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September 19-25, 2002 music No Looking Back
After coming to terms with their past, Wire go back to the future. Colin Newman The sounds come hard and fast, and then they stop, and then they come again. The noise is rough but not unpolished, urgent but not desperate, precise but not mechanical. Read & Burn 01 (Pink Flag), the first burst of new material from the post-punk British foursome Wire in over a decade, is a terse, confrontational statement of purpose: six songs in 17 minutes, most based on simple, obsessively repeated riffs which feed back on each other endlessly. (Try listening to it on repeat.) Where the band once declared of its earliest material that the music went on until the words stopped, here the words repeat until the riffs have run their course. It is, as the EP’s first track would have it, “all in the art of stopping.” Wire's willingness to revisit the guitar-driven music of its early days -- particularly the stunning triple shot of Pink Flag (1977), Chairs Missing (1978) and 154 (1979) -- is no secret to fans who caught the band on their 2000 tour of the U.S. But even so, the ferocity of R&B 01's return to what singer/guitarist Colin Newman once derided as "beat combo" music is nothing short of a shock. "It's designed to be impactful," admits Newman from his home studio in London. After the release of Drill in 1991, Wire spent the '90s apart: Newman dipped into dance music on his own and through his label Swim, bassist Graham Lewis and guitarist Bruce Gilbert dallied with ambient and industrial together and apart, and drummer Robert Gotobed explored heavy machinery of his own by taking up farming. As a whole, they'd cast rock aside and moved onward, but when the offer came to play London's Royal Festival Hall in 2000, they seized the opportunity. "It's not the kind of thing you turn down," Newman says. "It's a certain kind of recognition, and there's usually a fairly large check attached to it as well." Given the valedictory nature of the event, the band couldn't skip over their early material as they'd done throughout the '80s, when they toured with a Wire tribute band to sate the audience's desire for the old stuff. Absent the desire to be a nostalgia act, the band set out to concoct a "third millennium approach" to their back catalog, what Newman calls "a scheme." "It's a very Wire thing to do. Having a scheme means basically having a simple set of instructions which everybody follows. [In this case,] the scheme was, basically, take out all of that '70s formalism, including the second chord. Reduce it to one chord only, and put the dynamic in by having it just drop down to the bass and drums, and then build up with the guitars again. That's not a lot of scheme, but it's enough." The result was "what we call in England a big fuck-off rock noise. Right from the beginning, that always sounded good." And, Newman found, audiences liked it as well. The defining moment came at the British All Tomorrow's Parties festival, which in 2000 was curated by Scottish sludge-noisemakers Mogwai. "The majority of bands playing were pretty slow, sort of post-rock stuff," Newman recalls, "and suddenly Wire were going fast. You could see, some of the audience, they were thinking, ŒFucking 'ell, that's good!' There's something about Britain, especially London, about how trends happen. It's almost like breathing in the air; you feel like something is coming. And it was obvious to me at that point: These kids want fast rock. I can see this coming. Arty fast rock. It was as big a shock to me as anybody else. I saw all that coming, and I thought, ŒWire have to be part of that. We have to be doing the right thing when that is happening, and the right thing is doing fast material, but not doing old fast material.'" That said, the band's attempt to "engage with a rock aesthetic" isn't as simple as it might seem. Though it could conceivably be played by four musicians standing in a room, R&B 01 was in fact painstakingly remade and remodeled by Newman and Gilbert from raw material produced by the band. "We met together in a rehearsal room and recorded the most basic, not particularly well-played [versions], just thrashing around, recording any idea that anyone had of any kind, including a bunch of just Robert playing the drums. We had this whole bank of material. And then through '01, Bruce and I started working through that. Bruce would come to the studio once a week, and we'd just start squeezing stuff out, and producing a range of material." Releasing an album would, Newman says, have been simply "too shocking," so the band made the decision to release "a series of six-packs, curated on style": the Read & Burn series. But then a strange thing happened; Read & Burn 01 started selling. "We had a shrewd idea about what we could [sell]," he explains. "That's now been exceeded by a factor of five." The last two years, of course, have seen not only much-vaunted "rock revival" but a major resurgence in Wire's brand of "arty fast rock" -- so much so that several of the like-minded bands Wire hoped to have open for them were either booked solid or priced out of their range. (Newman expresses awe for their eventual tourmates, Baltimore's Oxes: "I don't know how to explain this, but the highlight of their set was when the drummer ate a banana.") And that, in turn, has made the band "think very seriously" about Read & Burn and beyond. 02, which Newman says "adds more colors to the box," is available only at shows or through www.pinkflag.com, which has gone from selling "boutique items" and tour souvenirs to verging perilously close to being a bona fide record label -- although, Newman says, "we still haven't figured out who's running it." The idea is to protect any upcoming album from redundancy, although Newman insists there will be "definite exclusivity" on any album, although it may use "elements" from the EPs. Retrospectives behind them, the band is verging firmly forward. Early reports have them playing brisk sets of less than an hour, composed almost exclusively of material from Read & Burn 01 and 02. It's not fatigue with the old songs so much as an eagerness to press on. "People keep asking, ŒWhat label's it on?' because they can only imagine that some major label is going to be putting money into this," Newman says. "Boy, nobody's putting money into this. It's a self-run venture. It isn't all about money, but the point is, for the first time, we can say, ŒYeah, this is our art, we're not doing it how anybody else wants to do it,' and people respond to it. That's a fantastic feeling." Wire plays with Oxes, Thu., Sept. 19, 8 p.m., $15, Gasoline, Eighth and Callowhill sts., 215-629-0614. 
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