Wire, one rule at a time: Pink Flag, Chairs Missing, 154

Twenty-one songs in thirty-five minutes and twenty-six seconds. Then fifteen in forty-two, then thirteen in forty-four.

Those are the three albums Wire put out between 1977 and 1979, and if you strip each one down to two numbers and set them side by side, something keeps moving in the same direction that has nothing at all to do with taste.

Fifteen of the twenty-one tracks on Pink Flag run under two minutes, and 154 hasn’t got a single one.

The usual version is a growth story. Punks learn to play, find the synthesizer, grow up. It explains nothing you can actually hear. The second record didn’t come from better gear. The third didn’t come from more money.

What Wire do, album after album, is set themselves a ban and keep it until there’s nothing left in it. Then they take another one, usually the opposite of the last. Three records, three rules, and three moments where a rule runs out.

The ban comes before the records

Wire form in London in 1976, in the wake of the Sex Pistols, and they’re an odd case among their peers. They’re older. They’ve studied. Everyone except the drummer came through art school.

There are five of them to begin with, then guitarist George Gill is thrown out and the band starts again as a four-piece.

This is worth a moment, because the first ban arrives through somebody leaving, and with Gill gone there’s nobody in the band who plays a solo any more. In any other group in 1977 that’s a hole to fill. Here it becomes house policy.

Their recording debut is two tracks buried on a live compilation taped at the Roxy in London. Mike Thorne, who worked at EMI, saw them there.

He played their demos to his boss Nick Mobbs in the car, off a cassette, after the two of them had been talking about the Sex Pistols, and nobody at the label objected to the signing. The date is 9 September 1977. The initial fee is twenty-five thousand pounds.

Pink Flag: the song stops when it’s finished

The first rule fits on one line. A song lasts as long as it has something to say and not a second longer.

That’s meant literally. The twenty-one tracks run from three minutes fifty-eight down to twenty-eight seconds, and not one of them reaches four minutes.

No chorus comes round again out of habit. There’s no second verse sitting there because songs usually have two. When the idea stops, so does the track.

Field Day for the Sundays runs twenty-eight seconds and sits in second place, where a normal album puts the single. When we played it in the office somebody asked whether the player was skipping tracks.

The recording follows the same logic. The sessions were at Advision Studios in London, and Thorne describes putting Gotobed’s kit in the middle of the big room to pick up real ambience, then isolating Newman in the booth where a drummer would normally end up.

The four of them play all twenty-one songs on the first day, straight through, to find their bearings, and after that they cut them one at a time going for a live take on every pass. Every vocal you hear is the original, tracked with the rest, apart from Strange and part of Lowdown.

Something that happened before the sessions says a lot about the method. Wire and Thorne spent an afternoon in his basement working out the running order for both sides, and that order never changed again.

So each song, as it’s being cut, already knows where it’s going to sit, and a forty-one-second piece like Brazil ends up working as something that lives at one particular point and does a job there rather than as a fragment.

Thorne brought in guitars, amps and a Yamaha electronic tuner, on the argument that a punk record needs its instruments in tune if it’s going to hit hard, which in 1977 came very close to a provocation.

None of this makes the album sound better than the others that year. It makes it sound built, by people who’d decided in advance what they weren’t going to do.

Chairs Missing: adding back exactly what was banned

The title is British slang. Having a few chairs missing means you’re not quite right.

The rule changes in the simplest way available. Everything the first record banned gets put back in. Songs stretch out, colour arrives, keyboards arrive.

Twenty-one tracks become fifteen, and the average song goes from one minute forty-one to two minutes fifty.

Thorne tells the story of how the synthesizers got in, and it deserves quoting whole.

He used an Oberheim analogue synthesizer and a cranky old RMI Electrapiano whose pedal kept falling off. The instruments aren’t the interesting part.

What matters is the rule governing their use, and Thorne puts it plainly enough: no guitar heroes, and what sounds like a keyboard is often an electric guitar, and the other way round. The synthesizer never arrives as a lead instrument. It arrives as material, level with everything else.

A whole day went on Another the Letter, which runs one minute and seven seconds. The tempo doesn’t come from the drums at all, but from a knob on the Oberheim, which Thorne notes with some satisfaction was preferable to relying on a sweaty drummer.

Then there’s the ban that mattered more inside the band than any of the others, and it governs how you were allowed to talk in the room, where any reference at all to a style was taboo.

Suggesting a track be done, say, in a kind of Motown groove would bring on horror and expressions of disgust.

That makes I Am the Fly funnier than it looks. Newman described it as a sort of disco thing, and Thorne notes that for this group the remark was close to cultural heresy.

