Colin Newman

Immersed in Thought: What Is Lost Will Return

by coldwarnightlife
written by coldwarnightlife

The dreampop of Immersion on What Is Lost Will Return combines the faded seaside glamour of England’s south coast with a European sensibility. The new album from Malka Spigel (Minimal Compact) and Colin Newman (Wire) maintains a detached air of magic realism while holding to familiar anchors.

“Nephology” opens on a line that will not be hurried. The steady motion is accompanied by Newman talking about clouds in the way that Robert Wyatt once reflected on Wiltshire’s porcine housing. The structure creates space for reversed sounds to float and spread. It’s all so much vapour.

“Breaking Free, Diversity, Evolution” brings Ed Chivers in on drums. The lyric treats borders and other structures as useful fictions to be transcended. It’s a sing-along reply to the regressive billionaire-sponsored politics of the mid-2020s. “We Don’t Need Your Validation” continues the intellectual theme with the sharpest three minutes on the record – a pulse aimed at follower counts and door policies designed to keep your dopamine levels within prescribed thresholds.

The instrumentals stop the album turning into a polemic. “Megafauna” is the dark middle: dub weight under guitar that looms. A flute line refuses the pastoral, while a synth does the work of a didgeridoo. Matt Schulz (Holy Fuck) covers much of the kit; and, on this track, the drums feel like the foundations of a space rock epic. “Childsplay” and “Frequencies & Echoes” finish the run with modular colour and guitar sanded of rock-and-roll gloss.

The title track talks up differences without a pamphlet. “Radio Signals” asks who is actually on the other end of the dial. The production stays spare – pads against programmed and live drums, with guitar used as rhythm as much as lead.

Like a lenticular image, this is an album for dark rooms and open spaces. How it appears depends entirely on how you approach it.

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Shine On: Bruce Gilbert

by coldwarnightlife
written by coldwarnightlife

Bruce Gilbert approaches music as material to play with. A guitar can provide structure, but so can a tape loop, a repeated word, a contact microphone, or the sound of an object struck until its ordinary purpose disappears.

Wire gave Gilbert a public role as the art-pop ensemble’s guitarist, principal lyricist, and visual strategist. When the group first took a hiatus, in 1980, he continued to work with bassist Graham Lewis under various guises and in different combinations: Cupol, Dome, B.C. Gilbert and G. Lewis, P’o, Yclept, MZUI (with Russell Mills), and Duet Emmo (with Daniel Miller). They turned the studio into a place for construction rather than documentation. Gilbert later described the core principle as one of useful economy: make things, impose no rules, and work quickly.

Solo commissions for dance extended that method. So did his writing and production with Angela Conway, as A.C. Marias, and the guitar (de)constructions of Orr with Robert Hampson and Paul Kendall.

There were stutters in Wire’s timeline, but Gilbert left Wire definitively in 2004, after the triumph of Send and years of frustration with management and direction. Subsequent projects included Ordier (2004), the multimedia work Soundtrack for an Exhibition (2006), Oblivio Agitatum (2009), the Touch single “Monad” (2011), and Diluvial (2013), based on an installation addressing climate change and creation stories.

Gilbert’s career can be seen as a struggle against confinement within stable structures – whether the framework of a band or the DJ’s traditional role in a club setting. His catalogue traces a line from art-punk’s destabilising energy to experimental electronic sound, contemporary composition, and audiovisual installation – always with a restlessness energy that subverts a biographer’s attempts at certainty.

10. Wire – Practice Makes Perfect

Within Wire, Gilbert’s poetry was key to the band’s appeal and elusiveness. Wordplay and chance observations supported the dynamic of  reinvention that kept the group from living in their own nostalgia.

“Practice Makes Perfect” opens Chairs Missing with a looping guitar figure that seems to have started before the listener arrived. Although it quickly launches into minimalist stabs that strain post-punk nerves, half of the song is a dissolution into experimentation, haunting word repetition, and Eastern promises that subvert your initial expectations.

