n June 24, I was invited onto Sound Opinions, "the world's only rock 'n roll talk show," on WXRT Radio in Chicago, hosted by Chicago rock critics Greg Kot and Jim DeRogatis. The reason was as such - that night, perhaps one of my very favorite groups of all-time, Wire (or at least three-quarters of them) were guests on the show. I figured that there was no way I could miss seeing/meeting then, and the night was a fucking great one - I brought the band coffee before I introduced myself to them because the studio needed an extra hand, and then during a commercial break, Greg introduced me to the band, to which they looked at my Blur shirt, and said "nice to meet you Sam - shit shirt!" and laughed. At that point, I just blurted out "what do you think of Elastica?" figuring I'd never get to ask them any question ever again; of course, Jim sort of rolled his eyes and said, "oh, Sam," and Graham Lewis proceeded to berate them. Even worse! - they called Primal Scream "absolute bollocks" when a caller suggested Send, their latest album, sounded a bit like XTRMNTR.
So after the show, I asked the befuddled Mr. Newman to sign my copy of Chairs Missing, and proceeded to talk to them about other old English punk codgers - like The Fall and Buzzcocks - still touring and making records. I felt suitably stupid when I exclaimed "oh God, the new Buzzcocks album is just shit!" and my idols sort of nodded their heads. Then Lewis stepped out to smoke a cigar.
But just as they were leaving, I told Colin that I wrote for the illustrious Stylus Magazine - "perhaps you've heard of it?" - and that an interview would be great. He obliged, giving me his e-mail address -- and about a week later, I called him at his home and studio in England and proceeded to have a two and a half hour chat.
Colin was eager to talk, exceedingly polite and helpful, and seemed to answer all my questions perfectly honestly. Without further adieu: Trash/Treasure: An Interview With Colin Newman.
Stylus: With Read and Burn - more specifically, the first one - and then, the material that you’ve put on Send, it seems that there’s a parallel with Pink Flag, which you’ve talked about before. You’ve used Pink Flag as sort of a starting-over point: the song you still play at shows, it’s the name of your record label, that sort of bare-bones ... well, nothing more than what’s needed. Why Pink Flag? Why not, say, Chairs Missing?
CN: That’s a fair enough point ... ‘why.’ I think there’s something sort of totemic about things like that—have you looked at the Post Everything site? There’s a little bit of complete and utter bollocks that I wrote at the bottom of the description of the badge, which explains the ‘pink flag,’ which was intended to be a joke, but nobody has come back to me and said ‘I thought that was really funny what you wrote, because it seemed very po-faced and arty.’ It’s a weird thing, it’s like ... I mean, it’s hard to even know what kind of reputation Wire even have, I mean, even if anybody thinks we’re any good or whatever, but you know, there’s the one thing that’s sort of informed us and haunted us all of our working lives, is this album, Pink Flag. It’s this record we recorded when we first started, which was fundamentally all the songs that we had, and that style kind of came as a result of actually having ... through somebody else’s band, but we kicked him out and got rid of all of his binge, and then made everything shorter, you see. So that sort of stripping down and brevity ... everything is kind of a reaction against other things, so this was a reaction against the material that there was, but if you think back to the mid-70s — actually, a lot of it was very ... a lot of stuff around was very formal. A lot of punk rock wasn’t very new, it was just old rock. So a lot of it was dressed up—and it’s easy to say this in hindsight, but you sort of had to be there. To see why anybody get very excited about—there was a feeling to do something else, somehow it felt like ... less is more. Now I think that’s the whole sort of axis [of Pink Flag] ... when you look back on Pink Flag the album, you say, ‘well, actually, as an album, some of it sounds quite good, some of just sounds like old music’—and that doesn’t particularly inspire me.
