• Wire – Mind Hive

    February 17, 2020 - By 

    Though Wire were always renowned for their musical transformation over three short years in the late ’70s – from the art school punk vignettes of 1977’s Pink Flag through to the icy, doomed post-punk of 154, stopping off at the transitional Chairs Missing in between – it’s no great surprise that 40 years into their career they don’t always possess this same level of invention. It’s not necessarily a bad thing though – while their last outing, 2017’s Silver/Lead could be possibly be described as samey, it was also their most solid and consistent work in a while. At once…

  • Wire – Silver/Lead

    April 3, 2017 - By 

    Wire have always been a band more interested in looking forward than back. On returning from their first hiatus in 1985 they famously hired a Wire covers band, The Ex Lion Tamers, as their support act so they could be freed up to focus exclusively on new material. So it seems entirely appropriate that they would celebrate the 40th anniversary of their debut performance with another new album, their fifteenth. Although still most celebrated for their initial trio of envelope-pushing albums between 1977 and 1979 – the frantic art-punk of Pink Flag, the more effects-laden post-punk of Chairs Missing and…

  • Wire – Nocturnal Koreans

    April 24, 2016 - By 

    The term seminal might get thrown around too much these days, but when used to describe post-punk legends Wire, it almost seems too humble. In many ways, the group are an anomaly amongst their peers. For starters, over their majority of their thirty-year career they’ve managed to retain the same line-up, avoiding the unfortunate stigma of being a glorified vanity project for singer Colin Newman with a revolving door of musicians, desperately vying for some kind of relevance. In fact, the group has gone the exact opposite route, shrugging off any requests to do retrospective tours of their first three,…