Mid-period Wire

Woebot

Well-known member
more non-consensual middle-brow revelations.

more efforts to shatter the sensible and cautious lock-down on good taste.

more musical life after the shark jump.

we all love pink flag, chairs missing and 154.

but drill, the ideal copy and a bell is a cup - these are GREAT records.

always dismissed as watered-down new order (what's that even?) or cashing in on their existing audience.

just sayin.
 

STN

sou'wester
I don’t have much to add, except that I love A Bell is a Cup, and when I last tried to listen to chairs missing I pretty much hated it (other than Outdoor Miner, which I think is a beautiful song): wibbly voices, clever clever lyrics. It just seemed incredibly silly.

I guess by the 80s everyone thought everything had moved on and didn’t notice that Wire had moved on too.
 

blissblogger

Well-known member
I did like The Ideal Copy quite a bit at the time, and whatever the single was off of Bell Is Cup

Think those records suffer a bit from the effects of mid-Eighties production, as does quite a lot of Eighties alternative type music - there's a sort of wispiness, a lack of punch.

(The worst casualty of I can think of it, although there's a lot of competition, is the Woodentops's debut album).

Saw Wire's return-to-action "debut" gig at Oxford's Museum of Modern Art in '85 I think it was - terrific, the 'Drill' era sound, pretty ferocious. Seem to remember the lighting was very good too - but then from what I've read that was always a strong feature of their gigs (art students, figures they would have a feeling for light!)

You know what I think is really good in the Wire-related zone of the middle Eighties - the He Said stuff.

Particularly this song


Interviewed Graham Lewis about this project, in a little Vietnamese cafe in Chinatown. Great bloke.
 

john eden

male pale and stale
I remember hearing Drill on John Peel - I think possibly that was one of the first Wire tunes I heard.

Similarly, I heard the Big Black cover of Heartbeat before the Wire version (and saw members of Wire perform it as part of the encore for Big Black's show at the Clarendon). And Rollins' cover of Ex-Lion Tamer.

Eardrum Buzz I always rated too.

I agree with blissblogger about some of the production, but I have a soft spot for 80s stuff anyway for obvious reasons.

I thought Wire had come back into fashion a bit now? Like with The Fall they'd tapped into a general appreciation just by hanging around for long enough and not doing nostalgia?
 

padraig (u.s.)

a monkey that will go ape
ya that's fantastic, reminds me of Antena etc crossed with a slowed-down Depeche Mode, kinda surprised it's not already a cosmic/Balearic classic

not familiar w/post-154 Wire, but I do like some of their side projects - Dome/Cupol is great, and this also, produced by the Gilbert/Lewis duo around the same time.
 

padraig (u.s.)

a monkey that will go ape
actually everything on the Dome label is really good

seriously far out Irish astral exploration on a unique homemade dulcimer kind of thing (I think)
 
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