The tension between Gilbert and Colin Newman was a source of friction in the band, but their creative interactions were also the fuel that propelled them to moments like this.

9. B.C. Gilbert & G. Lewis – R

The four pieces on 3R4 divide authorship between Gilbert and Lewis. “R,” which occupies the second side, is credited to Gilbert alone. The pair share the production on the EP, with Gilbert listed on guitar, bass, and percussion across the release.

Twenty minutes in, “R” shows no sign of a traditional song taking form. Low tones spread, percussion appears without establishing a conventional groove, and guitar is treated as a source of atmospherics rather than defined tone.

8. A.C. Marias – One of Our Girls (Has Gone Missing)

Angela Conway is sometimes described in the music press as “Bruce Gilbert’s girlfriend.” That reductionist description manages to be patriarchal and oblivious at the same time.

Besides her initials, what Conway brought to the A.C. Marias was a dreamy, elegant voice that swirled while Gilbert’s guitar dug deep into the terrain. His work anchored the tracks, allowing Conway to seep into spaces like vapour. In this case, the arrangement does not dramatise the subject – it leaves an outline where a person should be.

Conway and Gilbert share the writing credits for the album. Production was divided among Gilbert, Gareth Jones, John Fryer and Paul Kendall – a who’s who of Mute production at the time. Gilbert’s guitar is still recognisable throughout: dry, persistent and unwilling to resolve the tension. It works as an exercise in sonic edging.

7. Gilbert Hampson Kendall – Quad

Orr brought Gilbert together with Robert Hampson and Paul Kendall for the first release in Mute’s Parallel Series in 1996. Apart from one or two samples, every sound came from guitars. Kendall was then allowed to mutate and brutalise the material.

“Quad” conceals that source efficiently. Long bands of sound press against highly electrical detail, while isolated events cross the stereo field without establishing a beat. Guitar functions here as a provider of friction and current. The title promises four sides, but the track declines to provide a stable centre.

6. Bruce Gilbert – Work for ‘Do You Me? I Did’

Gilbert’s first solo album, This Way, grew from music commissioned by choreographer Michael Clark. He constructed the material from home recordings, studio improvisation, and what he called a relentless abuse of studio effects, with Blackwing’s John Fryer engineering.

“Work for ‘Do You Me? I Did’” proceeds in large, grey planes. Rhythm is implied by the rate of change rather than supplied by drums. Dissonance gathers slowly, reaches a hard brightness, and falls away. Written for bodies in motion, it avoids telling them where the ground is.

5. Cupol – Kluba Cupol

“Kluba Cupol” was written and produced by Gilbert and Lewis, with Russell Mills also performing.

Its central percussion began with a contact microphone attached to an ashtray. The object was struck against the floor while Mills played bodhrán, producing a single extended take shaped by the available tape and the duration of the intended performance. The result is physical and faintly dadaist.

Experimental music rarely admits how much it owes to the sonic capabilities of office furniture.

4. Dome – Cruel When Complete

The first Dome album allowed Gilbert and Lewis to abandon any obligation to behave like a band. They produced it together at Blackwing, on consecrated ground, using voices, guitars, bass, percussion, drums, and tapes as interchangeable resources. “Cruel When Complete” is the exception in its writing credits: it belongs to Gilbert and Angela Conway, whose voice is identified on the track.

Conway sounds close to the microphone but detached from the room. Around her, rhythm stumbles into position and treated sounds gather without settling into accompaniment. Gilbert leaves the song partly assembled: achieving finality would have been unkind.

3. Dome – To Speak

“To Speak” occupies more than eighteen minutes of Will You Speak This Word. Gilbert, Lewis, and violinist David Drinkwater share the writing credit. The recording also includes Vince Clarke, who supervised the use of his rather expensive Fairlight CMI.

Violin and saxophone (brought in by Terrence Leach) begin in abrasive conversation. Acoustic guitar and percussion then establish a rough terrain before electronics remove the remaining landmarks. The number of contributors does not make the piece expansive in a welcoming sense. It creates a larger enclosure, with each new sound testing the walls.

