| When is punk not really punk? When it's the surreal, cerebral, minimalist, distanced, art-strained, pioneering punk of Wire. In fact, Wire outdid punk at its own cut-the-crap game, cramming broad avant-garde scope into the 21 songs and 37 minutes of 1977's Pink Flag. Guitarists Colin Newman and B.C. Gilbert, bassist Graham Lewis, and drummer Robert Gotobed extracted every contentious drop of relevance from their distilled tunes, never continuing for a second longer than necessary. Formed in London in 1976, Wire released Pink Flag the next year. The classic debut's succinct, eyes-straight-ahead focus made it a showcase of wit and aggression carried by eternally memorable tunes. (Elastica's "Connection," with a melody identical to Flag's "Three Girl Rhumba," reportedly resulted in an out-of-court settlement.) The more dangerous Chairs Missing expanded into longer tracks, thick icy sonics, and bark-along songs like "I Am The Fly." Often sounding like a boho mating of Pink Floyd and Velvet Underground, 154 exploited Wire's darkly moody and melodic sides with subtle, exotic colors. Wire's prolific run came at a cost; discord spilt the band into solo projects in 1980, including the Gilbert-Lewis electronics of He Said and Newman's A To Z. Energized by updated technology and a newly cavernous sound, Wire reformed in 1985 and released the post-punk pop drones of The Ideal Copy and its occasionally endearing follow-up, A Bell Is A Cup. Intrigued by music computers, Wire abandoned their "beat combo" concept around 1989, generating experiments with rhythmic repetition on The Drill and new-wavey synthesizers on Manscape. When Gotobed exited to be replaced by drum machines, WIR dropped the "e" in their name in deference and produced 1991's electro-subliminal The First Letter, apparently the group's last gasp. |
