BOYLE, MARK.

Scottish artist, 1934-2005.

Mark Boyle was a guest lecturer at Watford College of Art during Colin Newman‘s time there in the mid-Seventies. Boyle was something of a hippie-era art celebrity, having helped invent “psychedelic” light shows in Britain with his partner, Joan Hills. Their productions at the UFO nightclub in the mid-Sixties were the lysergic backdrop to performances by Pink Floyd and the Soft Machine. Boyle and Hills became friends with the latter band, touring the US with them and Jimi Hendrix in 1968.

Boyle was from Glasgow; in 1957, when he met Hills, he was mostly a poet. She urged him to start painting and they worked on canvases together—a fully collaborative unit whose works, until the Seventies, were sold, cataloged, and displayed under the singular name of Mark Boyle, as the British avant-garde found the concept of a woman artist off-putting (the Boyles later said they had “tak[en] the view that if the art world wanted to believe in obsessed, lone male artists starving in their studios, they could present their work in a way that would fit.”) They were known as the Boyle Family once Hills and Boyle were joined by their two children, Georgia and Sebastian.

He once said of his and Hills’ work that it “was to do with not being exclusive. We’re not going to exclude anything from what we make, whatever form it takes. There is no experience, no sensation, no aspect of reality we would eliminate.” They crafted pieces made from found objects, such as a mess of paint tins, lids, and brushes that had gotten stuck to a piece of hardboard, and devoted much of their post-Sixties ventures to “random earth” assemblages: replicas of patches of ground they had come across.

In their London Series, Boyle and Hills tacked up a map of London, threw darts at it, and made an earthwork of each location that a dart struck. This broadened into the World Series—a world map, more darts. “Wherever the darts fell, that area—whether land or sea, motorway or piece of scrubland—was to be the subject of a work,” Andrew Wilson wrote in his obituary for Boyle. At the time of his death in 2005, “Boyle had still not found a means of replicating water.” Hills died last year.

BOYS, THE.

UK rock band, 1976-1982, 1999-present.

Wire opened for The Boys at The Roxy in March 1977, when The Boys were among the more commercially promising of the “punk” acts on the London club circuit. They had just signed an album deal with NEMS, the descendant of Brian Epstein’s old label (revived for reissues of Black Sabbath albums, NEMS put a few chips on punk, signing The Boys and, later, The Damned and the UK Subs, with no luck).

The Boys formed in late 1975 when singer and guitarist Matt Dangerfield left London SS (Mick Jones’ early band; sadly not the last “ironic” Nazi name of the era) joined up with keyboardist Casino Steel, and, a bit later, Dangerfield’s art college friend Honest John Plain. With such top-grade rock ‘n’ roll names, all that remained was to get a rhythm section: Kid Reid and Jack Black, whose names were as sufficient as their playing. The Boys debuted at the Hope and Anchor in October 1976, at a time when any punk-related show was a gathering of forces: Jones, Billy Idol, Joe Strummer, and Tony James were among those in the crowd.

They hung their songs on teenage strife and bubblegum hooks—The New York Dolls and The Ramones, rather than the Sex Pistols, were their foundation. With Steel’s prominent keyboards and an open taste for rock oldies (on their debut LP, they covered The Beatles’ “I Call Your Name,” rewrote “Wake Up Little Susie” on “Tumble,” while even the anti-rock ‘n’ roll “I Don’t Care” has Chuck Berry guitar breaks), they formed part of punk’s traditionalist wing. Their best tracks are on their debut: “Sick on You” (attraction, vomit), “Kiss Like a Nun” (possibly a good thing; the singer’s conflicted) and “First Time,” a losing-virginity song of exploitative empathy.

Titling their second LP Alternative Chartbusters was a knowing move—The Boys were sentenced to the “power pop” universe of hits that never were, singles that NEMS could do nothing with. The group moved to Safari Records, then broke up early in the Thatcher years.

BRADFORD, UNIVERSITY OF.

Public research university, Bradford, UK. Wire performance at the Communal Building, 25 October 1978, released in 2010 in the Legal Bootleg Series.

The Communal Building, aka “The Commie,” opened in February 1976 at the University of Bradford in West Yorkshire. A campus newsletter of the period noted “the social facilities available [that] are not only extensive but come at a time when we are faced with a period of austerity.” (Not for the last time.) There was a student disco, a social bar (of which the newsletter said “the main feature…is the ventilation pipes in the far corner”), a “quiet bar” (good for parent/spouse visits; see above photo), and rooms for hobbies and indoor sports.

As University of Bradford librarian Alison Cullingford wrote of the Commie, “it unfortunately illustrated the worst features of 1970s building design [see period photo, very Soviet]. In dingy concrete, flat-roofed, with multiple confusing entrances and hidden staircases, the building lacked focus, was hard to understand and hard to love.” (At the time Cullingford wrote this in 2010, the Commie was being upgraded into a new facility, Student Central.)

In the fall semester of 1978, the Gang of Four, appropriately, played the Commie, as did Wire, roughly a month later. Bradford was one of two shows in that leg of Wire’s “Chairs Missing” UK tour to have been taped (the other, at the Canterbury Odeon earlier in October, circulates as a fragment). Decades later, the Bradford tape was issued to kick off Wire’s Legal Bootleg Series. (Of these tapes, Colin Newman later said “I just found them really, really difficult to listen to. The voices are all out of tune. They’re classic board recordings where the voice is really loud and the band is really quiet, because a lot of the band sound is coming from the stage.”)

The Bradford soundboard is an invaluable snapshot of Wire, with the band introducing a fair amount of material they would record or demo for 154 in the following months—Bradford has either the first or second extant live performances of “The Other Window” (its frantic first edition; all but unrecognizable from its ominous studio version), “I Should Have Known Better,” “A Mutual Friend,” “Former Airline,” “Stepping Off Too Quick,” “Indirect Enquiries” and “On Returning.”

Of the older songs, “Lowdown” is taken at an amble; “Reuters” is a heavy roll. Chairs Missing songs are dispatched with fire. “Another the Letter” is supersonic; “I Feel Mysterious Today” dances on a tightrope; Graham Lewis sings “Sand in My Joints” as if ripping holes in the song, answering Newman’s similar attack on “Mercy.” Wire at full youthful strength, bolting into the future, fearless.

BRAZIL.

[Text: Lewis; Song: Newman; Music: Wire.] Master recording: 12 September-ca. 7 October 1977, Advision. First release: 28 November 1977, Pink Flag. Live recordings: 1 & 2 April 1977, The Roxy; 17 February 1978, West Runton Pavilion, Cromer.

Alterations in tempo. “Brazil,” when Wire debuted it on stage at the Roxy in April 1977, had a groove—there’s a weight, a density, in the guitars and bassline: a torpor of sorts. Colin Newman has to strive against it as he sings, while Robert Grey shifts hard into gear for the “left!-right! left!-right!” section.

On its studio take, “Brazil” goes faster, centered on Grey’s drums, the guitars now a snarl overhead in the mix. This lets Newman’s loopy phrasing soar—he sings a few lines as if dotting “i”s in a letter. Atomic age romance shorthand for a verse, nihilistic punk for a refrain/bridge, parade-ground outro: it cuts off in under forty seconds.

Alterations in phrasing. At the Roxy, to close the song, Newman and Graham Lewis yell “SA-LUTE!!” in unison, stepping on the last syllable—it gives “Brazil” an end credit. On Pink Flag, Newman mutters “salute” in the margins, sounding as if he’s pulling away from the mike, already onto the next song.

Previous: BLOOD—BOWIE; Next: BUZZCOCKS (Quartet No. 9a).

BLOOD SACRIFICE.

There was a band that existed called Wire in the latter part of 1976, but that was somebody else’s band. It wasn’t until we kicked that person out of his own band that what you would think of [as] Wire was born.

Colin Newman, 2017.

The sacking of George Gill, the band’s founder and lead guitarist, was the dawn of Wire. Bands need a foundational myth or two, and the blood sacrifice is a vivid one. It says: We were this before, but then we killed one of our own. Now we are who we were meant to be.

Pete Best in The Beatles is a quintessential example. He was in the band from early on and was with them right up to the boiling point. Sitting in Abbey Road with Lennon and McCartney and George Martin, cutting a single for EMI Parlophone. And then he was cast aside, left to spend his life seeing The Beatles on television, their photographs staring at him from newsstands—a demotion to a bystander, to a life as a semi-celebrity. The Beatle Who Wasn’t.

A proper blood sacrifice has specifications. The person should be there at an early, formative stage of the band, sometimes playing an important role (e.g., Best’s mother, Mona, was an early booker of Beatles gigs, and Best was the band’s heartthrob). Their leaving should not be of their own making: their friends have to fire them. And the firing must happen around the time when the band breaks through, to make the wound sting.

