Remain did well in Britain, where “Once in a Lifetime” was a hit single, but in America, the album was Talking Heads’ worst seller. “It was perceived as too funky for the rock stations, while the R&B stations, of course, didn’t want to know either,” says Byrne. “Once in a Lifetime” was never even released as a single in America (although the video did get heavy play on the fledgling MTV channel a year or so later). In pointed contrast with the uncommercial Remain, Tina Weymouth and Chris Frantz’s delightfully poppy side project the Tom Tom Club was unexpectedly successful, scoring a big U.K. hit with “Wordy Rappinghood” and a ton of radio play in the United States with “Genius of Love.” The latter was especially popular on black radio stations, whose listeners assumed the group was African American because the track was so damn funky.
All this added further impetus to the idea of ending the relationship with Eno. For the sake of unity, Byrne went along with the general feeling that the band needed to rediscover the “charm and tightness” of its earliest music. Call it vanguard fatigue. Weymouth talked of how the group “spent so many years trying to be original that we don’t know what original is anymore.” Byrne decided to strategically divide his energies, channeling his more experimental impulses into the plethora of side projects that were opening up for him (like The Catherine Wheel album, music he composed for a ballet by avant-garde choreographer Twyla Tharp) while making Talking Heads the outlet for his pure pop instincts. After dissolving rock into an oceanic swirl of ethnofunkadelia, Talking Heads did the least-expected thing and enjoyed a second act as a pop group.
BACK IN THE EARLY SEVENTIES, long before his fateful meeting with the Talking Heads in London, Brian Eno was a regular visitor to Watford Art College, where his friend Peter Schmidt was one of the main tutors. Schmidt painted the watercolor artwork for several Eno albums, but he is most known as the cocreator, with Eno, of Oblique Strategies, an I Ching–like set of cards with instructions and hints designed to help artists break through creative impasses. Oblique Strategies’ subtitle is “Over one hundred worthwhile dilemmas” and its most famous maxim is “Honor thy error as a hidden intention.” Other Oblique advice included “don’t be afraid of things because they’re easy to do,” “retrace your steps,” “turn it upside down,” and “is it finished?” Fluxus in a box, Oblique Strategies essentially distilled the anything-goes sensibility that pervaded the more progressive British art schools (such as Watford) during the sixties and seventies. Recalling their spirit of mixed-media playfulness and boundary-smashing impudence, Eno hailed the fine-art schools of this era as “one of the most highly evolved forms of liberal education available on the planet…. Really something quite extraordinary.”
When Eno came to Watford to help with projects, he and Schmidt would often get a lift back to London from another tutor, Hansjörg Mayer. Sometimes there would be another passenger in the car, a young student of Mayer’s named Colin Newman, who in a few years would become a founding member of Wire. “In my view humans are inherently creative,” says Newman, “but there is a process by which a particular individual becomes an artist, meaning that they can say they are an artist without being pretentious. If that happened at any given point to me it was during those car journeys. As soon as I stepped in that car I was no longer just a rather poor student but a friend and an equal, an artist sitting in a car with other artists. I could babble on about my ideas.”
With the exception of drummer Robert Gotobed, the members of Wire all came with an art school pedigree. Bassist Graham Lewis was a fashion graduate doing freelance design for London boutiques. Guitarist Bruce Gilbert, old for a punk at thirty-one in 1977, was an abstract painter who worked as an audiovisual-aids technician at Watford, which is where he met Newman. Seven years younger than Gilbert, Newman was studying illustration, but had gravitated toward the sound studio’s facilities for experimenting with tape. “Bruce and me specifically always brought a fine-arts mentality to Wire,” says Newman.
Wire had a meteoric rise. In February 1977, six months after forming, the group made their live debut at the Roxy, London’s equivalent to CBGB. Four months later they made their vinyl debut on the live compilation The Roxy London WC2, and by year’s end they’d released their debut album, Pink Flag. Like Talking Heads, Wire were right at the heart of the punk scene, yet never quite belonged there. They were misfits whose distanced artiness made them distinctive but also rubbed some people the wrong way.