But one thing I brought to the very first sessions, when we came to do this again, was this scheme for doing Pink Flag. I had this idea of doing it sort of on and off—like if we just had the one chord, instead of the two chords—and you have the bit where everything plays, and then it’s just the bass and drums ... it’s kind of like dance music concept, really. And we tried that in the very first rehearsals—it’s such an easy scheme, everyone plays the E, then it’s just the bass and drums, then everyone goes back on to the E again—it’s not exactly rocket science, but it was incredibly effective. And it seemed to me that if we could make an analogy, with the difference between what the newest version of Wire about, and the original version of Wire is about, it’s just very simply that. It’s just, like, ‘make it more simple.’ You’ve got quite a bit of people coming in from a bunch of different angles, and you don’t always agree on what something ought to be, there’s a way of Wire coalescing on something simple. On one level, it’s the lowest common denominator, but it’s a different kind of lowest common denominator than what you normally get—it’s a less, less thing, the simplest thing you can have. And that reduction beyond the point where people would think something is reduced, but really, it isn’t really being reduced, it’s just a different kind of ornate—and I’m sure what I’m describing—of Pink Flag—is a different kind of ornate, that reduced kind of ornate. There’s always more simple to be, you know, but somehow, that may have been a key into it.
In terms of why the record company is called Pinkflag—I’ve forgotten. I can’t remember ... I think it was just, well, Paul Smith, he’s our managerial co-conspirator, who should never be omitted from any kind of discussion of how we [Wire] do this. Paul is very good at coming up with stuff. It was in the early days of it—well, I already had Swim, I was running a label already, and I knew about how to run a small record label—i.e.: how much hard work it is, and how much time it takes—I just thought, well, when we had the idea to put out our very first things, which were the rehearsal recordings, and just sell it through the internet, we thought we’d do it through an imprint and not a label, ‘cause that’s really hard work. It just sort of became obvious to call it Pinkflag—at some point, later on in the process, where we saw that we were going to have a label, it was going to have to be Pinkflag, and it was going to be run like a real label, and it was pretty much down to me to do it. Like anything in real life, things happen kind of by default and less by design than you’d like to be able to say if you’re going to be writing the perfect version of your life ... me, personally, I tend to prefer the less glamorous, more real life stuff. I mean, with the label, I think that was what we found, in our first meeting—Paul said, ‘do you like it or not?’
We’re coming to this with a history, and that is a bunch of stuff that people know. And the most famous—or infamous—of it is the album Pink Flag. It can be an incredible cross to bear—Jim [DeRogatis], instead of writing a preview of our shows in Chicago, or talking about how great the new album is, even though he does like the album and he would have been excited about it, he wrote four pages [interviewer’s note: not actually four pages] about Pink Flag. On one level you say, ‘oh that’s really, really nice, somebody is still writing about a record that was made God knows who many years ago, and if anybody remembers it, or thinks it’s any good,’ because frankly it’s not a record that sold in many, many copies, and most people don’t know it—‘it’s some kind of obscure band from England that did this sort of arty punk rock,’ where most of them don’t even know what normal arty punk rock is. So, what kind of relevance does that have to peoples’ lives? Or, you can look at it from the other side—‘well, why the fuck isn’t he writing about the new album?’ You know, the truth is, those sort of things follow around—if you star in a soap opera, you’re always going to be that character even after you’ve left it. So you have to deal with it, and say, ‘that was me, I was there, here’s what I thought was good about it, here’s what was bad from it, and let me try to relate it to the world.’ Or, you can run away from it, and that doesn’t really work—we all tried that. So in the end, you sort of embrace it.
That’s a very stark aesthetic what you have on the front cover of that album. It’s a flagpole with a drawn-on pink flag. There’s nothing going on there. You know, it’s not punk design, there are no safety pins in evidence, it’s not taken apart and put together in a very obvious manner, it’s just incredibly stark. And in a way, that’s sort of a symbol of Wire—it’s sort of fantastic. I mean, the pink flag. It means absolutely nothing. It’s like somewhere between ‘surrender’ and Communism—in color. What does it mean? It appears to mean as a symbol, it’s totally totemic; you look at it and you say, ‘that’s a fucking strong image,’ but it doesn’t really mean anything. But I mean, maybe that’s what Wire is like. Maybe when you listen to Wire, you get a sense of, ‘fucking hell, that’s so amazing! That’s so deep! ... But what’s it about? I haven’t got a fucking clue.”