The blood sacrifice unsettles. While I imagine there are people who fantasize about being on stage, posing for LP cover photos and so on, I would venture that there are more of us who see ourselves in the faces of the discarded, in the ones who didn’t make the cut, who lost out, whose playing wasn’t fast or inspired enough, whose laugh irritated someone. They are the counterfactual conditional: they would have been, if not for.

Other notable examples:

Ian Stewart. Fired from the Stones for being too homely and because a sextet Stones was too cumbersome a unit, Stewart settled into a role of session musician/road manager/Friend of the Band until his death in 1985. “Stu” was the only reflection the band would allow themselves to see—they wrote and played with him in mind. Would Stu think this one swings enough? Would he roll his eyes, mutter ‘well, that’s a lively one’ and start talking about golf? (He lived long enough to have thoughts on “Too Much Blood” and Jagger’s She’s The Boss.)

Elbridge “Al” Bryant. Founding member of The Temptations (1960-1963). Bryant grew unhappy about the group’s early lack of success on Motown, and was a hard drinker—he struck his fellow Temptation Paul Williams with a beer bottle backstage and, upon another on-stage altercation at the 1963 Motown Christmas party, he got the chop. He was replaced by David Ruffin, and The Temptations got their first hit, “The Way You Do the Things You Do” within months. Bryant died of liver cirrhosis in 1975.

Doug Sandom. Drummer for The Who (1962-1964), fired due to ageism (he was in his early thirties) after the group failed an audition, to be replaced by Keith Moon. Upon Sandom’s death, Pete Townshend wrote: “If you have read my book Who I Am you will know how kind Doug was to me, and how clumsily I dealt with his leaving the band… A bricklayer by trade, Doug was an excellent drummer but was considered by our first record label to be too old for us. It was his age and his wisdom that made him important to me. He never sneered at my aspirations the way some of my peers tended to do (I was a bit of an egoistic handful sometimes). Doug took a while to forgive me, but did so in the end.”

Warwick “Wally” Nightingale. Co-founder and guitarist of the ur-Sex Pistols (“The Strand”) with Steve Jones and Paul Cook; fired in 1974 allegedly for not attending rehearsals, replaced by Glen Matlock. Nightingale doesn’t quite fit the formula (nor does Matlock), but it’s key to the Pistols narrative that their two lead actors, Johnny Rotten and Sid Vicious, came later in the story: a pair of usurpers.

Henry Padovani. Lead guitarist for The Police, January-August 1977. The firing of Padovani, the group’s madcap French guitarist, to be replaced by the pedigreed 35-year-old muso Andy Summers marked the end of The Police’s aspirational “punk” stage: we don’t get a “Tea in the Sahara” with Henry.

Dale Hibbert. Bassist for The Smiths (1982). Fired and replaced by Andy Rourke some months before the group cut “This Charming Man.” Hibbert was more interested in being a sound engineer than in playing bass, and him calling Morrissey “Steve” didn’t help matters. He later told the Lancashire Telegraph: “I have a problem with the perception that my life ended when I was kicked out of The Smiths. Some imagine I have never recovered and will spend my later days sitting in a rocking chair listening to Smiths songs while ruing on what could have been…[but] I opened the first internet café in Manchester. I owned a nightclub. I ‘retired’ at 40 and went to live in Sydney. I have been homeless. I have been penniless. I am not the sum of those six months with The Smiths…I was doing lots of other things at the time. I didn’t really give it much attention which is a shame because if I’d have kept a lot of the stuff—the lyrics, etc.—I could have been eBaying them now and I wouldn’t have to work.”

Annette Zilinskas, bassist for The Bangles (1981-1983). As with Nightingale, she doesn’t quite fit the formula, as Zilinskas left rather than being pushed out. But her replacement by the ultra-cool ex-Runaway Michael Steele, months before the band cut All Over The Place, is a top-tier “baseball trade” move by a rock group.

Jason Everman. Guitarist for Nirvana (1989) and bassist for Soundgarden (1989-1990), fired before the groups cut Nevermind and Badmotorfinger, respectively. The New York Times: “He wasn’t just Pete Best…He was Pete Best twice.” Fated to symbolize the end of the Nineties, Everman joined the US Special Forces and fought in Iraq and Afghanistan.

BLUR.

UK rock band, 1989-2005, 2009-2015, 2023-present.

Wire had two prominent inheritors in the Britpop era, and we’ll get to Elastica soon enough. In 1991, during its trio “Wir” period (see PART THREE: SEND), Wire opened for Blur at the Kilburn National and got their usual mixed-to-antagonistic audience reaction. “It was pretty difficult stuff and the audience was telling them to go away,” Graham Coxon recalled (see AUDIENCE).

Backstage, Damon Albarn approached Colin Newman and said “We’re all ’60s now, but we’re going to be ’70s soon—we’re listening to a lot of your stuff.” Sure enough, Blur’s records of the mid-Nineties would be in part shaped by Harvest-era Wire. Blur had Mike Thorne produce some tracks, riffed on the chorus of “I Am the Fly” for “Girls and Boys,” and made a “Song 2” to Wire’s “Song 1.” They resembled a Wire recast for broader public consumption in the millennium, from “pop singer” leader to arty guitarist to no-fuss drummer.

BOOK OF LAUGHTER AND FORGETTING, THE.

Novel by Milan Kundera. First published as “Le livre du rire et d’oubli” (France, 1979); English ed. (t. Michael Henry Heim), p. 1980; Czech ed., “Kniha smíchu a zapomnění,” p. Canada, 1981.

Some of Annette Green‘s photographs taken for Wire’s Chairs Missing evoke the opening pages of Milan Kundera’s The Book of Laughter and Forgetting, which wasn’t published in English translation until two years after the album’s release.

Graham Lewis later picked up on the odd coincidence. “The inner sleeve [photo] was an outtake. It reminds me of the Kundera story about the photographer of the Czech Communist Party,” he told Sean Eden. “All the members of the Politburo are standing on the balcony of the school where Kafka went to as a kid. But once one of them had been thrown out of the party, instead of taking a new photograph all they did was airbrush him out…this guy had kind of disappeared. It’s the same kind of effect in this way. You see people leaving, but they are not posed.”

Karel Hájek, a renowned Czech photographer, had taken shots of the Czech communist leader Klement Gottwald speaking to a crowd in Prague on a winter day in 1948. Next to Gottwald stood his Foreign Minister, the Slovak Vladimír Clementis. Within a year, Gottwald began dispatching opponents and rivals, and in 1950 Clementis was forced to resign. He was arrested and charged with being a “bourgeois nationalist” and conspirator.

The Czechoslovakian Interior Ministry raided Hájek’s apartment, seized hundreds of thousands of his negatives and loaded them into a truck, where they were shipped to the Interior Ministry’s propaganda department. By the time Clementis was hung for treason in December 1952, his ashes scattered on a road near Prague, he had been vanished from all state photographs. Hájek’s image of that 1948 winter day had become Klement minus Clementis.

Similar retouchings were made to photographs of Stalin and purged Inner Party members and no doubt are a regular occurrence in North Korea, et al. It’s the totalitarian dream to conquer time—the Party and the leader control the present, have a hard grip on the future, and they will own the past as well. The dream has been further refined in the decades since: generative AI photo and video manipulation offer a set of exciting new opportunities in devising falsehoods.

Green’s photos of Wire for Chairs Missing depict the band as a Mod cabal. Sitting at a long table, side by side and facing the viewer, they’re dwarfed by the backdrop: servants of some vast apparatus of power and decorum. They could be a set of austere ice-skating judges, or the group of men who sentence you to twenty years of Siberian exile.

The “Kundera” photograph of Bruce Gilbert abruptly leaving the group, looking as though he’s being lassoed out of the frame, anticipates Gilbert’s ultimate end with Wire and the band’s fractious attempts to clarify/revise its past in the following decades (see COMPOSITION CREDIT).

BOWIE, DAVID.

Musician, artisan (UK; later ‘global’), 1947-2016.

When Wire toured West Berlin in 1978, the soundtrack for the trip was David Bowie’s Low and “Heroes” on repeat. “I remember the interminable drives with Bowie and Eno blasting out through the cassette player at distorted volumes,” their road manager Bryan Grant recalled. “We had a trip down to the Wall playing Low, getting the Cold War vibe,” Colin Newman enthused.

One of Bowie’s gifts was knowing when to disappear. Most notably, in the late 2000s and early 2010s, where he resumed his mystique via silence rather than putting out records with Win Butler guest vocals. And while his “Berlin” period was a fecund one, recording-wise, Bowie was also notably absent from the London scene—he was rarely there between his spring 1976 and summer 1978 tours, and so missed the rise and fall of UK punk.