2. Duet Emmo – Or So It Seems

Duet Emmo combined Gilbert and Lewis with Mute founder, Daniel Miller. The name famously combines Dome and Mute in an anagram, while all three musicians share the writing credit across the sole 1983 album that resulted from the project.

Gilbert’s relationship with Mute arose from a chance meeting on tour, when Wire crossed paths with Robert Rental and The Normal. Miller kept in touch, between Depeche Mode commitments, and released iconic works by Gilbert and Lewis (He Said) as solo artists.

The title track places Lewis’s voice over a sequence that moves with severe patience. Dome’s roughened surfaces meet Miller’s synthesiser discipline in a track drenched in romance. If remains the most beautiful love song ever made.

1. Wire – Blessed State

“Blessed State” is the only track on a Wire studio album for which Gilbert received sole credit for creating both music and lyrics. Graham Lewis sings it, while Gilbert is credited with guitar.

The bass moves in a patient loop. Guitar passes across it in thin metallic strokes, and the vocal appears to examine stability from a position just outside it. Nothing is forced towards a climax. The arrangement holds its shape while every surface suggests corrosion.

Gilbert’s work is often described through abstraction, noise, and experiment. “Blessed State” concentrates those instincts inside a complete song. Control is not a retreat from disturbance – it is the mechanism that gives it presence.

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Shine On: Graham Lewis

by coldwarnightlife
written by coldwarnightlife

With his flat cap and specs, Graham Lewis looks every bit the English chap abroad. These markers of his origins belie the three decades he has spent living in Sweden – a country that, by now, could claim him as a cultural icon of their own.

The Englishman among them started making music as the bassist for Wire. An art-school band that wasn’t formed at art school, Wire are one of the most influential acts to emerge from the 1970s. They were post-punk while punk was still a thing and have staunchly resisted categorisation for four decades. Either together with the band’s original guitarist, Bruce Gilbert, or on his own, Lewis has never been contained by the borders of the band: his experimental and leftfield output has freely branched as a counterpoint to Wire’s commercial success.

As we have previously noted:

Edvard Graham Lewis has appeared in a variety of guises since his first days with Wire. As one half of Dome, he erected a tent inside a recording studio. As one-third of Duet Emmo, he voiced the most achingly beautiful single ever written. As four-quarters of He Said, Lewis reimagined pop as an intellectual pursuit. The list of fractions and factions takes us through P’o, 27#11, Halo, Hox, Ocsid – a fluid combination of characters, both musical and typographic, dissolving and reforming. The unifying thread is a shifting tension between the lyrical and experimental; music that sometimes approaches commercial pop but draws away just in time. You can’t always dance to it, but you’ll have fun trying.

10. Wire – I Should Have Known Better

Although most vocals in Wire are handled by Colin Newman, it is hard to imagine the band without Lewis’ own contributions. The most iconic of Wire songs, “Pink Flag,” wouldn’t be the same without his deep tones insistently calling back to Newman, “How many?”

One of the most powerful Wire songs, “I Should Have Known Better,” finds Lewis taking the lead on the vocals to great effect. With intelligent lyrics, showing psychological insights beyond the wit of the usual post-punk band, the track hasn’t aged a day since Lewis crafted and executed it forty years ago.

9. Dome – To Speak

Starting in 1980, Lewis and Bruce Gilbert, Wire’s guitarist and surreal lyricist, went into Blackwing Studios to play the room as an instrument. For one album, they erected a red tent in the main sound room and explored what noises they could make inside and outside of it.

This project yielded several albums as Dome, including one recorded with the help of Vince Clarke, who was in residence at Blackwing with his Fairlight CMI. Clarke’s partner at the time, Deb Danahay, ended up being sampled on the Fairlight and included in this track.

