Punk Rock by John Robb

Author:John Robb
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: PM Press
Published: 2013-07-27T16:00:00+00:00

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FOR THE 21ST CENTURY?

The Influential Wire

Fast forward to the future: Wire were one of the first hands to seize upon the possibilities of punk and take them somewhere else. They may not have sold millions of records but their influence has been every where, from post-punk through to Britpop and even on American Eighties hardcore.

Colin Newman

It’s a bit of weird story, how Wire got together. There was this guy called George Gill in my year at college. I’d been kicked out of home and had moved to Watford to art college and thought there would be loads of girls and I could get into a band. There was talk of this band doing a performance at the end of term. They said, ‘We need a singer,’ and I said, ‘Well, I’m a guitarist and I’ve never sung in my life.’ I got elected to be the singer and Bruce Gilbert was the guitarist beside George. We had a bass player, who was the film director Jack Good’s son, John. He was a nice bloke but someone you didn’t want to be in a band with. He was in a different place, but he had his own Messerschmitt (the car, not the plane!), which was good for transporting us around.

It was George’s band. There were no doubts about it. He was the one who played the guitar solos and did all the shouting. Gradually we acquired a bass player and a drummer and started playing gigs, places like the Nashville and the Roxy, and people said we were rubbish. We were not getting invited back. The material was tedious, to be honest. George fancied himself as a bit of a poet, he drank quite a lot and he had a temper - it was a weird combination. I thought his songs were very average, even though we were putting layers of sound over it.

One day he was pissed and, making his way down the stairs, fell down and broke his leg. We started rehearsals without him and, boy, was that an improvement! Suddenly it was more stretched, more how we wanted it. We were playing the same songs but without the guitar solos, without the interjections and the songs were getting shorter. We did a gig at somewhere like the Roxy, and a friend said, ‘You’ve got to get rid of George. It sounds way better without George.’ We said, ‘But he writes the songs,’ and he said, ‘Well, you can write songs.’ And I said, ‘Of course I can,’ and Graham said, ‘Well, I can write words.’10 We started playing. Suddenly the band was liberated.

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