Instead, he was a correspondent posted at the Iron Curtain, sending home strange communiques every six months. “That dark European vibe was really fashionable, and it certainly informed what we did, although you saw that with a tongue-in-cheek perspective from our point-of-view, in our songs,” Newman said. (Wire would, eventually, record at Hansa By the Wall (see PART TWO: MUTE).

Bowie went to a Wire gig or two in the 1977-78 period. “I don’t think much ever went past Bowie in those days. He was always extremely sharp when it came to spotting new things and important developments,” Newman said. “All these people went, ‘Fuck, what’s that? Have you heard what they’re doing? That’s kind of weird, isn’t it? It’s like the song stops when the words run out!'”

The influence of Low on Pink Flag is an open one—a barrage of short songs, some of which sound as if they’ve been cut off before they’ve hardly begun. Chairs Missing was once described by its producer, Mike Thorne, as Wire doing a version of Low/”Heroes” in which the “short song” side was blended into the “instrumental” one: the tracks hold both forms within them. And Nick Kent praised 154 for being the album Bowie and Eno had really wanted to make with Lodger but had fumbled; now the students had surpassed the professor.

Wire and Bowie met only once, at a Wire show in New York in 2000. Bruce Gilbert recalled Bowie drifting in backstage and being “very pleasant. He seemed to know everything we’d done. But he was very disappointed we weren’t playing more from Chairs Missing, very disappointed. He didn’t come back afterwards, probably because he was terribly disappointed.”

Previous: BEING—BLESSED; Next: BOYLE—BRAZIL.

BEING SUCKED IN AGAIN.

[Text, song: Newman; Music: Wire.] Demo recording: 14 April 1978, Riverside Studios. Master recording: ca. 10-30 May 1978, Advision. First release: 22 September 1978, Chairs Missing. Live recordings: 5 October 1978, Odeon, Canterbury [partial recording]; 25 October 1978, Bradford University; 10 & 12 November 1978, SO36, West Berlin, Germany; 14 February 1979, Rockpalast, WDR Studio L, Köln, Germany; 4 March 1979, Grugahalle, Essen, Germany; 17 September 1979, Notre Dame Hall, London.

Chairs Missing is Wire’s sea album, with its unwilling sailors (“Marooned”), shipwreck evacuees (“Men 2nd”), daughters of King Canute (“Sand in My Joints”), and the shark-infested vortex song “Being Sucked In Again.” Though the latter’s primary composer, Colin Newman, said he’d been “inspired by the legend of the succubus” (also, that the lyric “is quite inexplicable, really”).

“A curious number which begins slowly, speeds up to mid-tempo, then wanders away,” as the NME‘s Andy Gill described an early airing of the song at the Limit Club in Sheffield, a few weeks before Wire recorded it. On Chairs Missing, it was sequenced as the penultimate track on Side One, closing the run of seasongs, and chilling the air to prepare the listener for “Heartbeat.”

Its structure is similar to a Bowie-Eno composition on Low—a song that’s bookended by eerie instrumental pieces given equal importance. See the slow build of the intro, in which, as per Newman, “the synth chords ping in like a child miming a bullet (the result of a poor drop-in), [then] the bass pedal and heavily ‘mutronned’ guitar crashes prefigure the arrival of the guitar riff and drums, when the whole thing shifts up a gear.”

Three concise verses, each in a different key; three punchy refrains, all in the same key. Newman’s phrasings that delight in consonance (“dorsal fin…salted meat…sullen relapse“) and take pleasure in jarring sounds: the stomach-punch of “sucked” met by the hinge-sway of “in-ah-gain.” In the outro, the arrangement disintegrates until all that remains is a synthesized whistle, hanging high in the mix for nearly ten seconds. (The synths, played by Mike Thorne, were a Yamaha String Synth (most likely the SS-30) and the RMI Electrapiano.)

On stage, Graham Lewis would howl and moan his response vocals (“OH BEING SUCKED!!…urrrh being suuuucked”): a lurid sexuality that’s absent from the studio take, on which Lewis’ voice is as controlled and modulated as Robert Grey’s hi-hat figures.

BETHNAL.

UK rock group, 1972-1980.

The quartet Bethnal had been around since the heyday of T. Rex and, like many of their counterparts, they leapt to exploit the UK punk boom. “We weren’t desperate, but we wanted to make it,” its lead singer George Csapo told Melody Maker in early 1979. “Until punk, there was no chance. Then everyone was signing bands left, right and center. So we’re thankful to the punks.”

Bethnal opened for Wire on some late 1977 dates, as well as for Buzzcocks and Slaughter & the Dogs. Upon their first LP’s release in early 1978 (on Vertigo, Black Sabbath’s label), they became a contemporary headliner with Wire at clubs like the Marquee.

The band was all Londoners (their name came from Bethnal Green; one member was trying to impress a girl who lived there) and was a vivid act on stage—Csapo would sing while dramatically bowing an electric violin (“I’m trying to make it fashionable…make it more of an aggressive instrument…the band is worked round the violin rather than the other way round”), while their bassist Everton Williams, one of the few Black musicians in the UK punk-adjacent scene at the time, kept in perpetual motion.

A rock act pitched at a higher level of intensity than, say, Status Quo, but offering no hard break from the past (they cut reverent covers of “Baba O’Riley” and “We Gotta Get Out of This Place” on their debut), they were the kind of group that Joe Strummer dismissed when he sang, “if you’ve been tryin’ for years, we already heard your song.”

On their records, they feel time-stranded. Too tight for pub rock, too earnest for punk, Bethnal was developing a spacious Eighties rock sound in 1978, sounding at times like a premonition of The Alarm, even an artier Loverboy (they have a song titled “Bartok” whose chorus is “all right! gonna make it tonight! if you feel right! you gotta be my little lady, lady love!”). Their Old Grey Whistle Test spot documents them at their peak.

By 1979, Bethnal were established as a regional live act, but felt unappreciated by the press and were going nowhere on the charts. Pete Townshend had consulted on their second LP, listening to demos, telling the group where to develop a song or when “the vocals should be louder there.” But the album, Crash Landing, fulfilled its title: it would be Bethnal’s last release.

“We’re not a punk band, we’re not a heavy metal band, we’re not a pop band, we’re not a funky band,” Csapo said at the time. “They say we haven’t got an image….We are what we are, that’s our fucking image.” He noted to Melody Maker‘s Colin Irwin that “we’re doing alright. The gigs are good, we’re not complaining. Don’t say we’re self-pitying.” They broke up the following year, never to reform.

BITCH.

[Words: Gill; music: Gill? Wire?] Rehearsal demo, recorded August 1976, Watford. Unreleased.

A piece of bloodletting from Wire’s first demo tape, described by Colin Newman as “entirely formless, chugging around on two chords. It was mainly George [Gill] shouting ‘it’s a bitch’ and then losing it.”

BLESSED STATE.

[Text, song: Gilbert; Music: Wire]. Demo recording: 14 December 1978, Riverside Studios. Master recording: ca. April-May 1979, Advision. First release: 24 September 1979, 154. Live recordings: 12 November 1978, SO36, West Berlin; 14 February 1979, Rockpalast, WDR Studio L, Köln; 4 March 1979, Grugahalle, Essen; 3 July 1979, Tiffany’s, Hull; 17 September 1979, Notre Dame Hall, London; 10 November 1979, Jeanetta Cochrane Theatre, London.

Listeners, by mishap or design, will take a line from a song’s chorus, maybe pull one from a verse, and use these to hear the song as its opposite. Or they’ll just take the title literally and go from there—the world of pop music is a collective act of mishearing. So “The One I Love” is played at weddings (“a simple prop to occupy my time!” as the bride goes down the aisle). “Fortunate Son” and “Born in the USA” are blasted at Republican political rallies, “Won’t Get Fooled Again” at Democratic ones. “Running on Empty,” Jackson Browne on the moral and political failure of his generation, becomes a song about jogging.

For decades, I heard Wire’s “Blessed State” as about achieving a state of calm, of spying the world from a distance and seeing it whole: a perfect globe, one cleansed of countries, politicians, religion, history—a beautiful nude. “Oh what a pearl,” as Graham Lewis sings in his rich baritone, his phrasing a series of calm stresses. “What a well…made world…Sacred sphere, so glad…I’m here.” It’s there in my mind whenever I’m looking out of an airplane window, along with another Wire song (to come later in this series).

But “Blessed State” is one of Bruce Gilbert‘s sharpest ironies, starting with its title—it’s about a couple engaged in psychological torture (“loved in the flesh, but butchered in the mind”) and the singer’s realization that this is happening with other couples, elsewhere and everywhere in the world, all at once and forever.

“It’s about self-disgust and lying,” as Gilbert described “Blessed State” to Sean Eden, while he told Wilson Neate the lyric concerned “the horror of existence.” (“That realization at some point in your life when you realize that all your relationships are bound to fail in some way or other…another ‘the world is fucked’ song,” was his note on the track for a 2018 reissue of 154.)