Two words crystallize what Wire derived from art school: “method” and “design.” They approached making music with a methodical objectivity, thinking of their songs not as outpourings from their hearts and souls but as “pieces”—meaning “art works” but also lumps of sound-matter to be chipped away at, like marble for a sculpture. Like Eno, they approached creation with a what if/why not? curiosity, setting up processes and embracing artificial constraints just to see what would transpire.
Wire’s design sensibility encompassed the striking cover art on their records (the concept invariably devised, if not executed, by Gilbert and Lewis) and their highly contoured and geometric music. Even at its most punklike, there was a brutal elegance to the power chords and riffs. One could almost visualize their music as clean lines, deliberate spacings, and blocks of texture. The name Wire itself was chosen as much for “its graphic quality,” says Lewis, as for its connotations (thin and metallic, electrical power lines). “It was short and stark and would look big on a poster even if we were bottom of the bill!” Onstage, Wire looked equally styled and monochrome, favoring clothes in shades of black, gray, and white, and lighting that avoided rock ’n’ roll clichés in favor of harsh, glaring white spots. The band projected a glacial aloofness. Newman stood stock-still with eyes staring straight ahead, or struck stylized and frozen “rock star” poses.
What made Wire punk was their minimalism, their reductionist disdain for extraneous decoration. Initially, they arrived at their sound through removals and refusals. “It was a process of elimination, all the things we don’t do,” recalls Newman. “At the end of the process, the list of things we actually did do was quite short!” Solos were shed first. In their earliest days, Wire included another Watford student on lead guitar, but when he was hospitalized for six weeks, the group noticed that the music dramatically improved in the absence of his solos. “All the fat, all the meander, suddenly disappeared,” says Newman. “Everything was edited down drastically, the songs came down to one and a half minutes long.”
Brevity and severity became Wire’s hallmark, as heard on Pink Flag, which crams twenty-one compressed bursts of abstract fury into just thirty-five minutes. On an idle listen, Newman’s uncouthly enunciated mock Cockney could pass for standard-issue punk singing. But for all their aggression, the songs are as exquisitely etched as a finely honed haiku, and the absurdist song titles such as “Three Girl Rhumba” suggest that this isn’t mere ruckus for the Roxy rabble, but a conceptual enterprise. Many of the songs were written as acts of speculation. What would happen if you rewrote “Johnny B. Goode” using only one chord? (Answer: Pink Flag’s title track.) Newman composed “106 Beats That” on an agonizingly delayed train journey between Watford and London, during which he devised a complicated system of correspondences between the names of railway stations and guitar chords.
Wire’s lyrics, mostly written by Graham Lewis, were no less process oriented. His words for “106 Beats” came out of a failed attempt to write a lyric that only had one hundred syllables in it. “It turns out it’s got one hundred six, but that doesn’t matter because you’ve created a process.” He and Bruce Gilbert would play absurdist games with sense and nonsense, narrative and fragmentation. Because making statements or self-expression wasn’t the point, nobody was precious about the words. They were simply material to be messed around with. For instance, Newman wrote a lyric about a lion tamer, which Lewis mostly didn’t care for, so he went through replacing all the bits he didn’t like. Hence the song’s eventual title, “Ex Lion Tamer.” Di
smembering sequential narrative was a favorite Lewis tactic. The kaleidoscopic perceptions in Wire songs often managed to be closer to the fractured way we actually experience reality.
Lewis once talked of Wire’s quest for what he called the X Factor, “a kind of fear…something that you don’t understand.” The idea is close to Eno’s belief that art’s biological function is to expose the listener to disorientation. “What art does for you is that it constantly rehearses you for uncertainty,” Eno argued. Most reviewers, though, compared Wire’s enigmatic lyrics and nonlinear dream logic to Syd Barrett–era Pink Floyd rather than Eno’s solo albums. This was an easy link to make since Wire were signed to Harvest, EMI’s psychedelic/progressive imprint, whose founder Nick Mobbs had originally signed Floyd. “EMI thought Wire were gonna be part of a new psychedelia, the next Pink Floyd,” Newman says. “EMI saw us as the progressive element coming out of punk, with longevity and a more artistic approach, doing slower pieces with more depth and space in the sound, and different noises that weren’t just thrash, thrash, thrash.”
