Wire (band)
Based on Wikipedia: Wire (band)
The Band That Broke Every Rule of Punk
In the winter of 1979, a young Mike Watt—who would later anchor the legendary punk band Minutemen—heard an album that rewired his entire understanding of what rock music could be. "All the 'old' conventions from all the other 'old' bands went out the window after we heard Wire," he later recalled. "They were big-time liberating on us."
Wire didn't just influence punk. They detonated it from the inside, then rebuilt something stranger and more beautiful from the wreckage.
Formed in London in October 1976, Wire emerged at exactly the moment when the first surge of British punk was cresting. The Sex Pistols had just signed to EMI. The Clash were recording their debut. And into this maelstrom stepped four musicians—Colin Newman on vocals and guitar, Graham Lewis on bass and vocals, Bruce Gilbert on guitar, and Robert Grey on drums—who shared punk's energy but had absolutely no interest in its limitations.
Twenty-Eight Seconds of Revelation
Their debut album, Pink Flag, arrived in 1977 and contained twenty-one songs in under thirty-six minutes. That's not a typo. Some tracks were so compressed they barely existed at all. "Field Day for the Sundays" clocks in at twenty-eight seconds—a complete musical statement delivered in less time than it takes to read this paragraph aloud.
AllMusic would later call it "perhaps the most original debut album to come out of the first wave of British punk." But Pink Flag wasn't just short for shock value. Each song was stripped to its essential DNA, with no filler, no extended solos, no wasted breath. Wire had absorbed punk's rejection of rock-star excess and pushed it to its logical extreme.
The band actually started as a five-piece, with guitarist George Gill serving as the primary songwriter. But when Gill broke his leg and couldn't perform, the others moved on without him in early 1977. They discarded most of his songs too, which might seem harsh until you hear what replaced them. Wire had found their own voice, and it sounded like nothing else in London.
The Art of Getting Weirder
Most bands, if they're lucky enough to make a classic debut, spend years trying to recapture that lightning. Wire did the opposite. They got stranger.
Their second album, Chairs Missing, released in 1978, retreated from Pink Flag's stripped-down assault. The songs grew longer and more atmospheric. Producer Mike Thorne layered in synthesizers—still a relatively exotic instrument in rock music at the time. "Outdoor Miner," a shimmering pop song about the larvae of a specific fly species that tunnels through leaves, became a minor hit, peaking at number fifty-one on the UK singles chart.
By their third album, 154, released in 1979, Wire had traveled so far from conventional punk that they were essentially operating in uncharted territory. The album's title refers to the number of gigs the band had played up to that point—a characteristically cryptic choice that suggested they were keeping score in a game only they understood.
This is where things fell apart, at least temporarily.
The Label War
Wire had ideas about how to promote 154 that their record label, EMI, found incomprehensible. The band wanted to perform a week-long residency at a theater, treating each show as an event rather than just another gig. They proposed promoting the album with experimental videos and unconventional television advertisements.
"They couldn't understand a rock band that wanted to do a week in a theater as an event," Newman later explained. "We wanted to help them sell records; they thought we were simply being intransigent."
Personnel changes at EMI left Wire without internal support, and the label dropped them. Newman's solo album A-Z was actually conceived as the fourth Wire record, but EMI cancelled their studio time when negotiations collapsed.
Without a label or money, the band fractured. Their final release before the split was Document and Eyewitness in 1981, a live album featuring almost entirely new material. Critics described it as "disjointed," "unrecognizable as rock music," and "almost unlistenable." Wire, characteristically, seemed to consider this a compliment.
The Solo Years and the Return
Between 1981 and 1985, Wire ceased to exist as a performing unit. The members scattered into solo projects and collaborations with names like Dome, Cupol, and Duet Emmo—experimental electronic ventures that pushed even further into the avant-garde than Wire had dared.
When they reunited in 1985, they announced themselves as a "beat combo"—a deliberately antiquated term from early 1960s British pop that served as both a joke and a statement of intent. They also declared they would play none of their older material live.
This created a problem: fans wanted to hear the classics. Wire's solution was beautifully absurd. For their 1987 American tour, they hired Ex-Lion Tamers—a Wire cover band from Hoboken, New Jersey, named after a song from Pink Flag—as their opening act. The cover band played all the old favorites. Then Wire took the stage and played only new material.
The Name Game
In 1990, drummer Robert Grey (who had been performing under the stage name Robert Gotobed) left the band after the release of Manscape. The remaining three members decided to mark his departure in characteristically eccentric fashion: they dropped one letter from the band's name, becoming "Wir." The pronunciation stayed the same. Only the spelling changed.
Wir released one album, The First Letter, in 1991, before the members again dispersed into solo work. Newman founded the swim~ record label and later formed Githead with his wife, former Minimal Compact bassist Malka Spigel. Wire existed only as an occasional collaboration until 1999, when Grey returned and the band became a full-time entity once more.
Their first project was a performance at London's Royal Festival Hall in 2000, reworking much of their back catalogue. The reception during a short American tour and several UK shows convinced them to continue. Wire was back, and this time they stayed.
The Influence Spreads
Here's the paradox of Wire: their record sales have always been relatively modest, but their influence is immense. The bands they inspired read like a who's who of alternative rock.