Stylus: You were saying earlier that you have to bear the fact that you made Pink Flag, that you can’t run away from it. Do you get annoyed that people like myself say, ‘okay, well, where’s the similarity between Pink Flag and Send,’ or—
CN: No, no, you know, it’s a perfectly valid question to ask—and I should be so lucky to be some bloke sitting on the end of the phone having some guy whom I know to be pretty young calling me up, wanting to call me and talk about some music, on the other side of the Atlantic. I know plenty of people who, you know, in their dreams, get to pontificate about their past work on the telephone because they’ve never made any, because they wished they could have, but they never did. But I think it’s wrong to be rather churlish about it, on one level, but on the other side, you’ve got to have the intelligence to steer the conversation in such a way instead of saying, ‘oh yeah, we’re just doing the same old shit we did before,’ which actually isn’t true, instead of making it, so ‘oh, it’s like Pink Flag,’ or ‘oh, it will sell more.’ That’s just not the way Wire works—that’s how anybody who wants to do anything genuinely interesting with music or art ... you just can’t think like that. It’s not genius, you know. A great tune’s a great tune.
Stylus: You’ve kept the same sort of aesthetic with all the new material you’ve done—I don’t mean it’s similar sounding, but that it’s all in the same vein—it’s sort of a gradual move away from what you’re describing, like just hitting the E chord. Especially so with Read and Burn 02 and the newer things on Send, like a song with “99.9,” or more layered and with a different ... wash of noise. With this, where do you see yourself going with Read and Burn 03?
CN: That’s a good question. There’s a lot of material that’s been done already, and what we’ve worked on from September ‘01 from the last year, which apart from a few calls, has been a lot of time to work, and the songs we started in that period were very diverse, ranging from minimalism to ... classical music. And what we did was pick a selection of songs that we thought we could use as a starting point [for RB01]— Read and Burn 02 was just what logically happened next. The extra tracks that were on the album are then just the logical songs we thought we should put with the material from Read and Burn. So, there’s a kind of thought of thought to it—and for Read and Burn 03, there’s thought to it which is more ... obviously electronic. But that doesn’t mean to say we’re harkening back to some other kind of music—see, this is a very odd area, because there’s this whole thing, what is the current aesthetic? If you look at Wire, it’s just a bunch of old blokes—but we care very much about what current culture is doing. We’re not traditionalists. It’s not like—well, in America it’s very traditionalist, you’ve styles of music that follow other styles, a modern version of a tradition. And I’m not saying all musicians in America, but you’ve got a body of them who would say they’re proud to be a part of the tradition. Some of them could be quite young and quite hip, but they could still consider themselves part of it. I think apart from folkies or jazzers, nobody in Britain would like to consider themselves part of the tradition—they’re very about ... new stuff.
So even if they do, they just sound like some group from twenty years ago—and we’re part of that culture. So being aware of where music is going, it’s not about following, it’s more to do with the gestalt, the cultural gestalt, trying to understand how that works—what is relevant, and what people want to hear. And maybe those people we’re thinking of are ourselves—oh, it’s so hard to talk about this without sounding bullshitty, or trying to sound like you’re following what everybody else does or you’re making up some sort of vaguely mystical crap that doesn’t mean anything to anybody, but actually, I think a lot of artists actually do that. There is an intersection of a kind of artistic will, and cultural determinism or whatever. Somehow, things move in a cultural way, and not being out of touch with them is a very important thing, because for any artist, there is absolutely no point in making things that are culturally irrelevant, otherwise you’ll just be a traditionalist, and making ... I don’t know, a wooden washing machine—something that is beautifully constructed, but just doesn’t function. I get excited when ideas come up, but I find the execution is less exciting. Bands sound better when people are describing them to me, but when I hear them, I just hear the old things about them. Of course, one of the other factors—which is incredibly important, it colors everything—is the way that the music industry in general is actually failing. The sales are down, distribution is really failing—
Stylus: Do you mean like, the internet, and file-sharing?
CN: I don’t know if it’s actually file-sharing, that’s what the major record labels will say—‘oh, all those bad people, those kids getting their records for free’—I’m not totally convinced that that is the reason. I think it’s that there are too many crap records. I think that when you pump the market full of everything that’s ever been released, and it’s such a quantity, so much of it—things like where you hear one track off the radio, and you like it, but when you hear the album, it’s rubbish. It’s, it’s disillusioning for young people—so their response might be, ‘yeah, I’ll just download that one track, why should I buy it?’ I mean, most people want to do the right thing—I don’t believe that anybody who is a music fan, unless it is possible for them to get their hands on it, would be in opposition to going to the shop and buying a CD, as opposed to downloading all the tracks as mp3s, and burn a CD, and find the cover art somewhere. I don’t think people would do that. They might download the odd track, but I think to be quite honest, if you really like an album, you’ll go out in the shop and buy it. It’s just so much hassle than the other method. But I do think the way that music is being sold will undergo quite a radical change in the next five to ten years, and I do think the way mp3s will be handled will be different, like with the Apple codec thing. But I do think very much it is a coming thing, and now they’re selling tracks, which is, to me, like the real arse-end of the business—it’s all about selling one track. And that’s kind of depressing for somebody who’s trying to create objects.
