Wire – An Interview with Colin Newman

The new album ‘Mind Hive’ (read our review here) is bursting with energy and ideas. Sharp, crisp melodies that seem to find an adventurous balance between Wire’s elegance, aggression and experimentation. Achieving a textured atmosphere that seems completely bold and unique. Did you set out to find a balance between these different voices of the band?

The plan around recording Wire records is pretty pragmatic and organic. I’ve always written the majority of Wire’s “tunes” and I come to the studio sessions with songs with either guitar chords / riffs or a couple of simple elements in Pro-tools & a vocal melody. It’s up to the band (including me) to figure out a workable and convincing arrangement. This is recorded by the band, usually in a couple of takes. In a large percentage of cases this ends up being the basic skeleton on which the piece is developed. I then take the tracks away and refine them in my studio and we then have 2nd band session working on the developed pieces. After more refinement in my studio, the tracks are at a point where I can get Matt over to my place and we go through everything prior to mixing, sometimes making more radical decisions than I would necessarily make on my own (it says ‘Wire’ on the cover, not ‘me’!) – That’s the how of it.

The way the pieces develop is very much led by the pieces themselves. The more you work on something the more you get an idea what it might need to make it more fully realised.

The thing about Wire is that it has never been about one thing, one style, one aesthetic. My personal feeling is the more diverse the music is the better, BUT everything has to work on its own level.

The trio of songs at the beginning of the new record, ‘Be Like Them’, ‘Cactused’ and ‘Primed & Ready’ have a remarkable immediacy and really grab the listener. They also manage to take risks and challenge expectations with their lush and full sound. How difficult is it to balance those two factors? 

The thing is not to think about it too hard! And to enjoy the sheer absurdity and singularity of each piece. With ‘Be Like Them‘ as the contrast in the verse was between a single line & an almost heavy metal chord, I took it to the logical extreme using a tiny acoustic guitar sound for the notes & a Marshall amped-up sound for the chords.

We always thought it would be the album opener, but Matt came up with the running order that turned side one into a kind of “pop” side to use shorthand. ‘Off The Beach’ started out as almost punk rock with distorted chords, but the cleaner and lighter it got the more I liked it. It’s all feel! The contrast with the darkness of Graham’s text gives another layer. As I said, Wire is never about one thing!

Given how well-received the album has been with Wire fans: is song writing and creating this new music still the primary creative outlet or is performing the new material live an equally satisfying goal of the band? 

Me, personally I’m a studio person. I’m happy to perform live and understand there is something visceral about a live performance but in the end a performance is about the moment, but a great record is for ever!

Lyrically, the new album Mind Hive is completely unapologetic and forward thinking. Do we hear a cautious optimism? The lyric to Unrepentant is just remarkable;  “In between the lines / Ancient tales remind / Openings are hard to find / The blind will never lead the blind…Unrepentant, understanding, independent, making landing.” Would you care to expand on this track? Or, if not the specific meaning, could you elaborate on the general feel of this lyric?

Actually, this is one of the few texts that I contribute occasionally to Wire. Like a lot of my texts it’s quite stream of consciousness but also quite pointed in a way. You could see the chorus as aspirational and deliberately contradictory. To be “unrepentant” about who one is not necessarily a positive thing, but if it is tempered with understanding about who others are, then it gives context.

‘Mind Hive’ is your fifth album with Matthew Simms on guitar. Since he first joined Wire as a touring guitarist on the 2010  Red Barked Tree  tour, the musical evolution of Wire’s sound has been expanded and natural. How did Simms excite and inspire the changes in the band’s sound when he joined? 

Matt was a somewhat natural fit from day 1. Many would like to classify people by age, gender, race, religion etc, but in the end any kind of relationship is based on who people actually are. A different person of our “age” may not have fitted at all! In order to be in Wire, you have to kind of get that it’s not about anything you expect it might be. Wire is primarily an artistic venture & our relationship is based on that. I personally think it’s less about what “sound” Matt has brought to Wire, but rather how he has been very successful in becoming part of it without either compromising himself or Wire.

In addition to being able to create the sound the band aspires to play, what other personal attributes did Simms have that made you want to continue on the sound you explore on your albums with him?

Matt is in many ways a “mature soul” and he brings a good level of responsibility to his role. As I said before it’s not so much about the “sound”, he is quite accomplished in his sonic abilities, but the point is to have something which fits rather than something which simply impresses.