Wire really started living up to those expectations with their second album, Chairs Missing. The record saw Wire’s relationship with producer Mike Thorne (the EMI A&R man who’d originally recommended them to Harvest) deepen to the point where he became their very own Eno, shaping the overall sound by helping the group create unusual textures and effects. Chairs Missing reinvents psychedelia while preserving the group’s signature quality of monochrome minimalism. The guitars have an ultravivid gloss that almost feels wet to the ear’s touch. “French Film Blurred” is a vitreous shimmer. On “Being Sucked in Again” even the bass emits an unnatural glow, like fluorescent marble. Thorne had brought back a whole load of state-of-the-art effects units from the United States: MXR distortion, flangers, and new sound effects operating in what Thorne calls “the time domain, like delays and chorus pedals. The combination of delays with distortion sounded very exciting and different, so we just went full-tilt into that.” Says Newman, “The MXR unit provided this very clean and un-heavy-metal distortion. ‘I Am The Fly’ is literally that sound, like glass. On Chairs Missing we were just streets ahead when it came to guitar sounds.”
Practically a fifth member of the group, Thorne also played keyboards on Chairs Missing. In 1978, keyboards were still widely regarded with suspicion as somehow unpunk, but Wire got into the idea when they realized that their guitars were so heavily treated they might as well be synths. Soon it was vice versa, says Thorne. “We put synths through distortion pedals and got this electric sound that wasn’t a guitar or a keyboard but somewhere in between.” This disorienting uncertainty about the instrumental provenance of particular sounds added to the album’s hallucinatory feel.
For a towering postpunk classic, Chairs Missing garnered a surprisingly mixed reception in 1978. Praised to the marmalade skies by some reviewers, it was lambasted by others for its keyboards, for the lyrics’ trippy whimsy, and for having longer songs (the opener, “Practice Makes Perfect,” made a statement by being four minutes long, while “Mercy” almost reached six). NME’s Monty Smith accused the group of degenerating from Pink Flag to Pink Floyd in less than a year. But apart from the odd Electric Prunes–like guitar sound, the only real sixties throwback on the album was the single “Outdoor Miner,” all Byrdsy honeyed harmonies and idyllic chiming chords. It was the closest Wire ever got to having a hit.
Liquid with assonance and internal rhyme—“face worker, serpentine miner, a roof falls, an underliner, of leaf structure, the egg timer”—the lyric to “Outdoor Miner” sounds like sensuous nonsense, a typical example of Wire reveling in language’s melt-in-your-mouth musicality rather than meaning. In fact, it’s obliquely inspired by a BBC radio program during which Lewis learned about a bug called the serpentine miner who lives inside holly leaves and eats chlorophyll. “When I listen to my singing on that I just crease up,” Newman told NME. “I should be singing ‘she loves me’…but what I’m singing about is insects.” The genesis of other songs was equally whimsical. “French Film Blurred” came from Newman’s attempt to watch a foreign movie on a TV with reception so poor he couldn’t read the subtitles, forcing him to make up the dialogue, while “Marooned” was a fantasy vignette about an Arctic castaway resigned to his fate (“As the water gets warmer my iceberg gets smaller”).
By their third album, 154, Wire’s music was growing almost oppressively textured. The glaze of overdubs and guitar treatments produced a ceramic opacity, forbidding and impenetrable. The sessions were tense, too. The pop-minded Newman and Thorne jostled with the abstractionist Gilbert and Lewis (who’d been making pieces at home on tape recorders and venturing into the ambient zones later explored in their post-Wire project, Dome). “The vessel we were in just started getting a little small for all of us,” recalls Thorne, “because it was starting to cramp the ways in which we wanted to develop.” The tension seemed to infuse the songs, which were unusually cold-blooded even for Wire. Sung by Lewis in a doomy baritone, the opener, “I Should Have Known Better,” expressed animosity with steely precision: “I haven’t found a measure yet/To calibrate my displeasure yet.” Newman’s “Two People in a Room” depicted emotional conflict as stratagem and maneuver (“Positions are shifted/The cease-fire unlifted”) and obliquely evoked the disintegration of Wire into rival aesthetic camps. Ideas relating to number, measurement, and cartography limned the record, from songs such as “The 15th” and “Map Ref. 41°N 93°W” to the album title itself.