But for Wire, I think we’re slightly immune to that. It seems to be a band that attracts more music fans, who think probably, ‘yeah, I should buy it—it’s on their own label’—there are reasons for them to buy it, but they might do it just cause it looks nice, and it’s an object.
All of those things sort of color how you think about the future, and what you’re going to be making. I, personally, I’m really not a traditionalist; I don’t think, ‘hey, man, the band has to go record the album, blah blah blah,’ ‘cause we don’t work like that anyway. In five years time, we might not even be thinking about releasing CDs at all. I think after having more success with Send that more people thought we could have had in a million years—it wasn’t massive, but compared with what it could have been, it’s fantastic. You have to think quite carefully about where we’re going.
Stylus: I want to get off of the file-sharing for a little bit—just want to ask you this before I forget; the way you were describing the move in the Read and Burn as very logical and forward-thinking, but also you talk about being based off of Pink Flag. Do you think you are being culturally relevant, as you say, or a traditionalist, by sort of going back, and forward, at the same time?
CN: I think that at that moment in time, we were very lucky—in 2000, Pink Flag was becoming very relevant to a new generation of musicians. We should be exploring that, as a root into the future; I mean, I could feel that, it was sort of obvious to anyone who could feel that [the relevance of Pink Flag], but I mean, that really happened—it was a real event in real time. While we were physically putting together the third version of Wire, there were bands out there thinking, ‘yeah, this is just the kind of music to be into right now,’ especially American bands. I mean, the guy who does our sound, Steve, is an American, and he came with us to the radio station to see—I mean, he does the sound for like, half the bands in New York (of a certain kind), and they’re all like, ‘fucking hell, you do sound for Wire?’ You know, it’s not just like, it’s not some bullshitty thing, erm ... er ... I saw Level 42 on television about two months, going on about how they’re really cool with the kids, and I just wanted to puke. I just thought, I never want to be in that position, I never want to make any assumptions. It’s very, very gratifying for musicians in their forties to have younger kids into what they do, and the reason why it’s gratifying, is a lot of older people have their tasted already very formed. They’re not looking for something new, they’re very cynical—people in their early twenties are the ones very into music, in terms of buying, and creating. To have, as an element, a very strong number of people in their early twenties, it’s fantastic, at their shows—I mean, you’ve seen what I’m going on about—but it’s incredibly satisfying, and just, quite amazing, rather unexpected—even though you feel that that’s how it should pan out, for it to happen is another thing. Yeah, of course, we like to appreciated by intelligent people of all ages, but it is nice to see that there are musicians and artists or whatever out there, doing creative stuff, and thinking what we’re doing is great.
Stylus: Now, you’re saying with these new bands, who are all in their twenties, looking up to you, do you ever wish—I mean, previously, you hadn’t had very much success in terms of sales, at the very least with “Eardrum Buzz” in 1988, you were basically pretty ignored. Up until now, you could still say the same thing to an extent—I mean, Read and Burn 02 you could only get on Post Everything. Even though there are lots of these kids starting bands looking up to you, do you ever wish you had this sort of massive success?
