Wire have been so far ahead of their time that it’s only now, 30 years into the British band’s irregular career, that their audience are finally catching up to them. Wire were post-punk before punk even happened, stuffing the safety-pin fashion and paring their tunes down to compressed pieces of meta-pop. Their 1977 album Pink Flag had a direct influence on the forward-thinking bands of the American hardcore scene in the early ‘80s — by which time Wire had already packed it in, though not for long. By the mid-’80s, samplers and electronic instruments fuelled their return, and within a few years, singer/guitarist Colin Newman would be deep into drum ’n’ bass while Britpop siphoned off Wire’s more accessible aesthetics. EYE WEEKLY spoke with Newman on the line from his London studio as Wire prepared for their first proper North American tour in six years, supporting their new disc, Object 47.

You’ve mentioned that Wire never really break up or reform, but what keeps bringing you back after a hiatus?
Well, you have to look at the way it sort of ground to a halt in the various times it did. I mean, some things were really stupid and tiny reasons, which, you know in hindsight, cause you to be pretty pissed off, actually. I mean, certainly stopping in 1980 was complete commercial suicide — but whatever. There’s a sense like it’s just something that’s unfulfilled. You know, [we became] the most famous band you’ve never heard of. And it’s not like we want to be some massive mainstream success — it’s that we just always seem to be finding an audience. I’m really interested to see what’s going to happen in North America because we haven’t been there in a few years, and already in Europe we’ve played places this year we’ve never played.

Like Calgary, earlier this year [at the Sled Island Festival]?
That was a whole story. They’ve asked me to curate next year’s festival. We played two festivals this summer, the one in Calgary and the one in New York at [South Street] Seaport. And the one at Seaport was something like 3,000 people but it was at that point the biggest show we’d headlined.

I got into Wire through bands like the Minutemen and Minor Threat, and it seemed like those groups’ influences were so important in terms of defining what they were.
Especially with the early ’80s American hardcore, there’s a lot of Wire in that. It was obvious if you looked at it because Pink Flag did get good distribution in North America, whereas a lot of contemporary British albums didn’t. It was bound to have an impact. But it didn’t have an impact on that generation, the first kind of wave of people who bought it — it had an impact on the second generation who cared less about the traditions of rock ‘n’ roll. I mean, we played in Europe in ’78 and people would say, you know, “you guys can’t play, you don’t have any proper songs.” But they had these songs that everything was just so obvious, just the way the melodies went, and it was very traditional. And that was what [they] regarded as being able to play? Perhaps one wouldn’t express it in these terms, but you would say, “yeah, but a held-together string of clichés is not the same as coming up with something original.”

What inspires you to make a Wire record in 2008?
For me personally, Pro Tools was the next big revolution because I had been working with sequencing and sampling and suddenly it was just like recording. So in Wire’s studio I could record and manipulate audio in such a way that I didn’t have to care about data anymore.
We could be doing it fully in the analog domain, but it’s very expensive to do it like that. I’m too old to be an analog obsessive. When you’re in your 20s and you’re harking back to technologies and methodologies and whatever happened before you were born, you can live in some kind of slightly romantic kind of world. But if you’re old enough to have originally worked with the technologies and the methodologies and the aesthetics that are being so loved and adored by the 20-year olds, you’re just an old git. There’s a big difference. So me, I’m sticking with contemporary approaches.

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