Gilbert was moving along frets on his guitar and “found this cyclic thing that didn’t really change but had parts that made you feel like the structure was changing.” This was a four-chord sequence, going from A major (“closing”) to E major (“doors”) to F-sharp major (“opens”) to close on G major (“eyes”)—a progression through the A major key, peaking on a flatted VII chord, then going back home, to repeat again. It suited his lyrical frame of people being trapped in life on earth, fated to move in circles. “It’s why we’re in the pub, to get away from it for a few hours and forget what it’s like to be alive in a dysfunctional world. I think it’s the threat of the A-bomb again.”

Yet the cage that Gilbert and Wire built was so gorgeous an object! Its rich layers of chorus-pedalled guitars, played by Gilbert and Newman, who cycle through three-note patterns, answered by two-note replies, until they make a thicket of birdsong. The sumptuous blankness of Lewis’ singing. Or Robert Grey’s metronomic drum pattern, with its extra snare beat on every fourth bar and its tiny moment of elation with the fill at the end of the “solo” section (@ 2:22).

Gilbert may be one of few who regarded the song in the utterly bleak way he’d intended it to be heard (Jon Savage caught the tone in his 154 review, calling the song “sarcastic [and] sincerely crude. Such nice boys.”) Maybe no one really listens to song lyrics. Or if they do, they follow a line from The Band: take what they need and leave the rest.

Previous: BASIC—BEHIND; Next: BLOOD—BOWIE.

AUDIENCE.

Playing at The Roxy, in early April 1977, Wire slam each number shut and are met with silence. Between songs, you hear mutters and jeers from what sounds like a minuscule crowd (which, as per Wire, it was).

Enthusiasm was suspect in early punk shows. Don’t clap. What, did someone do a pole vault? If they’re good enough, dance to them. If they’re middling, talk through them. If they piss you off, yell at the stage or throw a beer can, try to nail the singer in the face. The Roxy in particular could be merciless—as Jon Savage described it, a band playing the club faced “a difficult audience composed of their peers and competitors.”

Wire inspired something more like wary inertia. To ZigZag in March 1978, Colin Newman said, “when we first started, the general reaction of audiences was almost absolute blank nothingness. They wouldn’t react, didn’t know how to react. Silence, like on the Roxy [live ’77] album.” (Because of this, it was rumored at the time that Wire had cut their performance in the studio.) To biographer Paul Lester, Newman recalled “a semi-circle of people pinned up against the back of the wall, and they would just be staring at us. They didn’t know what to do. They didn’t know what to make of us. They certainly didn’t really like us that much.”

Did Wire want audiences to like them? Did they want people to clap, sing along, dance? They admitted that they enjoyed frustrating attempts to pogo, playing so fast that the song ended just as the dancers got going.

Wire’s life on stage, from the Roxy in 1977 to the Electric Ballroom in 1980, can appear to be a series of actions taken to estrange and antagonize audiences, or, at least, to present a refusal to accommodate them. A Wire set of the time greatly consisted of songs that the band hadn’t recorded yet, with their released material treated like yesterday’s papers.

“If they like a particular track, they can go home and play it 40 or 50 times, until they’ve had enough,” Graham Lewis said. (On stage, he was the band’s deadpan enforcer. “We don’t take requests,” Lewis says, with complete sangfroid, during Wire’s performance on Rockpalast in 1979).

“The idea that we’re short-changing an audience” by not playing the “hits” was antithetical to Wire, Newman said. Instead, “you’re short-changing them by not doing your best…The idea of four geezers trotting out a jukebox isn’t my idea of what I’d like to see.”

Wire had a fundamental ambivalence to performance, questioning the relationship between those on the stage and those watching them. It was never clear, perhaps not even to them, what the group wanted from its crowds. Only that the standard rock ‘n’ roll interchange, the barter of panders for cheers, was corrupt, was broken.

“This thing about getting the audience, that you have not Gone Down Well unless they’re waving their scarves in the air and doing things audiences are supposed to…I mean, if I was in that audience I just would not do that,” Newman said. “I’d feel like an idiot.”

“I just refuse to put audiences through that rubbish. But if they want to, they can.”

Punk rock had to invent its audience. Andy Czezowski, who co-founded The Roxy and, for about two months, managed Wire, said it was born as an act of division.

At the first Sex Pistols show at St. Martins College of Art, in November 1975, “we all stood at the front…[while] from the safety of the bar, the students started shouting and complaining,” Czezowksi wrote. “We liked the sense of separation, new versus old. The feeling of Us and Them, and the band’s resolute stance that they weren’t there simply to entertain the Thursday night student dance.” (Newman recalled seeing the Sex Pistols at Middlesex Polytechnic in a crowd of mostly “pissed-up rugby types who hated them.”)

The writer Jonh (sic) Ingham said that one of Malcolm McLaren’s designs for the Pistols was “creating an audience that was specifically for the band.” Not some pub rock group on the hustle, looking to win over the next crowd of drinkers by catering to them, but an act who demanded that its audience bear half of the weight of a performance.

In the early months, this audience was some roughly one hundred people, mostly Londoners: a set of art school malcontents, employees and peripheral types in the McLaren/Vivienne Westwood Sex boutique scene, fashionable suburban refugees (the “Bromley Set,” which included Siouxsie Sioux), ex-hippies looking for the next thing (like Czezowski), ex-glam rockers in the same position, and aspiring punk musicians.

Some of those drawn to the Sex Pistols and The Damned, the polestars of early UK punk, used the shows as a means to design themselves, to shape inchoate notions of the person they’d wanted to be into something like reality. At a punk show, the floor was another stage: venue within the venue. As John Lydon told Julien Temple, in The Filth and the Fury:

The Sex Pistols definitely created new environments. It was [an] incredible good to see the audience being individual. There were absolutely stunning original people out there. Soo Catwoman: that woman required a lot of skill, style, and bravery to look like a cat! There was a couple of years there where it was stunning. People that had no self-respect suddenly started to view themselves as beautiful, in not being beautiful. Women started to appreciate themselves as not second-class citizens. Punk made that clear. I’ve always talked to the audience in one way after gigs. Where d’you live? What’s life like for you? Absolute basics.

Wherever the Pistols went, they planted new bands. One week they’d play High Wycombe and “see some faces there, guys with long hair,” Steve Jones said. “And a week later we’d be playing at the Nashville [in London] and I’d see the same people with their hair cut short and wearing the ripped-up t-shirt. Every gig you’d see a few more and a few more and a few more: people who just got converted.” The hot summer of 1976 drove people out of their flats and houses, into the clubs and recreation halls. “People thought they were alone in their rooms with their obsessions,” said Richard Boon, who managed the Buzzcocks. “They began to meet. A pocket-sized community formed.”

Wire’s Bruce Gilbert, recalling the Punk Festival at the 100 Club in September 1976, described the room as being like “a laboratory. The audience brings as much as the artists, are filmed and photographed as much as the artists…people experimenting with themselves, in their behavior, appearance, clothes.”

Any dream of punk rock as being a radical reincarnation of the Arts Labs of the Sixties was soon dispersed.

Some blamed the Sex Pistols’ shambles of an appearance on Bill Grundy’s Today, in December 1976, which landed the group in the tabloids and brought in a wave of dumb, violent young men who saw a punk show as an appealing opportunity to spit on people and beat them up. (A Wire show in Newcastle ended when “this bloke walked through the crowd, chose someone indiscriminately, hit him and the whole place went up,” Graham Lewis said. “150 people beating the shit out of each other. We stopped—there was nothing to play to anymore.”)

Then there were the trendoids, the conformists. Punk was no longer a space where you created yourself; it became a set of rules to follow. There was a break “from something artistic and almost intellectual in weird clothes,” Marco Pirroni said. “Suddenly there were these fools with dog collars on and ‘punk’ written on their shirts in biro.” The influx of Television Personalities’ “Part Time Punks“: “They pogo in their bedroom…In front of the mirror/ But only when their mum’s gone out!…they got £2.50/ to go and see The Clash.”

Others blamed The Roxy, which worsened punk’s hierarchies and hipster snob tendencies, while TV Smith of The Adverts blamed The Vortex, which replaced The Roxy. “At The Roxy, people didn’t have to look like a punk. They could do whatever they wanted,” he told Jon Savage. “After The Vortex opened there was this feeling that you should like this and you shouldn’t like that.”

Maybe it was the punk groups being signed by major labels and the story becoming one of chart positions and units shifted. The growth of heroin use, the ever-relentless press coverage, the cross-Atlantic invasion of ex-MainMan “celebrities” like Jayne County, Leee Black Childers and Cherry Vanilla, now severed from David Bowie and looking to exploit a fresh scene. Plenty of villains to go around.