In the 1980s and 1990s, Big Black, Minutemen, and Sonic Youth all expressed deep admiration for Wire. Mike Watt of Minutemen was especially effusive about Pink Flag: "I don't know what we would have sounded like if we didn't hear it."
Wire's impact on American hardcore punk was particularly profound. Ian MacKaye of Minor Threat and Henry Rollins of Black Flag both counted themselves as fans. Minor Threat covered Wire's abrasive early track "12XU" for the Flex Your Head compilation. According to journalist Michael Azerrad, at Minor Threat's second gig, all seven bands on the bill performed a Wire song. Seven bands. One influence.
Robert Pollard of Guided by Voices declared Wire's 154 to be "the greatest album of all time" and has acknowledged their ongoing influence on his prolific output. The list of bands citing Wire as an influence extends to Soundgarden, Manic Street Preachers, Hüsker Dü, Mission of Burma, and Bloc Party, among many others.
The Elastica Affair
Wire's influence wasn't always credited voluntarily. In the mid-1990s, Britpop band Elastica scored a hit with "Connection," a catchy single that bore an extremely suspicious resemblance to Wire's 1977 track "Three Girl Rhumba." Wire's music publisher took legal action, and the case was settled out of court.
That wasn't even the only borrowing. Critics noted that two other songs on Elastica's debut album, "Line Up" and "2:1," both drew heavily from the Wire song "I Am the Fly." Whether this represented homage or theft depends on your perspective, but it certainly demonstrated that Wire's decades-old innovations still sounded fresh enough to become hits when repackaged.
Not a Punk Band (Or Maybe the Best Punk Band)
Despite being credited as pioneers of post-punk—a genre that emerged as punk's initial fury mellowed into something more experimental and atmospheric—Newman has consistently rejected the punk label entirely.
"Wire really never were a punk band," he has stated. "We happened to be there at the same time. You could list the Ramones as one of our influences, but we were never interested in just doing that genre."
Then he offered an alternate interpretation: "There's basically two views of Wire: you either think we were not a punk band, or that we were the best punk band ever because we broke every single rule of punk."
The band's actual influences were considerably more eclectic than punk's three-chord orthodoxy would suggest. They drew from German krautrock and kosmische musik bands like Neu!, Can, and Kraftwerk—groups that emphasized motorik rhythms, electronic experimentation, and hypnotic repetition. They loved Roxy Music's art-school glamour and Brian Eno's ambient explorations. The Velvet Underground's noise experiments and Captain Beefheart's avant-garde blues informed their approach, as did the angular intensity of Television and Talking Heads.
The Long Game
What makes Wire unusual isn't just their influence or their willingness to experiment. It's their longevity and their refusal to become a nostalgia act.
In 2013, they released Change Becomes Us, their thirteenth studio album, to strong reviews. Their self-titled fourteenth album followed in 2015. Nocturnal Koreans arrived in 2016—Stereogum named it Album of the Week. Silver/Lead came in 2017, celebrating forty years since their first gig. Mind Hive appeared in 2020.
That's seventeen studio albums over more than four decades, with the recent output receiving critical acclaim comparable to their classic early work. How many bands from 1976 can claim they're still making vital, well-reviewed music?
The current lineup stabilized in 2010 when guitarist Matt Simms, formerly of the band It Hugs Back, joined Newman, Lewis, and Grey. Bruce Gilbert, the original guitarist who shaped so much of Wire's early sound, had gradually reduced his involvement through the 2000s, officially departing after the 2007 release Read & Burn 03.
The Archive Opens
In recent years, Wire has undertaken an extensive excavation of their own history. In 2018, they released lavish special editions of their first three albums, housed in books containing lyrics and detailed information. These collected the original albums alongside non-album singles and demo sessions from the era.
They also released Nine Sevens, a nine-disc vinyl box set compiling their first eight singles and the free EP originally given away with 154. In 2022, they officially released Not About to Die, a collection of demo recordings made for EMI in 1978 and 1979 that had circulated as a bootleg since the early 1980s.
These archival releases reveal just how prolific Wire was during their first incarnation. The demos show songs being refined, arrangements being stripped down or built up, ideas being tested. They're a graduate course in how a singular band developed their sound.
Why Wire Matters
Wire's achievement is threefold. First, they helped invent post-punk, demonstrating that punk's energy could be channeled into more complex and atmospheric music without sacrificing intensity. Second, they influenced virtually every important alternative rock band of the past forty years, directly or indirectly. Third, and perhaps most impressively, they kept evolving.
Most influential bands calcify. They find a formula that works, repeat it until it doesn't, then either break up or tour on nostalgia. Wire has treated their career as a continuous experiment. The band that made Pink Flag in 1977 sounds almost nothing like the band that made Mind Hive in 2020, yet both are unmistakably Wire—intelligent, restless, unwilling to repeat themselves.
As Alternative Press noted when they included Wire in their 1996 list of 100 underground inspirations: "As long as there are listeners equally lured by tough, intelligent riffs and fearless experimentalism, Wire will remain a crucial benchmark."
Nearly thirty years after that assessment, it still holds true. Wire endures because they never stopped moving forward, never stopped asking what else music could do. They broke every rule of punk, and then they broke their own rules, over and over again.
That's the real lesson of Wire: the only rule worth following is the one that says there are no rules.