Released in September 1979, 154 garnered universal acclaim. The album possessed a sheer size of sound that suggested Wire could become a major band, but the group’s first real brush with the big time—a sixteen-date tour supporting the re-formed Roxy Music, a group they’d once admired greatly—soured them on the industry way of doing things. If the traditional high-stamina rockbiz route to success (heavy touring in order to build a fan base) wasn’t an option for Wire, neither was the pop strategy of daytime radio play and hit singles. All densely overdubbed guitars and stacked vocals, “Map Ref. 41°N 93°W,” the single off 154, was majestic but its beauty was oddly remote, just like the cartographer’s-eye-view lyric, inspired by a flight over Iowa. As pop choruses go, “Lines of longitude and latitude/Define and refine my altitude” doesn’t exactly scream “chart potential.”
For “Map Ref. 41° N 93° W,” Wire decided to avoid the usual thing bands did to promote a single (conduct a short tour of the U.K.). Instead, they organized something special, a show called People in a Room that ran for four nights at the Jeanette Cochrane Theatre in London (part of the Central School of Art and Design). The show started with solo performances by each member of the band. Gilbert’s piece involved a black pushcart and a glass, into which a series of people poured water, while Newman’s Glenn Branca–style guitar drone symphony featured five people playing E, five playing A, and five playing D. When the band itself finally took the stage, Wire played a new fifteen-minute composition called “Crazy About Love.” Their gigs generally featured a high proportion of new material, but at the Jeanette Cochrane Theatre, Wire only played a couple of songs from 154, destroying any promotional aspect to the event and pissing off EMI.
People in a Room was effectively a career suicide note. In February 1980, a terse announcement appeared in the music papers, accompanied by a scowling shot of Wire. The group and EMI had parted company, it declared, because of “a breakdown of communication” and the label’s “reticence to consolidate future plans and projects.” Wire were impatient to move forward, to shake up the standard industry ways of doing things. They’d conceived an ambitious advertising campaign for 154—enigmatic posters on buses, ten-second advertisements on TV, all featuring nothing but the cryptic number 154—but EMI rejected the idea as too expensive.
According to Thorne, most of the more open-minded people at EMI had left, as the company took a turn at the end of the seventies toward playing it safe and putting out bottom-line-oriented releases. But Newman says Wire fe
lt like they “were engaged in a creative project and had this very rich record company that we assumed would be excited by new ideas. We wanted to sell records. We were talking about video. This was before MTV, but I’d seen from watching children’s TV shows that pop videos were becoming very important. We had an idea for ‘Map Ref.’—hugely expensive, but we could probably have been persuaded to do something a bit cheaper if there had been a budget. But EMI said, ‘You can’t sell music on television, we’ve tried.’ Hilarious, considering what happened a year later with MTV! In hindsight, I can see how Wire really suffered from being ahead of our time. By 1980, if we’d been on a label that was willing to put money into a video, we would have been amongst the first generation of MTV bands, alongside Talking Heads.”
Unwilling to spend what it would take to make Wire happen as a pop group, EMI was equally disinclined to fund their more esoteric side. Their proposal of a sublabel similar to Eno’s Obscure imprint through Island (an outlet for a steady stream of experimental side-project releases, limited in appeal to hard-core Wire aficionados but cheap to produce) was rejected. “The head of EMI put it quite succinctly,” recalls Thorne. “Something like, ‘A record company is not an Arts Council.’ And to be fair, Wire had lost touch with the fact that a large record company has to show a return on their investment.”
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