CN: I don’t know—it’s very hard, but the problem is, I know this from experience, especially running a label—the number of music fans is actually quite small. I mean, you go back to the 60s or 70s, you had to be sort of cool to have a record player or a stereo. To be sort of a special person. I mean, my mum never had a record player—they never really understood why you’d need to buy records. And, you know, everyone has a stereo now, but that hasn’t really increased the number of music fans one jot. Most people have, you know, no taste, and they buy stuff that sort of sounds okay to them, and to try to impress their friends—‘hey, I just got the new Britney album, look at those hooters’—you know, whatever, I’m being flippant, but ... there is a very small audience, quite a small number of people who care about these things, and they’re not necessarily the easiest one to reach, either. They’re very particular. They might know everything that’s ever been good—but they might not think that anything that used to be good might be good now. That’s sort of the hardest thing for Wire to break through, because, you know, people will look and go, ‘yeah, they were fantastic in the 70s, but they aren’t now.’ We have to be so good, we have to defeat that perception. And a lot of that energy, that power in drive, in this formation [of Wire], that sort of, screaming, like, energy, is very, ‘no, fuck it, we are that good, so you can all just fuck off.’ And you have to do it, like, ten times more strong. Because you can’t be, ‘yeah, yeah, I’m cool, whatever,’ ‘cause you’re fuckin’ not cool when in you’re in your forties, you’re just some old bloke in a group, who’s way past their sell-by date, trying to convince someone that you’re still relevant. That’s why all that stuff matters.
Stylus: So then, would you say that’s why Read and Burn—I mean, I don’t want to say angry; all your records kind of have been—but this one is louder, it’s much louder, you’ve got to prove you’re back. Is that the aesthetic?
CN: I think that’s certainly an element in the aesthetic, and there’s a lot of fun in that. I mean, this is a production—I’m sitting in that studio, my studio, where that record, among many, was made—and I’ve discovered it’s like hell to get things to sound good. You have to go with the vibe of the music, but if you’ve got something that’s going to be upfront, the music’s got to be upfront. Not too much gloss on it, it should just be very present. And I think that was—I mean, I had something to prove, personally—you go back to the 70s, and what was then state of the art, the full works, it cost a fortune to be there. Again, in the 80s, you were in the big international studio, the full works, and we came out this time, and I really wanted to have this more ... I don’t know, basic. More direct aesthetic. I mean, I had to prove it, to the band, anyone close to the band, who wouldn’t believe that I could get it to sound like that—what you hear in that is a very strong desire to get something to work, to say, ‘look, this fucking works.’
Stylus: So, what you’re talking about then, is how Wire has to sort of come back and prove—you were talking about file-sharing, for example, earlier, and I, for one, had never heard a Wire song until someone told me, ‘oh, you have to download Read and Burn 01, it’s incredible.’ I heard it and thought it was incredible—so file-sharing, at least for this next generation, it’s definitely helped you.
CN: Oh, without a doubt, I feel that they’ll go and buy it, I mean, that helps—did you go and buy it?
Stylus: Oh, yeah. Of course, I did.
CN: You don’t have to say that!
Stylus: Oh, no, no ... I got it.
CN: No, I mean, even though ... again, I would have said anytime up to this year, that this would be a plus. But I think it is changing this year ... I’m going to put my record company hat on, and say there are definitely things we need to be thinking about. Certainly Post Everything, we’ve talked about it—there are three of us who run it, the two labels and web designer, we’ve certainly discussed, ‘well, we have to think about what means.’ Up until this year, we also just took the view that mp3 download was good. But I think there is a changing aesthetic, for the generation younger than you. Like my son—he’s fourteen, nearly fifteen. I don’t know how many records he actually wants to buy. He downloads stuff, and he thinks a lot of stuff is rubbish. Today he told me that *NSYNC is rubbish—maybe that’s an age thing. I don’t know—but I’d be interested to see what he does, ‘cause he’s not at an age yet where he’s at any sort of conscious age to think about buying anything ... he just gets his parents to buy it for him, it’s the same cost as downloading! [Laughs]
Stylus: What it is like running your record label? Well, let me get this straight first—there’s yours, which is Swim; Wire’s, which is Pinkflag; and then they all run though Post Everything?
CN: Basically, the set up is—if you go back to the beginning, Swim is myself and my wife [Malka Spiegel], we’ve run the label since ‘93, and we were able to start the label simply because we had our own recording studio, we were musicians, and we were able to put it in our garage in our house, and we literally started with nothing. You know, we haven’t made huge, huge progress with the label, but we’ve put out a lot of really good records. So, I’d already had a lot of experience, and had my own studio, when we started the Wire process. So actually, in terms of what Pinkflag is, Pinkflag is Wire’s label, but basically I run it. So, it’s all run through the same place—it’s the same studio, both the Wire stuff and the things Malka and I do on Swim. And that’s where we make videos as well, and we do other stuff. Post Everything is a different thing—it’s basically an internet community and music distributor. We are about 180 degrees from Amazon—if you were to go to Amazon and type in the window, ‘take me to the cool stuff,’ people would get very confused. Post Everything is just a little button on the internet that is ‘take me to the cool stuff.’ We only bother with things that are any good, so you’re not going to get a lot of things you’ve heard of—it’s a very small collection of stuff, and it’s deliberately so, deliberately curated, it’s an artistic choice.
