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Get ready to ramble: 21 shows you need to see before September

Music Features

Post-masters

Although they were thrown into the general category of punk when they formed back in 1976, there was always something . . . different about Wire. Newman’s sardonic voice — capable of being plaintive and yearning in one song (say, the shimmering effervescence of 154’s “Map Ref. 41ºN 93ºW”) and snarkily nasty with punk vitriol in the next (the pummeling proto-hardcore of Pink Flag’s “12XU”) — always met the music at odd angles. Which makes sense, since the simple no-fills clunk-clunk of the drums and the martial rigidity of the bass and twin guitars compelled their songs to move in straight lines. They had a prickly, studied attitude, like a buzzkill at a party. Newman recalls, “When Wire first played America in 1978 at CBGB’s, we were told that we couldn’t play, because we didn’t have proper songs, that they didn’t end properly. Bands like the Sex Pistols and the Clash were playing much more traditional rock songs than us. And for me, I could see them for what they were: there was great entertainment value, but it wasn’t so . . . interesting, what they were doing musically.”

What Wire were doing musically was, as Newman puts it, “taking a cutting tool to the whole notion of rock.” Their debut, 1977’s Pink Flag, was not so much a call to arms as a frigid and sarcastic commentary on the notion of rock and roll itself: 21 songs in 35 minutes. But instead of a relentless rock assault, you got a series of short, disturbing vignettes: melodic songs, energetic rave-ups, with all the indulgent fat of typical ’70s rock shaved off. “Rock music was mainly very tedious,” says Newman. “You see, the thing is, I don’t like rock and roll, and I never have. Fifties rock and roll, I mean. I grew up with this sound in the ’60s, which somehow seemed to be more in color, whereas the ’50s were more in black and white, or even brown and white. And the music all seemed very dreary, so I don’t have any warm feelings towards most rock and roll, so I don’t need to defend it or be in the tradition of it. So I’m quite happy to just, you know, take a big mallet or sledgehammer to it and smack it around a bit.”