Listening Post: Wire — Not About to Die
In the late 1970s, Wire invented a certain variety of art punk—short, rhythmic, minimalist, melodic and smart. The band’s first three albums, Pink Flag in 1977, Chairs Missing in 1978 and 154 in 1979, set a template for a whole generation of 1980s bands: the Feelies, R.E.M., Sonic Youth, the Wipers, Mission of Burma, the Minutemen and others. Their brash, engaging aesthetic continues to reverberate through rock and pop—Jay Reatard, Franz Ferdinand, Shopping, the Woolen Men and a hundred others all sound like they spent time listening to the first Wire albums.
Wire itself moved on briskly from this early salvo, refusing to play early material (relegating that role, on one tour, to a cover band called Ex Lion Tamers) from 1985 forward and moving instead into a synth-y, dance-y phase.
Perhaps because they were so insistent on leaving the past behind them, Wire spent years resisting a release of the material now on Not About to Die, a collection of demos and alternate versions of songs from Chairs Missing and 154, as well as other tunes that never got an official pressing. Cassette copies circulated unofficially, and in the early 1980s, Amnesia Records released a bootleg version despite the band’s objections.
The demos are rough sketches, made without much attention to production and further damaged by several generations of tape-to-tape copying. But while no one would mistake this material for an official Wire release, it provides fascinating insight on Wire’s creative process. Early versions of “French Film (Blurred),” “Used To,” and “Being Sucked in Again,” document the development of Chairs Missing, while prototypes for “Once Is Enough,” “On Returning” and “Two People in a Room” hint at the rough beginnings of 154. “The Other Window,” blown out on 154 into a baroque space opera, is here a galloping, punk song.
The whole enterprise sheds light on a period when Wire was reinventing itself—not the only time but a significant one—and the way their songs changed as their ideas about what they were doing changed. It’s also a lot of fun, and if you like the earliest Wire best, it’ll make you happy in the most basic way.
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