In the midst of this, Wire stood apart, a group mistrusted by its peers and its audiences. Jane Suck, reviewing a summer 1977 show at the Marquee, wrote that Wire was “an example of [having] absolute faith in oneself” while having “undisguised contempt for the audience, the spikey refusal to open up their rock ‘n’ roll heart to anyone.”

On stage, the four of them said little, apart from song intros, and would barely look up from their instruments. Gilbert stood rooted in a corner, his body bent as if bracing for a gust of wind. Robert Grey played with a frantic precision. Newman thrashed about, his neck contorting, his body all but levitating, but he kept these movements restricted, as though he was magnetized to his microphone stand. Lewis moved upstage and downstage, shifting position with each bassline: he was the group’s restless legs, its reconnaissance unit.

After playing eighteen or twenty songs, they murmured thanks and walked off in silence. It was as though they’d been hired to work for a union-negotiated time period. “They have a healthy indifference to the audience,” wrote Sounds‘ Dave Fuller, in one of Wire’s first concert reviews.

One of those at The Roxy in April 1977 was Savage, who described Wire as “short-circuiting the audience totally…[they] don’t know when one [song] has finished and another is beginning. I like the band for that.” He also approved of Lewis, in his posh baritone, telling a heckler to fuck off (you can hear this on Live at the Roxy).

“They thought we were weirdos,” Newman recalled. “We didn’t adhere to any of the punk conventions, I think they found us quite intimidating, because we made a big noise and I did a lot of shouting. They were trying to work out what they’d done wrong—like, ‘Why is that band shouting at me?’”

Lewis, to the New York Rocker in 1978, said that while audiences were “sometimes as much the show as the band, we’d rather have more distance between us. You can use distance and space to create a tension.”

“You’re not supposed to enjoy Wire, are you?”

Giovanni Dadomo, recalling a colleague’s quip, in Sounds, 1979

In distance, space, and tension, Wire began to accumulate fans. “There was a small band of people who used to come to hear us and quite enjoyed it,” Gilbert said. “But to be honest, I think we alienated at least 80 per cent of the audience. We attracted serious loners.” (As Grey said, “it wasn’t a respectful audience. But I don’t think it was malicious.”)

They hired a lights operator with a background in theater and told him the only thing he couldn’t do was “rock and roll lighting….all that flash, because it’s so fucking boring and inevitably you get into the same rut where it means that everybody has to run around like loonies in order to make it look exciting,” Lewis said. “The change of lighting should be sufficient to make even small movements look noticeable.”

Wire would perform tightly-contained acts of precision and intensity on stage, and the people in the room with them would need to take what they wanted from the performances, could react in whichever way they wanted to (including throwing a bottle), but they should not expect any guidance, any catering, any condescension from the band.

“It is detachment in a way, but it also puts the onus more on the audience,” Lewis said. “It’s more respectful to them.” In another interview, he was more explicit. “We’ve always hoped that the person listening, or the person that comes to see us, feels that there is room enough after the process to be able to still feel that they can respond individually to it, rather than be cast as one of the mass or mob who a record is directed at, directly, shall we say, in a marketing way.”

Wire’s perceived coldness on stage was because “we play to individuals,” Newman said. “I prefer an honest reaction, and I think that that is very un-cynical, very naive in fact.”

After a show at The Venue in 1978, which the press and the band agreed was a dismal performance, Newman said the core problem was that people had “gone to see a rock and roll show which [they] didn’t get, which was a perfectly valid point,” he told Melody Maker. “I mean, we don’t present a rock and roll show, so if people want to see or get off on a rock and roll show, they’d better not come and see us. Plenty of other bands can do that.”

“At our worst,” he added, “we are efficient, and at our best we can produce something that is….I don’t know what it is.”

Wire opened for Roxy Music in the European leg of Roxy’s comeback tour, in March 1979. Booked in the largest venues that Wire had played to date, the tour had some of the most abusive audiences that the group would ever face.

Their road manager, Bryan Grant, told Wilson Neate that 1979 Roxy Music “audiences were attuned to Bryan Ferry and nice suits—the fashion-oriented side of it—and the music had become very mainstream.” Wire, playing at the peak of their austere power, with a set greatly consisting of then-unrecorded 154 songs, disturbed them. Each night they booed, screamed at the band, told them to get off the stage, to fuck off and die.

“When those little herberts got on stage, the audience just hated it,” Grant said. “Usually the reaction to a support band is one of boredom or people just go to the bar. What I found interesting was this violent, visceral reaction. I thought, fuck! Why is it so violent? What is this about?”

Gilbert found the reaction to be “a good thing for us—it was testing,” while Lewis said Wire was driven into “creative-survival mode…we thought, we are going to have fun with this. If they fuck with us, we’re not going to lie down.” A set of forty-five minutes was compressed to thirty—Wire played each song faster and faster with each night, with a murderous spirit, hurling their songs into the crowd. Then they’d close with a slow version of “Heartbeat,” flaying open the song, working to “destroy all the energy,” Lewis said (a performance from Montreux is on Document & Eyewitness).

“We left the stage, one at a time, walking slowly, very deliberately…What we did was to suck all the oxygen out of the room, taking all the adrenaline with us.” The support act as termites.

The Roxy Music debacle convinced them that “rock and roll” performance no longer made sense to attempt. The last shows of the band’s first incarnation would be structured as art exhibits, as, in Lewis’ words, “a total performance.”

The first of these designs was People In A Room, which Wire performed at the Jeanetta Cochrane Theatre over four evenings in November 1979. Attendees were captured by videocamera as they walked into the foyer, their images screened in the auditorium. Each member of Wire did a fifteen-minute “performance art” piece, followed by the band playing together, doing a set which, as usual, was about 40 percent current songs and 60 percent new, unrecorded ones.

The People In a Room shows were crafted as sealed boxes of experience. “A small theatre, a very nice theatre—very well equipped—which held about 350 seated each night,” Lewis said of the shows. “There was no bar. There was no smoking…the whole thing was very self-contained, as we felt that the way we previously approached things, we haven’t been altogether successful being a rock and roll band, because we aren’t a rock and roll band.”

The Electric Ballroom show, done four months later, was a more anarchic, sloppier, wilder revision of the concept. Here Wire, for the moment, reached the limit of what they felt they could achieve by standing on a stage in front of strangers.

Gilbert found it enjoyable that “the angrier the audience got, the funnier and funnier it became. There was a lot of shouting—the really clever ones shouted out requests. I’ve been told by a couple of people who were in the audience that it was right on the edge of turning into something very nasty.”

“It was pretty brutal, although we found it horribly funny,” Lewis recalled, decades later. “We just wound the audience up. It was good and it was also very depressing at the same time.”

BAD NIGHT AT THE LION (BAD NIGHT)

[Words: Gill? Newman?; music: Wire] Rehearsal demo, recorded August 1976, Watford. Unreleased.

George Gill, Wire’s founder and lead guitarist, was truculent on stage and off. At one of Wire’s first shows, at the Nashville Rooms, he broke a string and, while tuning, scowled at the audience: “What the fuck do you think you’re looking at? Get back to your beer!” (“The whole thing had an air of belligerence,” Colin Newman recalled. “And we were terrible.”)

“Bad Night at the Lion” (aka “Bad Night”), cut by Wire on an August 1976 rehearsal demo, was inspired by “a pub rock singer to whom Gill took a dislike,” the group told their biographer Wilson Neate (that said, Newman once claimed it as “one of my songs”).

A few chords hammered together, with early Wire’s three-guitars-plugged-into-one-amp buzzing smear of sound, “Bad Night” opens with a “one-two-fuck-you!,” soon ported to another composition. Verses are incomprehensible (likely for the best); choruses are a cheery promise of violence, something like “one-two-three-four! gonna come through the door! Three-four-five! Gonna take you (her?) alive!”

Another bad night came at a pub in Kilburn, around February 1977. Gill was drunk and heckling a band. He determined that the band was so terrible they had to be prevented from playing further gigs—he would steal their amplifiers. Staggering down a flight of stairs while carrying an amp, he fell and shattered his leg. The rest of his band kept rehearsing while he was on the mend. “We took out his guitar solos and it suddenly sounded a lot more efficient,” Newman said (see BEARS, THE; BLOOD SACRIFICE; GILL, GEORGE).

Previous: ART; Next: BASIC DESIGN—BEHIND THE CURTAIN

ART & LANGUAGE.

Conceptual art “organization,” ca. 1967-late 20th C.

In so far as this essay offers a form of narrative, it is one deformed by the dislocations of theory and practice and unbalanced by the asymmetries of intellectual generalization and existential detail.