We are adding labels all the time—but the thing is, we don’t do general. It’s a different kind of market—I mean, Post Everything is—the relationship between Post Everything and Pinkflag has become very important for both parties. It’s enabled Wire to make things, and just release things by mail-order, without having to go through a big thing of engagement with other parties, there’s no process, aside from manufacturing things for sale. And you should never underestimate the power of that. Any person who has made a record can make a thousand CDs, and go to the appropriate factories to make them, and get them there—well, what do you do with them then? How do you get the people to buy them? That’s the fundamental dichotomy of any self-made label, any artist that wants to get their music heard, and make a production on their own, has got to get their stuff out there. So, the idea that Wire is lucky enough to be in a situation where they can say, ‘yeah, we want to put out these six tracks, and we want the fans to have them next week’—we can do that. That’s fantastically powerful of a concept—just to have songs, all these years ago, you’d have to have money to go into a recording studio, to get someone to produce it, to sign all these things to have rights for them. Just to have these songs released a year later, or whatever. It’s just—you know, of course, that’s why I said we’re incredibly lucky.
Not everyone can do that. But there must be some kind of rope out there for people, other artists—maybe other artists who already have a career will think, ‘well, that’s the way to do it.’ Maybe that’s the way for it—I mean, you’re living in Chicago. But there are lots of people who buy from Post Everything who don’t live near a record shop. People just don’t have the way of getting a hold of stuff, because retail has been getting progressively worse. Even if you live near a record shop, which carries the things you want to buy, rather than just a general stock, they’ll have the new Eminem record ... but they might not have the new Wire record. I mean, I looked at a few stores—we stayed near the airport, Schaumburg, when we stayed out there, and I think there’s a big shopping mall there. And I went into it to see the Sam Goody’s there—and it was kind of like amazed there, at the paucity of the stuff ... just how little selection they had there. Now, you’re at a big shopping mall, at the edge of a big town, and I think that’s the one record shop there, there’s no way anyone’s going to find the new Wire record there. You’re probably going to have to into some ma and pa shop in Chicago to find that. So, you can see that it is—well, Virgin at least will carry stuff like that—it is, you know, especially for America, that way of selling stuff is very relevant. And somehow, it’s like file-sharing in a way, go back to that.
Stylus: Just that sort of availability?
CN: Availability, yeah, it’s not about, you know, you haven’t been excessively marketed that. Somebody told you it was good, so you went there and got it. It’s a simple transaction, it’s not a complex thing that involves ... you. You don’t want it for the wrong reasons. It’s a plus. It beats me most of the records that sell lots sell lots, because they aren’t very good. But ... I’m not some ... average person, you know. I’m cursed [laughs] .
Stylus: All right. Do you see any other bands possibly following this format? I mean, you were saying that you’re very lucky, but do you think it’s possible for other bands to start doing this?
CN: Well, one thing that I’ve been doing with Post Everything is talking to other artists, and I’ve tried to make a project, where I get people who have been around for a while—or, not even, they just want to self-release—and they already have some sort of reputation, but don’t want to deal with distribution, and the conventional way of going about it. The Project Dark album, which will get released through Post Everything—I mean, I don’t think they’re that well-known in certain areas, but they do have some sort of reputation, which is needed. They’re able to do events all over the world, so there’s people who do know about them. I’ve also been in some discussions, even though it hasn’t gotten very far, with Richard Kirk from Cabaret Voltaire. And you know, I’ve known him for years, and he’s always got various ideas about things he can do ... even though he doesn’t get very far with it. You know, there are other people out there who might think about that—the thing is, is that it’s a whole new way of thinking. You’ve got a lot of older bands who would just be like, ‘well, where’s the record company and the money, man?’ and ‘what do you mean, we can’t go into the studio?’ You’ve got to have a completely different way of thinking, you know, and this comes out of the whole thing of self-production, wanting to make their own record in your own way, and knowing how to make finished products sounds all right, and knowing what all the process is. And before you even start talking to somebody like Post Everything, you’ve got to be a label, you know, to make something. You can’t just say, ‘look, I’ve got some songs.’ Post Everything is not a label, it’s ... it’s a distributor.