8. Cupol – Kluba Copol

The B-side to the 12″ single, “It’s Been Like This for Ages,” “Kluba Kupol” is effectively one side of an LP. Clocking in at 20:28, the track is an ambient track based on a rhythmic groove.

It’s the kind of impossibly cool track that DJs will drop if they are really brave, but it is best enjoyed with headphones with the lights down. Lewis is working with Gilbert again here.

7. UUUU

An experimental project undertaken by Lewis with Valentina Magaletti (Tomaga, Vanishing Twin), Thighpaulsandra (Coil) and Matt Simms (Bruce Gilbert’s take-out in Wire), UUUU have to date released two records on Editions Mego.

Their self-titled album combined rhythms with touches of jazz, musique concrete, Krautrock and improvised electronica.

6. Edvard Graham Lewis – We’ve Lost Your Mind

Lewis released two albums on Editions Mego in 2014. The highlight for us was this track. As we said at the time:

It’s unmistakably Lewis material, with an almost conventional start that ultimately dissolves into fractals of noise. Immense.

5. 27#11

Lewis collaborated with Thomas Öberg (Bob Hund) and Marcus Turnkey on a single in 2006. Covering The Monks’ “Oh How to Do Now,” they leaned on Carl Michael von Hauswolff – another Lewis collaborator – for the artwork.

4. H-A-L-O – Two Too State

Recorded with Örjan Örnkloo, the H-A-L-O project saw Lewis in great form. The name was taken from the military tactic of dropping scuba divers from high altitude, which is as postmodern a concept as the music.

3. HOX – Icon of I Can

Andreas Karperyd joined Lewis for an album as HOX in 1999, and fifteen years later again. The duo made something closer to pop than Lewis’ normal experimental output, hinting at the commercial possibilities latent in the latter’s work.

2. Duet Emmo – Or So It Seems

A collaboration with Daniel Miller (The Normal, Silicon Teens, Sunroof!), Duet Emmo is an anagram of the words, Mute and Dome. For this project, Gilbert and Lewis were joined by North London’s best one-finger composer for an album of experimental material that somehow yielded a devastatingly beautiful single.

“Or So It Seems,” the title track, is a love song without peer. It has lyrics to melt the heart of any woman, sung hauntingly by Lewis over sequences melded from waveforms far ahead of their time.

1. He Said – Pump

Lewis’ solo work as He Said inspired the sound of Nine Inch Nails. The story goes that Trent Reznor sought to record at Blackwing Studios in Southwark and engage engineer John Fryer after listening to the He Said recordings. Reznor got what he wanted but neglected to credit his inspiration.

The quality of the He Said songs is very high. Several singles from the two albums that Lewis released under this name have become permanent fixtures in alternative DJ sets: “Only One I” and “Pump.” The latter has a funkiness that only a bassist could have conceived, together with a leftfield feel that only a member of Wire would have added.

“Grass,” as Lewis intones, “doesn’t grow on busy streets.” It might be a statement of the obvious, but it takes a poet to point it out.

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Colin Newman’s Solo Albums Reissued

by coldwarnightlife
written by coldwarnightlife

Colin Newman has always been played up as Wire’s straight man. While Bruce Gilbert and Graham Lewis joined forces, both within the band and their assorted side projects (Cupol, Dome, Duet Emmo, etc.), to explore performance art or the potential of the studio as an instrument, Newman – or so goes the story – wrote songs with commercial potential, developed production skills and explored the practical side of the music industry. There is a grain of truth in this narrative, particularly as Newman’s solo material tacks closer to Wire’s sound than that of his colleagues, but his creative output is sufficiently varied to subvert it.

Whether making dance music (Immersion, Oracle), doing indie (Githead) or producing other artists (Minimal Compact, Virgin Prunes, Parade Ground), Newman has always demonstrated a knack for balancing the commercial with the experimental. Nowhere is this tension as evident as in the three solo albums that he recorded for Beggar’s Banquet and 4AD during Wire’s first hiatus, between 1980 and 1982. Thanks to Newman’s efforts, this troika has been remastered and reissued by Sentient Sonics, together with additional material in the CD versions.

