#bruce gilbert

Wire

"Practice Makes Perfect"

“Fly by Wire”

WIRE, Toronto, 1987 & 1988

I was a music fan when I started my career as a photographer, so doing shoots with my favorite bands made up for the weird hours, hearing loss and lack of money. I was also learning on the job, not just as a photographer but as a fan. Not long after starting at Nerve, the free alternative music weekly where I got my start, my editor asked if I'd ever heard Wire. I'd heard of them - the Minutemen talked about them all the time - but I hadn't heard a note so he pressed a copy of their third (and at that point last) album, 154, in my hand. It was what passed for psychedelia at Nerve, and I was immediately hooked. Almost weeks afterwards news broke that the band had re-formed, and would be touring to promote their first new record, The Ideal Copy.

When they arrived to play RPM, a cavernous club by the waterfront, I showed up with only the vaguest idea of what I wanted to do and was met by four taciturn English gentlemen who seemed more interested in having a drink after soundcheck. I managed a few frames of a group photo with the harbour in the background, then snapped some informal portraits with my Mamiya C330 while the band congregated around the bar. Nearly forty years later they're interesting documents of the band at a particularly crucial point in their career, and that's pretty much how I'm presenting them here.

I stuck around to shoot Wire's show that night. They'd gone on tour with a band from New Jersey, the Ex-Lion Tamers, who performed the whole of Pink Flag, Wire's first record, from start to finish. As Wire didn't want to play any of their old songs, this was both convenient and clever; as Steve Coogan said, playing Factory Records founder Tony Wilson in the movie 24 Hour Party People, they were being post-modern before it was fashionable. Wire's show for that first tour was impressively minimal; drummer Robert Grey (alias Gotobed) had stripped down his kit to the bare essentials, as his mathematically precise drum parts on The Ideal Copy were occasionally indistinguishable from a drum machine. And their "light show" consisted of banks of bright white light that turned on when they started playing and turned off at the end of each song. As my editor Dave from Nerve put it at the time, it was like they were doing their whole set in air quotes.

When Wire returned to Toronto almost exactly a year later promoting their record A Bell is a Cup, I set myself to the task of getting the band photo I felt I'd failed to achieve the previous summer. This time they toured with Band of Susans as their opening act; I shot part of a roll of them and then went about my shoot with Wire. Bassist Graham Lewis had shed his mullet from the previous tour, and guitarist Bruce Gilbert had acquired a pair of impressive shades, but lead singer Colin Newman seemed to be wearing exactly the same outfit he had on a year before. I took them out to the street by the waterfront again, put a flash on my camera (a big new Metz this time, with a bounce attachment) and set the flash to take down the evening sky to a medium gray. This time I seemed to get the photo I had tried to take a year earlier. They would not, however, get published anywhere until today.

Christopher Petit

- Radio On (remix)