Stylus: I’ve always been sort of curious, then, to know what your role is within Wire, and Pinkflag and everything—you were describing that you sort of started to run Pinkflag by default, it seems sort of ... well, it’s kind of apparent that you seem to be ... well, more, the most prominent driving force behind Wire. I mean, what kind of force—do you come up with sketches for songs, do you tell the band ‘we’re going to be doing this’—what role do you play in everything?
CN: Um, it’s difficult, really. Traditionally, I’m the songwriter—I’m not a singer-songwriter, per se, because I tend to not write all the lyrics [bassist Graham Lewis often does], which is a strange attempt to write tunes. But, I’m not really the kind of ... acoustic guitar person anymore. You know, knocking out tunes in the bathroom. My whole kind of writing thing is, you know, ProTools and a Mac—that’s how I write anything in music. It all just becomes production—you know, in dance music, the people who make tracks tend to be referred to as producers, rather than songwriters. They don’t play anything, they just kind of cause the music to happen by fiddling with some stuff—you know what I mean, it’s not sort of ... ‘muso’ thing, by getting the guys together in the studio. The Wire stuff that’s been released so far has basically been made out of bits, and with the exception of I think ... maybe one piece that really came out of the band playing together, the results being recorded by some means, very roughly. The rest of the material has just been made out of bits, and I suppose you could say I composed—well, what I tend to do is, I originate certain material and I tend to finish everything. So, what that compositional aspect is, I really couldn’t tell you. I mean, Bruce [Gilbert, guitar player] has been very present within the production of most of those tracks. I mean, he turns up and just does some stuff. He might come up with the first riff—“In The Art Of Stopping,” that’s Bruce’s riff—but anyone who knows Wire would know that that is his riff, just because it’s so self-evidently ... his riff.
Everything else kind of after that, I’ve just kind of ... putting together, creating some sort of structure. I mean, we had the idea of the stops, of the loop and stops, really, I just structured it with my vocal, and then you know, kind of ... really, the power of it is that it took three days to mix. That was three days of quite hard work to mix it—and that’s quite absurd, I mean, there’s nothing there. It’s just ... two guitar parts, drums, and vocals, and a couple of funny noises. He’s just all about, absolute, getting that absolute amount of power out of that track, to get it to drive, and it really works. And I think that’s what I can comment that method of production—I mean, I’ve got libraries of role-playing. Graham sends bit that we kind of work up into parts of songs. I mean, this one track on Read and Burn 01 and Send, “The Agfers Of Kodack,” I mean, he had that whole thing, the vocal melody, and the arrangement, and we just kind of took that bit by bit, replace the arrangement bit by bit with other parts, and kept the vocal melody. So in a way, we kind of produced him. And, um, I don’t—I think it’s very—I think what tends to happen is that I tend to do a lot of things by default, again, just because I’m so hard-working, and I’m quite dogged—I will spend three days mixing something, just because I know I will get something at the end, and I know I will do it.
You know, I bothered to, you know, earn enough money so I could get a house that could have a recording studio in it. And, you know, bothered to spend the time to figure out how to do a record company, and—I mean, you can never leave Paul out of any of this, and Paul is always there with a lot of voice, he’s been running blast-first for years. He technically doesn’t run Pinkflag, because, that’s not his job, he’s the band’s manager, but he has an awful lot of input into it. I think a lot of people don’t get this—but when other people hear this and think, ‘oh, he’s just an artist, so therefore, when he says he runs something, he sort of gets other people to do it,’ actually, it’s quite the other way around. I do the more boring things. I do the more ... mundane stuff and other people have ideas, and I come out with a way to make them work. So, I’m really more ... practical, kind of nuts and bolts person.
