called Transatlantic Feedback, that’s about Punk and that’s an art concept as well. Which nobody knew about until recently actually, but is kind of crucial now.
last dichotomy, now versus forever
CN: And now. And now. The eternal now.
