Pt.2
We went on to talk about the final recording of the group’s first incarnation, Document and Witness, released on Rough Trade. Two concerts recorded live Document, recorded at the Electric Ballroom, was, according to Lewis, “a really fuck of piece of work” but the second show Witness, recorded at Notre Dame, “showed what strength the material was at after 154, it was material intended for the next record which, of course, we never made.” Between 81 and 85 there was a hiatus due to issues with management but in the in the mid 80’s Wire returned.
Newman: …. the time seemed right, it was considerably more messy in some respects than it had been in the 70’s but we did achieve some good things in that period….
Lewis: the beginning was fantastic…..
Newman: Snakedrill was good
Dorfdisco: Drill is something you have always returned to…
Lewis: Well it’s an R&D piece, you know research and development. Its purpose was once we have made and presented the piece we are working on at the time we play Drill ……
Newman: it is the basic Wire rhythm. The basic rhythm of Drill is the same as the verse of 12xu, it’s the same thing but longer……
Lewis: …….yeah just longer…..
Newman: It’s something without an obvious chord structure.
Lewis: It’s a very useful vehicle. I think the longest we played it was for about 29 minutes in Montreal. To a small audience…..
Dorfdisco: …..and it got smaller?
Lewis: No, we were just a bit pissed off because they were a bit slow.
Dorfdisco: Despite your minimalism the work suggests a very diverse range of possibilities, some of it might be regarded as very experimental, some of it as very pop… and yet there seems no contradiction.
Newman: There isn’t a conflict but it’s all to do with a reductionist aesthetic, that’s really what it’s about. What do you need to say the thing that you are trying to say. It’s eminently practical. It is very much about practicality. There is not a lot of ornamentation, in fact one of the criticisms I would make of Pink Flag is that there were times when it was too ornamental and I am really not into stark for the sake of stark, its just a question of what do you need to carry the thing that you are trying to carry.
Lewis: The thing is that people tend to look at things in the wrong way. The important thing is the frame. You can have ideas but the important thing is how you package them, how they are framed. I think that’s were the skill comes in, that’s were the variety comes in, the frame provides context. It’s there to define what it is that you are supposed to be looking at or engaging with.
Newman: Going back to that moment at the end of the 70’s, what was significant was that all of the bands that were coming up to us and saying we really like what you are doing were from the North. The London bands studiously ignored us. I only found out from reading the book that has just come out on Pink Flag (Wire’s Pink Flag (33 1/3) Wilson Neate) that people from the Gang Of Four thought we were really cool and that Glenn Matlock, believe it or not, was a big fan. We didn’t know any of that at the time. In fact we were pretty much despised by the punks. They hated our snotty nosed intellectualism. They hated the fact that we took a stance that was kind of anti their fashion style, in that we were quite smart and we were not afraid to show that we were nicely spoken. We were not cultivating an attitude.
Lewis: We had an attitude….
Newman: We didn’t pretend to be anything that we were not……
Lewis: …….and being separated certainly gave us no pain. When we would go up to Manchester the likes of Joy Division would come and see us, nobody ever came and said hello but they certainly observed and took away a few things. I tell you who did like it though, was Tony Wilson, he was like, “Its fooking great that is, I’ve seen the poster for 154 and its fooking wonderful.”
Graham Lewis, Wire, Photo: Tanja Krokos, Dorfdisco 2009
Dorfdisco: So moving on to more recent releases, Send (2002) and Object 47 (2008) seem truly ferocious records….
Newman: We invented the old men can still get it up aesthetic. Grinderman might have borrowed something from us, though not the moustaches….
Lewis: It’s a ferocious record, its an angry record but what we were angry about is quite deceptive. It’s an awful lot of things but I think it really did reflect the times, the sense of, “what the fuck is going on?” There are no songs. The text is more like advertising copy, or slogans – almost meaningless. It’s almost very Dada in that way. It’s a very claustrophobic record. The tempos are really fast.
Newman: The basis of it was we made this recording of 12XU in 2000 at the Garage in London which was just appalling in its uselessness. It was just so poorly played it was frightening, so I thought well that might be really interesting if you just spiced up the tempo, chopped it and treated like a dance track but instead of having a house beat have a punk rock beat and I played to the band and they just loved it. I think the first thing that came was the track 1st Fast on Read and Burn 1…..
Lewis: My angle on it came from thrash, in Sweden (Lewis currently lives in Sweden). Dance music is there but because people don’t take drugs it never really took the same kind of root that it did here and in England. There you had people like Entombed and they were playing really ferociously but with fantastic precision.
Dorfdisco: How has the mp3 culture impacted on your approach?
Newman: Well back in the 70’s and 80’s you would tour to support an album but now its almost like the 50’s, the album promotes the live shows. I think it was 2003/4 when the reality finally hit home to me that having adopted a stance all my life of only ever being into new music and never listening to old music, this had become absurd. There is no difference anymore, literally no difference. Every record that has ever been released is competing with every other record. It’s all equally available all the time.
To use the Winston Churchill quote, “history is written by the victors”. Anyone our age writing a history of punk in the 70’s, talking about what was happening in London, probably wouldn’t even include Wire but for the generation in their teens and twenties now, Wire is very high on that list. They like Wire much more than they like the Sex Pistols because the Pistols and the Clash sound like old hat but Wire and the Gang of Four sound more contemporary, more fresh………
Lewis: …..the thing about that sloganeering folk music is that it has a shelf life and those ideas sound rather tragic now in some cases, whereas what we were doing was suggesting modles of behaviour and work which are still useful tools.
Wire -1st Fast/I Don’t Understand
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