We’ve never agreed on Chairs Missing. Some of us always start from side one, others go in at track nine and never come back.

It’s the album where Wire sit between two ways of being themselves, and depending on where you enter it sounds like two different records.

154: the song stops being the centre

The title is a tally. A hundred and fifty-four was the number of shows the band had played by then.

Before the sessions they toured Europe supporting Roxy Music, and Thorne says he came back to a different group, with the confidence picked up on the road audible straight away.

The third rule is the most drastic of the three, and you can read it straight off the instrument list, because 154 has a cor anglais on it, plus an electric viola played by Tim Souster, a composer who’d studied with Stockhausen, and keyboards and marimba from Thorne.

Hilly Kristal, who owned CBGB, lends a bass voice to A Mutual Friend.

None of that is there to make better songs. It’s there to make something that isn’t quite a song any more.

Put the two ends of the arc side by side. In 1977 the shortest track runs twenty-eight seconds. In 1979 A Touching Display runs four hundred and fifteen.

On paper it reads as a band opening out. From the inside it was something else, and Thorne doesn’t dress it up. The third Wire album accentuated the jealousies that cause splits, he says, and the tension may well have fed the music, but it was often very hard work indeed.

Once the album was done he told the manager he couldn’t carry on. It was his last record with them for eight years.

We kept going back to A Touching Display for months without settling on it. Some of us skip it every time, and some of us put it on deliberately.

29 February 1980: the rule against the audience

The logic now arrives where it was always heading.

A band spends three years refusing to repeat itself. The audience it wins over mostly wants to hear it repeat itself. Those two things can’t stay in the same room.

On 29 February 1980 Wire played the Electric Ballroom in London. They refused the known songs and concentrated on works still in progress.

The evening wasn’t really a concert. A white sheet roughly four metres by two was carried round the stage on upright poles, people walked on to block whatever the band was doing, and a woman dragged two men across the floor while they perched on an inflatable passenger jet.

Salon hairdryer domes went over the musicians’ heads. There was a beekeeper’s hat with a very long veil, and two enormous scrolls daubed with symbols.

The crowd reacted about as you’d expect. Part of the room enjoyed the whole thing enormously, and everybody else made that impossible to miss when the suited manager tried to speak from the stage and got an insult that stayed on the tape.

That recording became Document and Eyewitness, and it’s a rare live document whose most gripping element is the hostility of the people listening.

Weeks earlier a statement had closed the label business, citing the internal and corporate problems then besetting EMI, and the fact that the group no longer had any contractual obligation.

Wire wouldn’t play live again until June 1985.

What happened next, and to whom

The surprise is that the rule was still standing when they came back.

In 1987 Wire returned with a new album and went to the United States, their first proper American tour, twenty-two dates. They were still refusing to play the old material.

They solved that in a way that sounds invented and is documented. A New Jersey journalist called Jim DeRogatis interviewed them for a fanzine and, over a beer, told Newman and Lewis he had a group that played Pink Flag. Not Wire songs. The whole album.

They were called the Ex-Lion Tamers, after track four. Newman hired them to open all twenty-two shows.

The rest of what they left behind shows up better fifteen years on, somewhere Wire hadn’t chosen.

Elastica’s debut came out in 1995 and did very well. The single Connection bears more than a passing resemblance to Three Girl Rhumba, an eighty-three-second track buried third on Pink Flag. Two more songs on the album, Line Up and 2:1, borrow openly from I Am the Fly.

The cases were settled out of court. The same source that reports them adds something worth keeping. Elastica also sent a great many listeners back to the bands that had sued them.

There’s something fitting about Wire reaching the nineties charts through a riff lasting a minute and twenty-three seconds. That’s exactly the sort of object the first rule existed to produce. Short, complete, and finished a long time ago.

What to read and what to hear

The book to look for is Wire… Everybody Loves A History by Kevin Eden, which Thorne points to as the first definitive biography of the group.

Eden wrote it after noticing that most of what circulated about the band was wrong. He keeps his own narration to a minimum, and the bulk of the text is interviews with the four of them and their collaborators.

Mike Thorne’s pages on The Stereo Society are free and cover the three albums one by one.

He wrote them himself, record by record, and they’re full of the things that usually go unrecorded. Where the microphone stood. Who said what in the room. How long a day’s work took.

The show of 29 February 1980 has been available complete for some time, after years in which only the edited version on Document and Eyewitness was known.

Hearing it whole, with the gaps between pieces put back where they belong, is the quickest way to understand what keeping a rule to the end actually costs.