LP-3.5mmSPINE_GZ.qxdThe elements of A-Z, Newman’s first solo album, took shape at the same time as Wire’s 154. Properly regarded as the pinnacle of Wire’s first period, 154 was supposed to launch the band into the stratosphere; instead, after Bruce Gilbert panicked at the idea of commercial success, they adjourned sine die and let the moment pass them by. While Lewis and Gilbert retired to Blackwing Studios to record loops and drones, Newman was able to develop the material that was left behind into a formidable album of alternative pop. Although “Alone” became the best-known track from A-Z, after it was used in the soundtrack for Silence of the Lambs, the album is also notable for the original version of “Not Me,” which was covered on the first This Mortal Coil album. It also features “&Jury,” the kind of track that would keep teenaged Canadian kids awake all night listening to Brave New Waves.

Produced by Mike Thorne, A-Z retains much of the sonic flavour of the trio of Wire albums that appeared on Harvest/EMI. The CD version of the new release includes a set of demos and alternative versions that reveal Newman’s more primitive aural aesthetic, including demos recorded at Riverside Studios. These help to explain why there arose a disagreement between Newman and Thorne over production styles, and why Newman did eventually feel the pull to develop his own studio skills.

PF 17LP coverFor his second solo album, Newman veered into more conceptual territory, drawing upon his prog rock roots. Provisionally entitled the singing fish eschewed distinctive song titles in favour of a series of consecutively numbered “fish” tracks. Recorded entirely by Newman as instrumentals, albeit with some engineering help, PETSF owes something to Brian Eno’s ambient offerings, and the result was ostensibly described by 4AD’s Ivo Watts-Russell as an album waiting for the technology to catch up with it. The additional tracks on the CD release don’t add much to the canon but will suit completists; particularly those who have been hunting for “Here Come the Fleeing Rabbits.”

PF 17LP coverThe third solo release from Newman, Not To, returned to more traditional terrain. “Remove for Improvement” is one of those tracks that can’t be called “lost” because it never went away but always deserved a wider airing. There are also reworkings of songs developed with Lewis or Gilbert, including “We Meet Under Tables.” Not To is half-way to being a Wire album, and it features not only the crisp drumming of Robert Grey throughout but also a guest appearance by Gilbert.

A scant 22 (!) bonus tracks accompany the CD version, including a surprisingly reggae-based version of “Greensleeves” and an excellent alternative version of “123 beep beep beep.” This CD is one to explore more deeply, as it broods, bops and jams with levels of intensity and simplicity that are sometimes at odds with the main album.

Newman has more solo albums to his credit, which were released during his Brussels period or after he launched the swim~ label. Hopefully, these will also see a reissue in the near future.

 

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Wire’s Psychedelic Interlude

by coldwarnightlife
written by coldwarnightlife

5ac18287-b443-466a-9c30-686ba909c7cdWire‘s residency in Islington last year, as headliners for the DRILL:Lexington festival, showed off the songs sculpted into their eponymous, fourteenth studio album. Hewn from sonic granite, Wire was a unique out-take from the art-rock outfit’s forty-year career; but then, each of the preceding releases has followed a different course. Change Becomes Us, said the title of the thirteenth studio album, and change is the only constant in the band’s trajectory. Even if there is a distinctive Wire sound and they inhabit the same planet as the rest of us, they follow a less predictable orbit and make better use of space.

The proof is in the pressing: Nocturnal Koreans, the fifteenth studio album, is a breezy set, floating on gentle whispers and propelled by more insistent gusts. There are folk-psychedelic airs blowing through the vents of “Dead Weight,” on which vocal tasks are shared by Colin Newman and Graham Lewis, and the material is far from the post-industrial urgency of their Send-era tracks. There might be echoes of Newman’s Wiltshire upbringing in the studio work, as even the fuzz of “Still” opens up into plains as wide as a cloudless English sky.