Charles Harrison, Essays on Art & Language

Not quite a think tank, not quite an art movement, not quite a rock band, and not quite a political party, Art & Language is an internally contested and outwardly perplexing organization that has reconfigured itself countless times during an ongoing history spanning nearly half a century.

Robert Bailey, Art & Language and the Politics of Art Worlds, 1969-1977

In England, sometime around 1965 or 1966, four teachers and students at the Coventry College of Art—Terry Atkinson, David Bainbridge, Michael Baldwin, and Harold Hurrell—began using “language” in their work.

They made paintings, sculptures, and sketches which incorporated words and numbers: e.g., Atkinson and Baldwin’s Map Not To Indicate (1967), above, a mostly-blank map of Canada and the United States which lists underneath the image what isn’t depicted. The quartet soon went the whole hog, making “works of purportedly visual art that exist[ed] entirely as texts or require[d] texts to approach and access them,” wrote Robert Bailey, whose 2012 dissertation on Art & Language has been of great help in this entry.

As Charles Harrison, one of Art & Language‘s prominent ambassadors and chroniclers, wrote:

Art & Language’s attempt to carry artistic practice into the territory of language was a form of insurgency….to bombard the Modernist practice of art with the materials of its own contingency, to reflect back—as the materials of art—both the entrenched terms and conceptualizations of the beholder’s discourse, and representations of the actual powers and interests which those terms concealed.

Art & Language regarded Modernist art as a closed system, one dedicated to the “suppression of the beholder.” The Modern Artist created the work, which was displayed in prominent, state-funded galleries and which was owned by capitalist princes. The beholder was encouraged to stand in silence before the work for a time, perhaps read some boilerplate curator description of the Pollock or de Kooning painting being concerned with “man’s struggle” or “individuality” or “chaos” or what have you, and then move on to the next work, in the way a consumer walks from store to store in a mall.

As Bailey summarizes Harrison: by contrast, “in conceptual art, making and doing come to the fore in a manner without precedent as themselves subject to artistic shaping, and the act of working, or even the act of working on the act of working, eclipses the completed results of work to become the prime locus of art and its site of greatest interest.” Or, as Harrison summarized: “The substantial aim was not simply to displace paintings and sculptures with texts or ‘proceedings,’ but rather to occupy the space of beholding with questions and paraphrases, to supplant ‘experience’ with a reading, and in that reading to reflect back the very tendencies and mechanisms by means of which experience is dignified as artistic.” [All italics mine.]

The Coventry group launched an Art Theory Programme (taught by Atkinson, Baldwin, and Bainbridge) in 1969 and founded a journal that year—its title, Art-Language, was retroactively applied to works the group had done over the past few years. The movement soon was trans-Atlantic. In New York, Joseph Kosuth agreed to be the journal’s American editor. A colleague of Atkinson’s, Kosuth had been toiling in a similar vein to the UK Art & Language group for some time: see his photostat work Title (Art as idea as idea) from 1967:

Kosuth’s friends Ian Burn and Mel Ramsden became journal contributors, and the three of them founded the New York branch of Art & Language.

The New York branch was, from inception, more politically-minded, more “active” and “public,” more interested in having conversations and arguments (one of the branch’s favorite theaters of operation was the Greenwich Village bar The Local, owned by the same man who owned Max’s Kansas City). The UK wing would remain hermetic and more theoretical: the Second Foundation. The two Art & Language houses would become estranged and, somewhat, adversaries. The NY branch created a rival journal, The Fox, which the UK branch scathingly reviewed in Art + Language (“Utopian Prayers and Infantile Marxism.”)

In 1970, Burn and Ramsden created (INDEX ( MODEL (…))), in which a text was broken into numbered passages, each of which was pasted onto roughly a hundred index cards in a Rolodex. One card read “any description of ‘the art-world’ is a description of a possible art-world”; another: “one doesn’t deal with art-works but art-worlds.”

Another Burn and Ramsden work of the period was Comparative Models (aka The Annotations). Here they separated each page of the December 1971 issue of Artforum and arranged the pages in sequential order along a gallery wall, juxtaposed with typewritten texts that criticized various Artforum pages. One example:

The network of relations, constructs, work, objects, etc., which may be said to constitute the ARTFORUM Model can be seen to be the consequence of the passive acceptance of reification. This ‘spell’ enraptures most forms of public life in our society. Of the ways that Capitalism limits the kinds of art produced and the relation of art to the rest of society…the social and economic system, through the division of labor, deprives the artist of a real response to his work and, through the objective relations of the market, turns his meanings into commodities.

The UK branch, which was now perceived by university administrators as introducing an unwelcome amount of barmy-seeming “radicalism” into arts education, was under duress. In 1971, Coventry College of Art cancelled the group’s Art Theory course (Mark Dennis: “ostensibly for the reason that there was a lack of ‘tangible visual art objects’ being produced by the students”); Coventry fired Bainbridge and Baldwin for good measure, though Bainbridge “had effectively disassociated himself from Art & Language” by this point. Atkinson would leave Coventry in 1973.

There was a regrouping, particularly once Charles Harrison became Art-Language‘s editor in 1971. Going forward, like news articles in The Economist, works produced by Art & Language members would be credited to the group as a whole: even transcripts of group meetings wouldn’t indicate who was speaking.

The great project of the period was A Survey by the Art & Language Institute at Documenta 5 (aka Index 01). First displayed in Kassel, Germany, in 1972, Index 01 was eight filing cabinets and 48 photostats, with the cabinets set atop four pedestals arranged in a square, looking like monoliths, while the photostats were on the walls in a grid formation. Inside each filing cabinet were Art & Language texts, in alphabetical and numerical order; the photostats were of charts “that trace[d] relations of compatibility, incompatibility, and non-relation between the texts.”

One aim was to encourage concatenation—for readers “to develop new insights out of old work in much the same way that the index to a book enables the making of connections within the book to which it is an index that might not occur otherwise by gathering proximally information…dispersed throughout a text or body of texts,” as Bailey wrote.

In Index 01: “In one sense, no new work is presented, only a reorganization of past work. But in another sense, the new work is the reorganization of past work.” Index 01 “oscillates between these two states,” Bailey wrote, “leaving audiences free to treat it either as an opportunity to investigate old work by Art & Language that they may not have seen or as a chance to consider the elaborate organizational scheme Art & Language employed—or some combination of the two…Art & Language functioned as their own curators.”

For the UK branch, Index 01 would be a map of the territory ahead. “Indexing itself became the main course for Art & Language activity from this point forward,” Bailey wrote. “In England, the formal and logical aspects of concatenating material took precedence and became increasingly elaborate.”

Around 1973, Charles Harrison began teaching at Watford College of Art [see WATFORD]. As one of his former students, David Batchelor, wrote upon Harrison’s death in 2009: “He was, without doubt, the most influential, inspiring and demanding teacher I have ever met; a number of students quickly gravitated towards him. At about the same time (and just as quickly), the management of the college became alarmed by many of the ideas, the art and the artists that Charles had begun to introduce us to. They came to regret his appointment at least as much as we benefited from it.”

Another of Harrison’s students at Watford, ca. 1975, was Colin Newman.

“I was really the only person in the class who understood half of the stuff he was talking about,” Newman claimed to Wilson Neate. “It was shocking to be in art school with a bunch of people who didn’t know anything about art.”

While it’s too broad of a stretch to find anything of the analytic rigor or the theoretical density of peak Art & Language in Wire’s songs, there’s an Art & Language sensibility lurking within their work. Few bands devoted as much attention to, and played as many games with, song and album titles as Wire did. Songs are named ironically or obliquely; their titles often reference something standing outside of the song. The “text” of a Wire song is, at times, is given as much importance as the track itself.

“There were conscious principles behind all of [Pink Flag‘s] songs,” as Newman wrote in The Independent in 2006. See “Ex Lion Tamer,” named so because Graham Lewis, upon revising the lyric, removed some lines about a lion tamer. Or “106 Beats That,” whose lyric began as an attempt by Lewis to write a set of lines capped at 100 syllables. He wound up with 106, which beats 100 (Lewis: “That doesn’t matter, because you’ve created a process.”) Songs that imply accompanying visuals (“‘Map Ref. 41°N 93°W,” “Dot Dash”) or which refer to unknown organizing systems (“The 15th,” 154; see also Newman’s A-Z and the track titles of Dome (see PART TWO: MUTE)).

ART ATTACKS.

UK punk band, 1977-1978 (aka Artattacks, Art Attax).

Before committing to Wire, Robert “Gotobed” Grey briefly drummed with Art Attacks, a band founded in early 1977 by two Royal College of Art students: Edwin Pouncey (later known as the cartoonist Savage Pencil) and Steve Spear. Grey plays on “Chicken in Funland” and “Rat City,” demos that the band cut at Pathway Studios; “Rat City” was later the B-side of their last (and posthumous) single, “Punk Rock Stars.”

