Read & Burn

Wilson Neate

Description

Read & Burn is the first serious, in-depth appraisal of one of the most influential British bands to emerge during the punk era.

If Wire were briefly a punk band, however, it was largely by historical accident. Yet they seem never to have quite escaped the label—despite the fact that they had complicated and transformed it almost before they’d begun.

Wire’s story—which honours punk’s original but quickly forgotten commitment to the new—is one of constant remaking and remodelling, one that stubbornly resists reduction to a single identity. Their insistence on always doing something different has intensified the challenge of balancing artistic endeavour and commercial viability—a task made all the more difficult by the complex creative relationships between the band-members.

Tracing Wire’s diverse output from 1977 up until the present, Read & Burn does justice to their restlessly inventive body of work by developing a sustained critical account of their shifting approaches. It combines analysis and interpretation with perspective drawn from extensive interviews with past and present members of the group, as well as producers, collaborators, and associates.

Sujets

• Musique
• Histoire de la musique
• Music
• Musician
• Individual Composer

Informations

• Publié par: Jawbone Press
• Date de parution: 01 juin 2013
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781908279347
• Langue: English

Extrait

Read & Burn: A Book About Wire
by Wilson Neate
A Jawbone Book
First Edition 2012
Published in the UK and the USA by Jawbone Press
2a Union Court,
20–22 Union Road,
London SW4 6JP,
England
www.jawbonepress.com
Volume copyright © 2013 Outline Press Ltd. Text copyright © Wilson Neate. All rights reserved. No part of this book covered by the copyrights hereon may be reproduced or copied in any manner whatsoever without written permission, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in articles or reviews where the source should be made clear. For more information contact the publishers.
Contents
Foreword by Mike Watt
What This Book Isn’t
1976 And All That
Chapter 1: Four People In A Book
Chapter 2: 1976–77
Chapter 3: 1977–78
Chapter 4: 1979
Chapter 5: 1980–83
Chapter 6: 1983–87
Illustrations
Chapter 7: 1987–89
Chapter 8: 1989–90
Chapter 9: 1990–2000
Chapter 10: 2000–03
Chapter 11: 2003–08
Chapter 12: 2008–11
Chapter 13: 2012: What’s Past Is Prologue
Chapter 14: Famous Last Words
Selected Discography
Acknowledgements
Foreword by Mike Watt
truth be told: the first ten years of my experience w/wire were solely through their first three albums and the singles up to ‘our swimmer’, including the b-sides. I had never seen them play a gig ’til 1987. maybe they’d like it that way. I’d never even read an interview w/them then – I knew them solely through those recorded works of theirs. I will tell you they were way deep on me and d. boon and changed our lives forever. maybe they were more intense on us than ccr … there is us before hearing pink flag and there is us after hearing this music from england that made an abstract connect a concrete dream. we became minutemen from whatever we were before.
I love those cats so much and I know for sure d. boon also – we just want the best for them cuz we owe them a butt-load, a fucking ton-worth, I swear. they gave us the courage to try and look and find ourselves, they were the righteous friends you met from the middle of nowhere – just there cuz they are … we owe them cats SO FUCKING MUCH – we were from working people and they helped us by just them being them.
what I’m trying to say is let’s say you got a penknife and the art ain’t in the penknife but what is to be carved w/it. of course this ain’t my idea but it’s a way I can try to relate to something like this. you get your mind blown by something you weren’t ready for and all of a sudden you find a launch pad for what you might call an inner speak, a resonance of that dna manifested by stuff like your thumbprint but w/a face, w/a kind of intent but also that of a flail (even dervish-like). and in our case, a launch pad for our minutemen way: boiling down stuff into what we called ‘econo’, which also happened to fit our lives, coming from working people. yeah, we got the idea of ‘jamming econo’ from these wire works. making something big out of lots of little things.
yeah, this thing about econo, about making bigger things out of simple stuff, making one big part out of a lot of little parts, econo drama from tension through repetition via sensibilities like the subtle morphing of a brickwall, brick by brick, econo hihat click by click – it’s the world of possibility that wire opened up to us, the no coercion part of emma goldman made alive to us in a music sense that had a human face and a spirit … fucking righteous, a dance in the head – free for all!
the way the words were put on the pink flag inner sleeve made me think of being at a place that was showing art on a wall and next to it was a description of each painting. it was as if the more I try to look at each work w/its description at the same time, the more the words would absorb the piece and not be like a cue sheet for a vocalist to follow at a recording session. and in a parallel universe, I got the same sensation in their sound, more and more as they moved onto the chairs missing and 154 albums – I guess part of their journey was about gigs but damn if I wasn’t connected that way. anyhow it wasn’t just that first experience and all that about little songs and boiling them down to the bare nada which was righteous and berlin-wall-busting-important but wire was further profound on me in making me feel things freed from the need for associations. it all got very emotional for me and still is … they always win the fight to be subjugated w/in me, they are living beings – even pink flag got reignited in this context though now looking back, of course it was the original springboard... I can hear popeye learning me ‘I am what I am’ and it’s ok cuz the kafka funny is one righteous backhand upside the head.
I’m talking about my own head cuz I feel any other way would be jive. I can’t speak for others though I get curious about hearing others – that book by wilson neate on the making of pink flag was wild for me cuz of course I had my own mind being sculpted by it first-hand (via the ear hole) in my san pedro, california town and to read these men talk about their work was a trip but at the same time it never “reduced the painting by its description” – more like footnote stuff.
here I am, on tour again like I have been for thirty plus years and part of my encore this time around is doing a cover of ‘106 beats that’ and having my guitarman tom watson sing it so I can watch and hear him do it. yeah, I’m working my bass to it and though neither me or tom or drummerman raul morales could or more important WOULD WANT to tell you what it means, I do know we all feel way down in our bones, feeling it most authentic to us. now that’s a trip but that’s the trip about wire.
on bass, watt
What This Book Isn’t
Read & Burn seeks to do justice to Wire’s highly influential and restlessly inventive body of work – of which I have been a fan since 1978 – by developing a sustained critical account of their shifting modus operandi.
Although Wire granted me considerable access during the research and writing processes (via interviews and correspondence), this isn’t a book that will always please each of the band-members. Rather, it takes their oeuvre seriously by creating a framework for understanding and critically evaluating it. To my mind, this approach pays a far higher compliment to Wire than would an exercise in gushing fandom or a simple transcription of interviews.
Read & Burn combines my analysis and interpretation with the band-members’ own words and perspective – drawing on approximately 100 hours of exclusive interviews with them, plus email exchanges. The interviews were conducted between 2007 and 2012, the bulk of them in 2011 and 2012. While the focus is very much on Bruce Gilbert, Robert Grey, Graham Lewis, and Colin Newman, I also interviewed various associates of the group, including touring members, producers, managers, and sleeve designers, as well as journalists and other musicians. Unless otherwise stated in the text, all quotations in this book derive from my own interviews.
Discussing the way in which Wire developed their aesthetic in 1977, Bruce Gilbert told me: “The only things we could agree on were the things we didn’t like. That’s what held it together and made life much simpler.” Graham Lewis made the same point, explaining how Wire constructed their early identity in terms of rejection and refusal; he even listed a set of unofficial, almost entirely prohibitive, rules that the band followed: “No solos; no decoration; when the words run out, it stops; we don’t chorus out; no rocking out; keep it to the point; no Americanisms.” This contrarian, negative self-definition was a foundational Wire characteristic. In much the same spirit, here’s a list of what this book is not and what it does not do:

This book was not read, vetted, or approved by Wire before publication
This book is not a biography of Wire collectively or individually
This book is not about the band-members’ solo projects
This book does not forensically dissect each of Wire’s albums
This book does not mention every Wire song, record sleeve, tour, or gig
This book does not provide a complete discography
This book does not compile or comprehensively analyse press coverage

Some of the above can be found elsewhere.
Some sections of this book draw on my own previously published writings: features and several reviews, my liner notes for Send Ultimate , and my book Pink Flag (Continuum, 2008).
1976 And All That
Wire’s résumé highlights a diverse body of recorded work dating from 1977 to the present. And yet, wherever you look, you’ll find Wire categorised as one, two, or all three of the following: a punk band, a post- punk band, or an art- punk band. Notwithstanding its occasional modifiers, the p-word has endured, as critics and commentators cling onto it in an attempt to capture the essence of Wire’s innovative uniqueness. As a result, Wire remain chained to a narrow and reductive musical identity – even though their long-term trajectory, which has always centred on a constant remaking and remodelling, stubbornly resists the notion of any fixed identity.
To continue to define Wire in relation to punk is like labelling David Bowie a mod or Brian Eno a glam rocker. ‘Punk’ carries with it a specific historical coding – in spite of its continuing half-life and its new iterations – so any ongoing linking of Wire with punk also implies that all their important work was executed before they went on hiatus in 1980, an idea disputed by the evidence of the band’s releases since then.
Of course, nothing happens in a vacuum. Like any band, Wire were born in a particular historical context and, in their case, that was the summer of punk. Therefore, it’s impossible to discuss their origins without talking about punk rock: Wire formed in 1976, and their earliest history was enacted on the new musical and cultural landscape opened up by the Sex Pistols. That much is incontrovertible. In fact, looking at Wire in relation to this moment in Bri