The songs on Nocturnal Koreans started life as songs left over from the Wire sessions, but they were subjected to revision in the studio until they emerged from their hard-drive chrysalis. Newman explains:

The WIRE album was quite respectful of the band, and Nocturnal Koreans is less respectful of the band—or, more accurately, it’s the band being less respectful to itself—in that it’s more created in the studio, rather than recorded basically as the band played it, which was mostly the case with WIRE. A general rule for this record was: any trickery is fair game, if it makes it sound better.

As heard in songs like “Pilgrim Trade,” the studio wizardry that Newman has mastered in his years as a producer is spell-binding. There are dreampop artists who can only imagine the spectral conjuring that Wire are capable of. At 25:57, Nocturnal Koreans is the briefest of trips, but it bears repeated listening to appreciate the subtle shades of psychedelia embedded in “Fishes Bones” alone.

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Shine On: Colin Newman

by coldwarnightlife
written by coldwarnightlife

Colin Newman describes himself as the spotty boy at school, who had trouble with the local Wiltshire bullies. His escapes were listening to Todd Rundgren’s “A Wizard, a True Star” in his bedroom and close-reading of the weekly NME with Desmond Simmons. Together with Simmons, he started a duo that never performed outside of his friend’s living room but gave him the confidence to start a life in music.

Newman left Salisbury for art school in Watford, where he fell in with a band led by George Gill. One day, the band had to rehearse without Gill, who had broken his leg, and discovered that they sounded a lot better without their principal songwriter. Gill’s leg recovered but his musical standing didn’t, so the band went on to become Wire (and, for a time, Wir). Newman’s role in the band has evolved from rhythm guitarist and lead vocalist to include production duties, leveraging the skills that he has honed working with other artists and making solo recordings during Wire’s periodic hiatuses.

Wire has never been a monoline undertaking. Although originally pigeon-holed as a punk/new wave act by the press, the band’s intellectual genealogy owes as much to Marcel Duchamp as Malcolm McLaren: its art school roots occasionally break through the surface as experimental composition and performance art. However, while other band members tested the limits of sound and the subversion of expectations, Newman often found himself exploring the practical side of the industry, including independent distribution (Post Everything), recording (Swim~) and performance (Drill Festivals). Besides Wire, Newman maintains a separate recording project, Githead, together with his partner, Malka Spigel (ex-Minimal Compact), composer Robin Rimbaud (aka Scanner) and Max Franken (also ex-Minimal Compact).

10. Colin Newman – Alone

Newman’s “Alone,” a track from his first solo album, 1980’s A-Z, made a high-profile appearance in the movie, Silence of the Lambs, where it served to set the atmosphere for a scene showing the house occupied by the crazed Buffalo Bill. The brooding, dark tone of the song was drawn out for a cover on This Mortal Coil’s Filigree & Shadow, but the original track still sets the bar for nervous anxiety.

9. Wire – Dot Dash

Written together with Graham Lewis, “Dot Dash” captures Wire’s early aesthetic: short, sometimes snarled, but entirely infectious and hovering on the border between pop and punk. Released as a single in 1978, its chorus is a Morse code message from the future. The single filled the gap between the Pink Flag and Chairs Missing albums, acting as a bridge between the taught, Spartan style of the former and more open, expansive leanings of the latter.

8. Colin Newman – & Jury

Newman’s solo work yielded three albums between 1980 and 1983. The first of these, A-Z, has been characterised as the Wire album that would have followed 154, but for Bruce Gilbert putting the band on ice. While Newman’s songs could have slotted into the Wire groove, there is a question whether the band could have agreed on them. 154 reflected a growing tension within the group, reinforced by the need to subvert expectations, and the songs on A-Z are leftfield art/pop held within a relatively conventional framework. They remain strong compositions – much stronger than some of the material on 154 – and there is something to be said for them having been aired in Newman’s own space.

