or better or worse, we here at Stylus, in all of our autocratic consumer-crit greed, are slaves to timeliness. A record over six months old is often discarded, deemed too old for publication, a relic in the internet age. That's why each week at Stylus, one writer takes a look at an album with the benefit of time. Whether it has been unjustly ignored, unfairly lauded, or misunderstood in some fundamental way, we aim with On Second Thought to provide a fresh look at albums that need it.

I now find myself in the most bizarre of situations for writing—never before have I written something with absolute certainty that the artist I’m writing about will read it. And so it’s very odd. As I took notes on Chairs Missing I found myself wondering if my musical idol would read my review and… decide that everything I thought about the album was a load of shit. So why do I even bother now? What’s the point when my (albeit possibly pretty good) guesses on what the fuck this whole album is about could be absolutely wrong?

Chairs Missing then, is a cheeky pop album, perhaps the first so-called "punk album" to revel in and roll around in its own ironies, to own up to the fact that it is essentially an anthemic pop album, marvellously catchy, providing a safe haven in song structures that are so familiar that they sound like the band is fucking with them… because they have to change. That’s what Chairs Missing sounds like, an album where the band has already hit that turmoil (that won’t happen again until The Ideal Copy) where creative tension results in a jagged, disorienting flow, and where lots of songs that sound like they’re about freezing to death or something or other are delivered with cartoonish question-and-answer glee. Disco sits next to a punk song that desperately, desperately tries to subvert its own stupid structure by… never ending… and all of it is predicated by a gloomy mood piece where drums turn into a wash over trickling guitars and descending bass and a chorus catchier than anything you've ever heard.

At one point Colin Newman told Pink Flag producer Mike Thorne that he wanted him to play more keyboards on Chairs Missing. When Thorne declined, Newman said "we’ll just get that Brian Eno guy" - this is the sound of a band who realise that Pink Flag was only a Ramones rip-off and that, shark-like, they have to move to stay alive. As a result, some songs on this album almost hit six minutes and others hit only one minute; guitars chip away at each other and electric pianos run arpeggios underneath to foreshadow shoegazing. The first track samples laughing crowds and the last track ends in guitar overdrive. Punk tracks get bass pushed up front and guitars become less audible than snare raps and there’s a disco bonus track whose "beat" consists of saxophones and car horn samples; and of course, the prettiest song I’ve ever heard is about an insect who destroys crop fields.

Coming out the other end with Mike Thorne in tow, Chairs Missing, to all intents and purposes, is the post-punk album, in the truest sense of the word. Every song contains the familiar, bare-bones punk structure, completely devoid of any sort of bridge. But somewhere along the line, production stepped up, leaving a wash of synthesizers all over the place (synthesizers! in a punk band! in 1978!), sucking up Graham Lewis’ watery bass, and tracking under nearly every guitar part for a wonderfully lush sound. "Heartbeat," "Used To," and "Men 2nd" all tone Colin Newman’s vocal down to a whisper, maybe a coo, fuck-all, this is the sound of change! Of a new urgency! and take out screeching "106 Beats That" guitar.

Maybe this doesn’t sound so cool, but there’s a cosmic moment of transition that probably couldn’t be have been achieved earlier, between "12XU" and "I Am The Fly," where suddenly, it’s not about I got you in a corner motherfucker! can’t get out bitch! anymore, and it becomes I can spread more disease than the flea which nibbles away at your window display. There’s a sing-a-long chorus again, that’s for damn sure, but it’s not a rally to fuck the man, more to… annoy him? Where once laid roaring guitar there are now handclaps and multiple Bruce Gilbert and Newman guitars that sort of ebb into each other, like an accidental march. That… that this band, this incredibly vital four-piece who once made punk music are now making goofy, cheeky pop songs!

Chairs Missing is bitingly sarcastic, which I guess was the cool thing to do in 1978, but never did these bands make fun of themselves! "From the Nursery," I bet, is about being strangled to death, or something horribly grim, dropping words like "molester," "amphibious," "violence," "Christmas," and more shit like that—but by the end of this sludge, this absolute thump, thump, move, Newman is hooting and hollering with Lewis repeating every other word like it’s a power-pop number, and I feel like dancing! "Mercy", featuring lyrics that allude to a "Reuters"-like chaos in a major city, marches along once again, but Lewis’ loopy bass pops up in what should be the climax, like a needle in the camel’s eye, blowing out all that wonderful tension. So fuck it! The song pointlessly goes on for another two minutes.

We have a pop album then, pop being the lightest and darkest form of fun in the world. Where in "French Film Blurred" and "Outdoor Miner," Thorne collides 1977 with 1988. He adds vocal back-up loops, spinning guitars into a web of synths, and Newman plopping, into fairly sombre songs, wonderfully beautiful choruses to lift you up… and throw you into the mud again in the verse. God, "Outdoor Miner" added a piano solo on the single edit - EMI asked them to add another minute-and-half! To a radio pop song! Try taking this seriously.

And Newman and Co. probably think that last sentence is absolute rubbish—that Chairs Missing is deadly serious. But I somehow doubt it. In the interview, he mentioned the possibility that when people listen to Wire, they ask themselves "that’s great - but what the fuck does it mean?" A possible answer is nothing. So when technology is used to rip a punk band away from their safe haven of one-minute thrashes in order to, still using punk as a core, create a wonderfully cheeky and sarcastic pop masterpiece, to almost unwillingly change - who knows what this means. But when the very next year, another English punk group released a double album that erased the word "punk" from their vocabulary and grabbed from every influence they had, too; and another English punk group released a socially charged dance album; and yet another English punk group whose first single was about orgasms put what they called "atmospheric synthesizers" on every track on their album - it’s hard not to see some sort of influence.

How Chairs Missing still sounds new while A Bell Is A Cup sounds like it was made… in 1985… is one of life's great mysteries. I can hear Justine Frischmann pick out the synths taking place of guitars on "Used To" and writing The Menace, though. I can hear Kevin Shields trying to make seventeen overdubbed guitars and a ream of harmonised feedback sound like one guitar and a synthesizer. And I can certainly hear the very moment in "Marooned" where 154 picks up, saying goodbye to the second half of the word "post-punk" forever.

For once, Wire made music that was about the details that took many, many listens to decipher, to hear every part of a wonderful sonic collage—but still sounded frustrated and catchy as ever. And that’s why in 2003, Chairs Missing is the greatest thing to ever crawl from the wreckage of "punk rock," and when I say wreckage, I mean it, and from the wreckage, it’s cobbled together to make a glorious mess. Fuck Magazine, fuck PiL, fuck Cabaret Voltaire. This is post-punk.