Nocturnal Koreans (2016) is a remarkable weaving of Wire’s prog-punk sound and a new elegance brought on by the studio experiments the band developed during recording. A lush detailed sound that seems to come so naturally for the band. How did you feel about taking a chance with the band’s sound? Were you inspired by modern electronic music or German experimental bands like Neu! or Cluster?

Nocturnal Koreans was an interesting departure for me in some ways. The material was stuff that was left over from the preceding Wire album. But whereas that album has an aesthetic very much based on the band’s live sound (during 2015 we actually had the entire album in the live set!), the NK tracks had been less developed so I took a more open role. That inevitably means more keyboards and stuff that very obviously is not generated by a live band. I have a pretty solid background in electronic music production. My partner Malka Spigel & myself have spent many years operating on & off as Immersion, an instrumental electronic duo, and I cut my teeth in music production with Cubase on the Atari ST. Classic midi sequencing with samplers & synths. Although I started recording as a musician in the 70’s, my production background is from the 80’s. That’s not to say I don’t like anything by Neu! or Cluster.

Wire has created some of the most satisfying music of your career in the last decade. With the  Silver / Lead (2017) album pushing the band in a psychedelic-punk direction. The first single from the album, ‘Short Elevated Period’, was an amazing blast of punk energy. Easily one of the 10 best songs the band has ever recorded. What was the  environment in the studio for Silver/Lead? How did those sessions differ from  Mind Hive? 

On the surface, Wire / Nocturnal Koreans, Silver / Lead & Mind Hive (not forgetting Change Becomes Us) were done pretty much the same way. Basic recording at Rockfield, production & mix at my studio, but the feel of the records has been quite different. We’ve learned as a band on the way and it feels like each album somehow builds on the last one, but in what way I wouldn’t be able to precisely say.

‘Short Elevated Period‘ has the weirdest structure which I based on the way Graham presented the text to me. He wrote all the verses sequentially and put the chorus at the end. I thought it would be amusing to exactly replicate this in the song structure. It wasn’t what Graham had expected, but one good thing about Wire is that everybody knows a good thing when they hear it!

Both Nocturnal Koreans and Silver / Lead manage to be remarkably different and yet captured the personality of Wire so well. Is it a struggle to maintain that consistency? Do you feel that there’s a main component of the Wire sound that must remain? What would you describe as the essence of your sound?

I actually think the essence of Wire’s sound is not having one. A conventional group would have contented itself with variations on Pink Flag. It’s simply not in Wire’s DNA to have that kind of attitude! By not being over-focussed on one approach, Wire has kind of freed itself to be whatever it might become. In fact of course there are inevitable harmonic signatures that re-occur, Graham & myself both have distinctive voices and Rob has to be one of the most recognisable drummers. These things mean that what we produce is always identifiable as Wire without us trying to sound like Wire!

Finally, I’d like to jump back to 2003 for the band’s tenth studio album, Send. An album that originally came out on two EPs: Read & Burn 01  and  Read & Burn 02. The music here is aggressive and volatile in a way that seemed to surprise and captivate a lot of fans. The guitars have an almost industrial or art-metal buzz that is completely new. Can you look back for us and give us your thoughts on the wonderful, tense, and adventurous album?

I’d spent the 90’s mainly working on electronic productions, but at the millennial cusp there was a point when the tonality of certain electronic styles was becoming more “rock” like. I’m talking about “dark” drum and bass. Producers like Nico Sykes & Ed Rush. At the same time there were electronic producers like Ulrich Schnauss who were moving away from “tracks” into something more like extended song structures. A clash between rock & electronica was very much in the air.

The antecedent to R&B 01 was “12 Times You”, 2 machine-like remixes I did of a live performance of 12XU at the Garage in London. I actually did them for the band’s amusement, but everyone really liked them. So that got me thinking, and the very first new piece in that style was “1st Fast” – coppiced riff meets aphorism kind of sums it up. Wire did some basic recording in a rehearsal room (mainly drums) and Bruce & myself basically created the material for “R&B 01/02/ Send” over a 2 year period in my studio, working maybe 2 or 2 days a week. I realised after a while that the mixing kind of fell to me as Bruce would lose interest after the pieces had everything in them he thought should be there. It got me confident enough to be able to handle the production on Wire records.

This all happened in a period when the band had no money at all and limited possibility to do much beyond the occasional tour. R&B01 was a real surprise. The idea was we’d do a couple of limited run Eps then compile them to an album, but R&B01 just flew out from the distributor. It was quite remarkable as we actually did no promotion at all! The fact that the record (and all subsequent ones) was on our own label changed everything about Wire’s possibilities. To be honest, we haven’t looked back!

Interview by Shawn Ciavattone / March 2020