Art Attacks began when Spear, learning that his school was putting on a talent show, thought it would be fun to form a punk band. A friend said he should ask “Edwin from graphics” to sing. For a drummer, they got Ricky Slaughter (later of The Motors) and on bass, Marion Fudger, whom Spear knew from the Stockwell squatting scene. She had played with the Trotskyist band The Derelicts and was in the Spare Rib collective. (“She was a bit embarrassed,” Spear recalled to Stewart Home in 1996. “She went out under the name of M. S., so that no one knew it was her. Marion wanted to be a serious musician.”)

They wrote two songs for the talent show: “Subway Train” (Spear: “it just got faster and faster until it exploded at the end”) and “Rat City” (Pouncey: “about a middle-aged guy on a treadmill”—the title was a nickname for London). It was a solid punk debut; at one point, Spear jumped off stage and had the requisite fight with a guy in the audience. Art Attacks were asked to play the Wimbledon College of Art. Soon enough they had a manager, regular gigs, and were cutting demos. For the latter, as the group was between drummers at the time, they used Grey—the connection was Rob Smith, who had played bass with Art Attacks for a few shows before they recruited Fudger; Smith and Grey had been in a group together (see SNAKES, THE). Grey was also a squatter in Stockwell, where he’d known Fudger.

“Chicken in Funland” came from a headline in The Sun—an expose of animal cruelty in which an arcade owner had been forcing chickens to play piano for his customers (Spear: “it was a gambling thing, where you won if the chicken hit a certain key”).

Art Attacks was signed by Albatross, one of the sketchiest British indie labels of the period. As per Pouncey and Spear, the label, run out of a Kensington Market basement, was owned by a hippie who had a burlesque stripper girlfriend and “this other guy who always wore a suit…he used to come up with these really stupid ideas, like they were going to advertise our single on all the buses in London.”

The debut single, issued in May 1978, was “I Am a Dalek.” Pouncey took a memory of having to wear a Dalek costume for a department store job and fleshed it out, making it a screed about how “you felt like your identity had been taken away from you and had been replaced by this robotic one. And all of the sudden, the robot inside started rebelling.” The B-side was “Neutron Bomb,” a call to wipe out everything in your life and start over. It sold about seven thousand copies.

Any prospect of subsequent releases died after Albatross’ distributor saw an Art Attacks show at which Pouncey crawled into the drum kit and refused to come out. At another gig, Pouncey handed the mike over to a “tramp who lumbered on stage…the new vocalist was this derelict screaming rubbish.”

The group played the punk circuit, opening for Generation X. Their set routinely entailed Art Attacks “taking the piss out of Billy Idol,” much to the anger of Generation X fans and road crew. The latter, for revenge, switched off the Art Attacks’ amps and mikes in the middle of a show. Art Attacks opened for 999 and The Motors; Squeeze once opened for them at the Marquee. Keith Moon was a fan. The ultra-hip punk club The Vortex, whose owners Pouncey and Spear would ridicule while on stage there, kept asking them back.

But they were done by the end of 1978. Pouncey, while he enjoyed playing with Spear and Fudger, wanted to complete his degree and saw that the punk scene had devolved into grubby commercialism and nihilist conformity—the rise of Sid Vicious, punk’s junkie killer cartoon, was a sign of how things had gone sour.

“Art Attacks was a project, like an art project in a way,” he said in 2010. “For me anyway, in my mind. There were people with aspirations for it to be a proper rock band, and go on and have a proper rock & roll career and everything, but I just found myself getting more and more dissatisfied with the whole idea of playing the gigs.” He wanted to write stories and poems, comics and illustrations (he’d already become a contributor to Sounds). “I wasn’t interested in yelling on about policemen, how horrible society is or any rubbish like that.”

Looking back, Pouncey felt most affinity with the grub-tier of UK punk groups, the bands that had one single or only managed to cut a demo, who opened for Eater or Sham 69 a few times, who only survive in small print on faded club listings or as names in the comments of 45cat single entries. “The bands that were substrata, that weren’t looking for huge amounts of money from EMI, they were just soldiering on,” Pouncey said. “They were excited by the idea of being able to do it, and did it, and then faded away. On to the next project.”

ART ROCK.

Musical genre name, ca. 1967-present.

The nearest thing to classic awful English art-rock since Genesis discovered funk.

Robert Christgau, review of The Who’s It’s Hard (1982).

Whenever Wire is assigned a musical genre, it’s typically “post-punk” (see upcoming) or “art rock.”

So what is art rock? A band classified as “ska,” say, or “heavy metal” will share some easily definable attributes with others in the genre. Whereas “art rock” can mean, and has meant, many things under the sun.

The earliest use of the term that I’ve found in US and UK newspapers is in the Tampa Bay Times of 9 February 1967, which notes a local performer’s “new Psychedelic Art-Rock Folk Sound.” Later that year, Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band (Peter Blake/ Jann Haworth cover; lyrics printed on LP sleeve; mustaches), Procol Harum’s “Whiter Shade of Pale” (Bach; marijuana), and the Moody Blues’ Days of Future Passed (poetry; Mellotron) fully inaugurated the genre, at least in the press.

By February 1968, “art rock” is being compared with “shock rock” and rockabilly by the Manchester Evening News; a year later, “art rock” has assumed one of its primary roles—as a way for critics to pit “sophisticated” artists against rock ‘n’ roll teenage dance product. In a review of Jack Bruce’s Song for a Tailor, Tony Palmer in The Observer claimed that “art-rock, as it was known, is no longer rock or even art.”

Palmer wouldn’t be alone in being wary about “art rock,” regarding it as an aspirational type of highbrow popular music that was in truth neither, but rather some ungainly, flopping hybrid that irritated both highbrows and rock ‘n’ roll fans. The writer Dave Marsh would rail against art rock for decades. In his The Heart of Rock and Soul, he made a cogent point about which artists were allowed to be “art rock” and which weren’t, often due to class and race. On ? and the Mysterians’ “96 Tears”:

Had R.E.M. or The Cure recorded it, “96 Tears” would be heralded as pure art-rock. But “96 Tears” was recorded by a quartet of Tex-Mex migrant workers, and without art school credentials, all that Rudy Martinez gets credit for is creating a “garage band” classic. History will doubtless provide equity, since “96 Tears” will be remembered long after “post-modernist” spats recede into the mists that spawned them.

See also Robert Christgau, who only last year laid into “art-rock, which actively rejects both the catchy hooks and the compelling groove of the rock and roll aesthetic I’ve championed for most of my life.”

Again, the vagueness of the term leads one to ask—who are we really complaining about here? Radiohead? The Decemberists?

In the early- to mid-Seventies, “art rock” and “progressive rock” are used interchangeably in reviews: Pink Floyd, Jethro Tull, Yes, Genesis, The Strawbs, Family are all called “art rock” at some point; King Crimson is “tentatively balanced on the high wire of art rock” (Harrow Observer). Yet the same was true for punk or punk-adjacent acts: Metro is “art rock,” as is Devo and Deaf School (“art school rock”) and XTC (“art rock new wavers”).

In September 1977, the Valley Advocate (from my near-hometown of Amherst, MA), attempted to create an art-rock canon:

To speak in generalities (hey, it’s the art rock entry; I’m not sure how you can speak otherwise), an act labeled “art rock” has some of these attributes:

• Band or artist is perceived, rightly or wrongly, as being “smart,” or at least “clever” (usually “overly”). The act’s just as often called “pretentious,” an adjective whose definition is so foggy that it could close an airport.
• Band or artist devotes a heap of time and attention to record sleeve photos and design (and, later, videos) and, equally important, to the maintenance and upgrades of their own look.
• Artist, or at least someone in the band, paints or makes sculptures, etc.: something aesthetically extraneous to making rock music. T-shirt design does not qualify.
• Song lyrics refer to other media (paintings, plays, books, movies, etc.) and the musician at least fakes that they’re familiar with such things.
• The musician doesn’t need to have gone to a university, but it helps. You can also be in the vicinity of one (see R.E.M.) or lie about attending one.

Yet this doesn’t quite cover it. Steely Dan ticks most of these boxes, but few would call them “art rock.” Dylan and John Mellencamp paint, but they don’t make art rock. A number of Black artists also qualify, and, surprise, they aren’t called “art rock” either: see Grace Jones, Nona Hendryx, Dr. Buzzard’s Original Savannah Band/ Kid Creole & the Coconuts, Public Enemy, The Coup. In the Valley Advocate list above, you’ll note, among the usual suspects, Kansas and Meat Loaf, who would likely be deemed too uncool to qualify for a similar list today.

Does an art rock act need to be cool, though? As this is one of the dorkiest music genres in existence?

