Wire
Epic Comes In Silver And Black, The Forefathers
Nov 10, 2008
Words by Sean Moeller
Illustration by Johnnie Cluney
Sound engineering by Patrick Stolley and Brad Kopplin
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Welcome to Daytrotter
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Silk Skin Paws
original version appears on A Bell Is A Cup...Until It Is Struck
Originally appeared on 1988's "A Bell Is A Cup…Until It Is Struck" and was added to our live set specifically for the North American shows. This particular arrangement was influenced by the 7" version with its chiming guitars.
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Mr. Marx's Table
original version appears on Send
Originally appeared on Send from 2003. This song has been in our live set since 2002 and favoured because of its dynamic arrangement.
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Mekon Headman
original version appears on Object 47
From the current album Object 47 (2008) and featuring Graham on vocals. People might wonder why we didn't choose only songs from our new album but we wanted to choose songs which represent our live set. The album is perfectly capable of standing for itself!
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Boiling Boy
original version appears on A Bell Is A Cup...Until It Is Struck
Originally on 1988's A Bell Is A Cup…Until It Is Struck in a very different version. The genesis of this version dates from the set of 2000, although the 2008 version takes it further with the "song" section given greater beauty and the "sonic" section given greater sonicness! An introduction from Wire's Colin Newman: In keeping with Daytrotter's "played" feel we chose four songs from the set we have been touring throughout Europe & North America during 2008. We did this session the day after the last date of the North American tour (in Chicago), which was in fact our last date of 2008! We never attempt to "reproduce" album versions in our live sets, so each piece must find its expression as a live entity. In that way this studio recorded version of Wire playing live was a unique document. Falling at the end of our most extensive touring year since 1987 it became a unique document recorded at a unique time!I'll introduce each piece with a brief history and something about its place in the 2008 live set.
It was the Sunday morning following Wire's tour-ending show at Chicago's Metro the night before, which drew radiant reviews from Sun-Times and Sound Opinions critic Jim DeRogatis and from the Tribune, similar to the likes of those that Barack Obama in his bulletproof case, Grant Park, an Indian summer of a night and the clear-headed American majority got last Tuesday. The legendary English punk band, from all accounts, had been as blissfully explosive and politically fascinating as ever before in its 32-year musical career, which has been the lesson plan for countless numbers of the new breed of post-punk bands who feel that they too can be edgy and insightful and educated, just like the originators - the three old men who remain their heroes and forefathers.
Colin Newman, Graham Lewis and Robert Grey are the wizened players in one of London's most influential punk bands at a time when the city's punk scene was establishing itself as something grimier and filthier - with rage and youth but no rivet gun to send the points into the floor joists, making them stick like claws and arched doorways. What Newman, Lewis, Grey and then guitarist Bruce Gilbert made was an even odder kind of punk rock that was artful and could have been leather-bound though it would have shook itself right out of those constricting books and back out onto the streets. Really, for the working lads and the toiling people, Wire were and are still more for the poly-sci and mathematical brains than for the safety pins, the mosh pits and the mohawks. It's a pronounced difference that's driven home in all of the group's various works - that this was music that deserved introspection and investigation.
It wasn't just music for the sake of making a statement and it wasn't just music for the sake of making millions. It was music that was its own testament and the songs that Wire wrote in the late 70s and early 80s don't have a stale bone in their bodies. They stack up still as if we're looking into the face of modernism, taut and gritty songs that cut to the quick and get serious before anyone's had a chance to take their coats off and shag a drink. It's not glamour music and it was never music meant to inspire an epidemic of likeminded individuals, and in some ways it didn't for a long time, leaving Wire as the lions at the top of the hill, able to roar and find the effects to be how they wished them to be. The guitar sounds and trickeries are hunting and prowling, searing and silvery, like metal apocalyptically grating across concrete and making a luscious industrial forest. The bass acted as the palpitations of an urgent heart, pounding the clothes away from the chest and Grey's drums are efficient, pounding and relentlessly moody.
Even as these men have moved on in years, their relevancy has not wavered and in this session they demonstrate - along with touring auxiliary guitarist Margaret Fielder McGinnis - the everlasting vibrancy of their music. It has acquired no gray hairs and its ambitious exploration of atmospherics and sonic landscapes is as flashy as it always was, reflecting the short introduction made in the left-hand corner of the band's official website, stating that the band is still active and they still get together to experiment, which still leads to "confounding expectations." Confounding decades, confounding people and still chasing that angular muse no matter how many years it lasts is what Wire is at its utter core.
It's watching Grey slip off his comfortable travel/every day shoes and into the hybrid of old school basketball/prehistoric skater/military shoes as he stoically readies himself to do his work behind the kit. It's seeing Newman scream into a microphone and thrash on a guitar and make it look like as thoughtful of a series of gestures as someone articulating the birth of their child and it's seeing Lewis, who looks like he's a man who takes his pancakes and eggs in black turtlenecks, coats and dapper black shoes and slacks and still would be the best person to ever take to a pub, live through his bass to know that there is no imitation.
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