7. Parade Ground – Moans

Newman helmed Parade Ground’s “Moans,” and the sound of this track clearly owes something to his studio performance. Part of the Brussels scene of the 1980s, in which Newman became immersed, Parade Ground crossed Joy Division with Fad Gadget, maintaining a po-faced look and sound that contrasted with the commercial excesses of the times. Newman adds vocals, keyboards and guitars here, and the result is a certified indietronica gem.

6. Virgin Prunes – Decline and Fall

After Wire hit the wall, following a disastrous tour supporting Roxy Music in 1979, Newman turned to his solo work, but the lure of production and the need to make a living led him into a studio chair for the first album from Virgin Prunes. Rough Trade had talent-spotted the Irish post-punk outfit and wanted something quite specific and quite general: “A pop record,” is what Rough Trade boss Geoff Travis asked of Newman. He found the task challenging, as the Prunes were desperate to avoid any comparisons to another Dublin outfit then gaining attention: U2. It didn’t help that one of the guitarists was The Edge’s brother. Newman described himself “bludgeoning” the Prunes into releasing “Baby Turns Blue” as a single, but the song he has expressed the most appreciation for was “Decline and Fall,” an album track.

5. Wire – Drill

Poor Suzanne Summers didn’t know what had hit her when Wire performed on NBC’s The Tonight Show in 1987. The most Establishment entertainment programme on American television was usually hosted by the comedian, Johnny Carson. On the night Wire played a musical slot, Summers was in the host’s chair and Wire were touring “Drill” – so that’s what they played. Based on a riff from early punk-tinged hit, “12XU,” which had been abstracted into a repetitive framework that could stretch to 30 minutes in performance, a key vocal element was the onomatopoeic, “Dugga dugga dugga.” Summers was complimentary, but she would have known that the audience at home, watching from their Sealy Posturepedic beds, must have thought that the band had landed from outer space.

4. Minimal Compact – My Will

Brussels has played an interesting role as the cradle for a lot of alternative music. For a long time the home to Tuxedomoon, the birthplace of New Beat and the centre for many EBM artists, such as Front 242, the city was also the base for the Crammed record label. Minimal Compact were part of that scene when they wrote off to Newman – legend has it, at the suggestion of Daniel Miller of Mute Records – to ask him to produce them. They had already hit the US college radio sweet spot with “Next One Is Real,” and Newman found he had a number of shared interests with the band. One thing led to another, as they say, and Malka Spigel became his life and musical partner.

3. Githead – Take Off

The Githead project was intended as a one-off live arrangement, for the tenth anniversary of Newman’s Swim~ label, but it sparked an interest that has kept it going for four albums. Although part of its work will sit comfortably to Wire fans, Githead has its own sound and feel, and the sense of familiarity comes from Newman’s voice rather than from a derivative style.

2. Immersion – Metal Sea

In the 1990s, Newman became interested in the prospects of electronic dance music and home recording. One of his projects was Immersion, which became an avenue for exploring ambient and dancefloor-oriented tracks together with Malka Spigel. The time spent working on this material helped to refine his recording skills, which led to a critical reappraisal of the production of Wire’s 1980s recordings and set the stage for Newman to exercise greater control over the band’s future studio sound.

1. Wire – Pink Flag

If Wire has a signature song, it is “Pink Flag.” The title track from their first album is an apocalyptic vision for the New World, rendered in two chords, with lyrics that read like a late-twentieth century Book of Relevations. Like a club track, it breaks down and builds up to an ecstatic release, but one that is delayed for as long as the band keep hitting E. “Pink Flag” has been performed as a minimalist composition and a wall-of-sound with a massed guitar collective, but the anchor is always Newman’s vocal contribution, imbued with more determination than menace.

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Wire Announce New Album, DRILL:LEXINGTON Festival

by coldwarnightlife
written by coldwarnightlife

Art/pop stalwarts, Wire, have announced a new album. Simply called Wire, the first eponymous release and the thirteenth studio album from the band is expected on 13 April 2015. That event will launch the DRILL:LEXINGTON festival, which takes place at The Lexington in Islington from 14 through 18 April 2015. The line-up for the festival is still to be announced, but Wire will be headlining each night.