There are a few undeniable art rock acts; most are impeccably cool. David Bowie, who painted and sketched and made SF home movies, who wrote songs about Andy Warhol, Chris Burden, and the architect Philip Johnson, and who nicked lines from Hans Richter’s Dada: Art and Anti-Art for “Up the Hill Backwards.” Kate Bush, whose debut single is about a Bronte novel and who wrote songs quoting Ulysses and referencing Wilhelm Reich. Laurie Anderson, whose debut single was released by an art gallery. Arthur Russell, quintessential rock/dance aesthete.

Roxy Music, headed by two art school graduates, whose first single was based on a Bryan Ferry painting and who looked like they’d argued about Late Modernism while in the studio. (Ferry owned the term in a 1975 interview: “Roxy…could play things which were very experimental and forward-looking, and trying to break ground in a sort of art-rock way.”)

The Velvet Underground, sponsored by a painter who also did their debut LP sleeve, and whose members included a Syracuse grad who’d studied with Delmore Schwartz (the Manchester Evening News, of 14 December 1976, credits Lou Reed as “the originator of the New York art rock sound”) and a Goldsmiths College alum who had performed Erik Satie pieces and wrote “Graham Greene” and “Hedda Gabler.”

And Talking Heads, the majority of whom went to the Rhode Island School of Design, who were originally called The Artistics and had a song called “Artists Only,” and who had Johnny Ramone shaking with rage when, while touring with The Ramones, they went to museums and worse, talked about what they had seen; Tina Weymouth even spoke French on occasion. (That said, David Byrne hated the term “art rock.”)

So, sure, Wire, a group whose members included an art school alum who knew Art & Language veterans, and Peter Schmidt and Eno, and various British and German painters (Colin Newman), a fashion designer (Graham Lewis), and an experimental music nerd who worked in an art school library (Bruce Gilbert)—a group who had songs called “French Film Blurred” and “Midnight Bahnhof Café” and had chosen their name in part for its visual qualities—is about as “art rock” as one can get.

But as Newman told Simon Reynolds, in the latter’s Rip It Up and Start Again, Wire’s music “wasn’t ‘arty,’ we were doing fucking art. Punk was art. It was all art.”

ART SCHOOL.

British educational institution, 1768-present.

Any taste that you feel is right
Wear any clothes just as long as they’re bright

The Jam, “Art School” (1977)

I gotta get a job, I gotta get some pay
My son’s gotta go to art school, he’s leaving in three days

They Might Be Giants, “Alienation’s for the Rich” (1986)

“A lot of people from the music papers balk at the mention of art school,” said Colin Newman in one of Wire’s first interviews, with the NME in 1977. “Because there’s a thing called art school rock.”

In 1768, the first British art school—the Royal Academy of Arts—was founded after a few leading architects and society painters of the time had petitioned the crown; the RA was intended for the education of similar craftsmen. Two centuries later, Newman, Bruce Gilbert, and Graham Lewis were among the tens of thousands of students in a constellation of art schools scattered across Britain.

Shaken up by reforms in art education in the years after the war (see BASIC DESIGN) and a growing radicalism in course instruction (see ART + LANGUAGE), and having a level of government financial support that, from today’s perspective, seems fantastical, the British art school, by 1970, offered an alternate path to bright students who had struggled with traditional education. It was a place for provincial weirdos to find like-minded weirdos. And it gave a means of support until you could establish yourself as an artist, or, in the case of Malcolm McLaren, as an arts-entrepreneur.

Punk, for all of its street-fighting front, was as much an art school movement. Apart from a few clubs in London, Liverpool and Manchester, art schools formed much of the circuit for the early punk bands—the first-ever Sex Pistols show was at St. Martin’s School of Art, and many of their early performances were at art schools, from Chelsea School of Art to Watford College to Hertfordshire College of Art.

It was a natural fit. Art schools had the performance spaces and PA equipment, the funds to pay bands semi-decently, and “these guys sound weird, let’s book them” was the ethos of many a student union social secretary (like Hornsey College’s Graham Lewis).

You’re all from art school backgrounds? Why the move from art to music?

Newman: Because they don’t have rock ‘n’ roll schools.

Lewis: We were all doing what we had been trained to do so the time came when it was an easy decision to change, but obviously our past influences are still there.

Record Mirror interview of Wire, 7 October 1978

Colin Newman was of the generation who went to art school because that’s where you trained to be a pop star.

“My idea was that I’d go to art school because that was a good way to get into a band,” he told Wilson Neate. “I subscribed to that myth 100%. All the musicians who excited me had been to art school. You needed to be where there was a creative environment.”

By 1975, the lineage was well established. Founders of the tradition included John Lennon and Stuart Sutcliffe (Liverpool College of Art), Ray Davies (Hornsey College of Art), Keith Richards and a few of the Pretty Things (Sidcup Art College), Roy Wood (Mosely College of Art), Jimmy Page (Sutton Art College), Syd Barrett (Camberwell College of Arts) and Freddie Mercury (Ealing Art College). Three-fourths of The Clash were art school kids—before they settled on a “working class rebel” look, they wore Jackson Pollock-esque paint-splashed gear, much like the Sex Pistols’ Glen Matlock (St. Martin’s).

The most archetypal art school rockers were Pete Townshend, who studied under Roy Ascott at Ealing, took the idea for guitar demolition from the artist Gustav Metzger, and who once called The Who a “form of Pop Art.” Even today, as per his ex-drummer Zak Starkey, “there’s nothing normal about [The Who]. These are the most crazy…you’ve got an abstract, conceptualist artist who thinks the band is an art installation.”

And of course, Brian Eno (Ipswich, 1966; Winchester College of Art, 1969), who appears to have been willed into being by the collective mind of the British art schools. One of the undying myths about David Bowie is that he went to art school—he didn’t, unlike many of his peers, but it’s as if we demand that he must have.

Newman first attended Winchester, then transferred to Watford College of Art, where he concentrated in illustration (“I could not only be in the band but design the album covers as well”).

At Watford, Newman discovered a lively group of art educators and theorists: instructors during his time included Charles Harrison (see ART + LANGUAGE), Peter Schmidt and, critically for Newman, Hansjörg Mayer, who became his second-year tutor and who saw his role as keeping the university administration off Newman’s back so that Newman could devote his time to getting a band together.

“He enabled me to just get on with stuff,” Newman recalled. Mayer, Schmidt, and Eno, who was a regular visitor to Watford, “encouraged what we called intuitive orienteering, a way of saying ‘there are no boundaries and you’ll only discover something new by trying new things.’ It wasn’t airy fairy do-what-you-like-and-discover-yourself; it was hard line and quite strict.”

Watford provided Newman with the space and time he needed to help invent Wire, and he credits the likes of Mayer for not “treating me like some stupid student…there’s a process by which individuals go from being just a general person to being someone who can inhabit the kind of life you need to if you’re an artist. I went through that process there.”

“I managed to convince some people that I might do something one day,” he said in 2006. “Which is what I think art school is supposed to be about.”

Are the students in art schools less straight than those in the universities? “That’s probably true,” Lewis replied. And Newman added, “Less conventional. You’re not likely in an art school to meet more than two or three people you see eye to eye with. But in a university you might not meet any.”

New York Rocker interview of Wire, July 1978.

The sole member of Wire who completed his art school degree was Graham Lewis, which caused some resentment when the band was first forming (Lewis: “There was hostility because I was ex-Hornsey. I was in London and I was doing well”).

Hornsey College of Art was a punk generator: in the early to mid-Seventies, Lewis, Viv Albertine, Adam Ant, The Raincoats’ Gina Birch and Ana da Silva, and The Specials’ Jerry Dammers were all there. Lewis had wound up at Hornsey after doing a foundation course at Lanchester Polytechnic, where “the friends I had in the painting and sculpture department all seemed incredibly unhappy…and were doing stuff that was a real reaction to what was going on.”

At Hornsey, Lewis first concentrated in textiles, pursuing “textile printing on a rather more abstract fashion than what they considered commercial,” he told Kevin Eden. “I was interested in pop images and how things are repeated over and over. They suggested that I go to the Fashion department and learn how to make things out of what I produced.” This appealed to him, and he got a degree in Fashion Design.

Bruce Gilbert’s time in art education was spottier. He originally wanted to do a two-year course at St Albans School of Art but didn’t get in, so he went to Leicester Polytechnic, first studying graphics (“totally unsuitable”), then fine arts (“I failed miserably”). “I decided I couldn’t see myself as a graphic designer, so in 1971 I left and started painting seriously,” he said. A few years later, he got a job as a media specialist in the library at Watford, which he described as “the end of a very golden period…a typical small provincial art school with lots of interesting people working there.”

The outlier was Robert Grey, who spent two terms studying humanities at Thames Polytechnic, hated it, and left. “I seriously went on my own path and decided not to be influenced by anyone else,” he later said.

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