We don’t reprint press releases, as a rule, but all we have to go on about the album, at the moment, is a preview at Vice and the following information from the official pinkflag.com Web site:

Their 13th studio album – simply titled Wire – comprises material that was written with the album in mind, but toured extensively first, as well as songs that Newman introduced to the group in the studio just prior to recording. The idea was to get the most spontaneous reaction possible from the musicians, and far from the rough and ready results one might expect from such a tack, Wire is full of swooning pop melodies with a 60s tinge and an irresistible, near motorik rhythmic momentum. One can recognise certain melodic inflections, guitar and bass motifs, and drum rhythms from Wire’s idiosyncratic vocabulary but it has a remarkable freshness.


The basic tracks were recorded at Rockfield Studios near Monmouth, with overdubs added at Brighton Electric last December following the group’s DRILL : BRIGHTON Festival. The 11 tracks selected for release were the ones that came together most naturally.


From the outset Wire was an alliance between four very different characters and continues today with the addition, in 2012, of It Hugs Back guitarist Matthew Simms, who is around thirty years younger than the other group members. “With Matt there was a really new dynamic that had appeared in the group’s sound and that was something we wanted to capture, utilise and be creative with,” says Lewis.


Wire is the first album where Simms has been involved in formulating the material from the ground up, but when the group’s particular chemistry starts working he is now very much part of the process.


“With ‘Sleepwalking’, I don’t think we even ran all the way through it before we recorded it.” Newman says. “Wire do this thing so well and there’s instant atmosphere. There’s my rhythm guitar, Matt playing lap steel, Graham (Lewis) playing bass with effects – there’s as much effects as bass – and Rob’s tolling drumming. It was already almost sustainable for six minutes with just that.”


Lewis also provides most of the lyrics for the album, their subject matter encompassing love songs, cryptic narratives and coded messages. One time, Newman asked Lewis to send over some unfinished, unformatted text so he wouldn’t be bound by what to use for the chorus. This material spawned two songs written on the same day, ‘Split Your Ends’ and the droll ‘In Manchester’. The latter has one of the album’s loveliest melodies, but it’s no coded paean to the city in its Baggy heyday. Instead this process led to the disorientating and rather absurd situation of having “In Manchester” as a soaring chorus, when the song is not about Manchester beyond a single line in the lyric.


As the album progresses, some of the sunlit pop tunes become more shadowy and it ultimately plunges into the musical black hole of ‘Harpooned’, eight churning minutes of the group’s darkest, most abrasive music to date, and a favourite in live performances since 2013.


Big money offers have been made to Wire to become part of the Heritage Rock industry, to get the original line-up back together and play only 70s music. These have all been unequivocally turned down. Fun though that might be, why plant yourself firmly back in the past when you are making new music this potent with the promise of more in the future?


“The point where our personal narratives meet is all about change – moving on and keeping it interesting for ourselves,” says Newman. “We’re in it for the long haul and this is a one-way trip.”

We’d note in passing that A Secret Wish, the Cold War Night Life-curated alternative music event, happens at the same venue as DRILL:LEXINGTON just a day later. It features the legendary producer and engineer, John Fryer, who has worked with Graham Lewis of Wire.

Wire official site: pinkflag.com
DRILL:LEXINGTON: Tickets

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Githead – Bringing the Sea to the City

by coldwarnightlife
written by coldwarnightlife

Githead are back with their fourth album, Waiting for a Sign, ready for release on 8 December 2014. As a preview, the four-piece ensemble have made “Bringing the Sea to the City” available through Soundcloud. With the line-up of Wire’s Colin Newman, Minimal Compact’s Malka Spigel and Max “The Carpenter” Franken, as well as Robin Rimbaud (aka Scanner), Githead are a fusion of styles and influences like no other. “Bringing…” is an elegant, summery track with the sumptuousness of shoegaze but signs of a new wave bloodline.

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