For example, if you look at Post Everything, there are three directors, two record company bosses, and a web designer. And the one who’s supposed to be the artist—me—I’m the one who does the accounts. You know, I do the really boring stuff. I mean, I’ve just about finished ... every quarter, got to knock that out. I’m the person who says, ‘what are these fucking five pounds supposed to be here for?’ You know, and I think, it’s kind of a weird thing, and I think people often don’t know how to take me, just sort of—‘how can they be that, and that?’ I mean, I’m obviously quite creative in some ways, and I do boring stuff—it’s just about a work aesthetic. I really like work, and I don’t ... anymore ... take any other drugs; I don’t drink very much; but, there is one thing that I’m kind of addicted to, and that’s work—actually, I think I am a workaholic. So for me, sitting around doing nothing is an anathema. I hate doing nothing, I think it’s just boring. I always have to be doing something. There’s a weird kind of thing—work junkies always recognize each other. That’s why Paul and I tend to gravitate together. We both really like to work and kind of get on with it. And I don’t think everybody in Wire kind of has the same attitude.
I mean, people could say, ‘well, just cause you work all the time doesn’t mean you do anything good,’ which is a perfectly valid argument. But you can think and think and think and think, and never get anything done. And so the balance of them is what makes it work—so, you know, I can also appear to be doing a lot, because I am doing a lot. But that doesn’t mean that somebody else who is doing ... less... doesn’t have any influence over the way it goes. Certainly, in the work I do with Malka, from my own projects—we have this one thing, Immersion, which we’ve done a few records together, a much more electronic thing—her way of working with me ... it’s more that she’ll just say, ‘that’s rubbish, don’t do that.’ That may be—that might have been hours and hours of work, but that’s just decisive intervention. But, I do really like collaboration, and I do think that, um, people can make decisive interventions, but there has to be respect. You can’t just say ‘that’s rubbish’ for the sake of it. Malka’s—that’s one of her best skills, she’s very, very able to hear something and make a very good judgment about it.
Stylus: Now, you said, this was all happening from the 90s?
CN: From the early 90s, correct.
Stylus: So, this was just after when you sort of maligned basically your entire 1980s output. Now, I don’t really understand why you’re so adverse to everything you did in the 1980s—
CN: —well, that’s just a conceptual standpoint. You know, I wouldn’t get too hung up on it. Certainly, when we started up again, in say, 2000, one of things that we did was play some of the 80s material alongside the 70s material, and everybody said, ‘well, it’s the same stuff, really, it’s just the production that went into it was a little bit different.’ That was one point to make—we always were the same band. The 80s, in terms of the history of Wire, was when an awful lot of shit hit the fan. You know, you never had—it’s internally combustible to a huge degree. There were some just absolutely awful moments during the 80s, you know, stuff that is just not creative. And nobody in the band has very good memories of that. Sadly, it sounded it more dated, certainly, in 2000, the sound of Wire in the 80s sounded more dated than Wire in the 70s. Now, it could well be that the sound of Wire in the 80s may become less dated in retrospect. Every generation has its contemporary culture, and its references of old culture, which go along with contemporary, if you know what I mean. So, certainly, I mean, er—Simon ... er, fuck off, what’s his name, the British writer living in New York who does these all, kind of, certain, ah, student of style. And one of the things he said was recently that 70s Wire is now, well, the stock of 70s Wire is going down, and The Drill is going to be really cool.
Stylus: Oh, Reynolds, Simon Reynolds.
CN: Yeah, Simon Reynolds. You’ve probably read that same thing.
Stylus: Yeah, yeah.
CN: Yeah, yeah, yeah [laughs]. Which is—
Stylus: Well, he might have been doing that just ‘cause he’s an asshole.
CN: He might have been, but just to say, just to think—Wire’s direction is a more overtly electronic aesthetic now, and ... bingo. Well, that certainly wasn’t a result of Simon Reynolds saying anything [laughs] —it’s an appreciation of how things move. What we have done right now is rendered the 80s material, the catalog, worthless, by what we’ve done now, because everybody wants original Wire, and new Wire—nobody wants 80s Wire. So now is the time to start thinking about how to make 80s Wire more interesting. I think, probably, one of the things that’s really holding back a genuine revival of 80s Wire is production. It’s not quite—it’s not the musical content, it’s just very ... loud snare-type thing, way too much reverb. I don’t think that that particular way of producing records is going to necessarily come back. I may be wrong.
Stylus: Well, I listen to A Bell Is A Cup, and there’s some really great songs on there, I mean, the first track off of it, I forget the name of it—
CN: Yeah, I know which one you mean—
Stylus: —and then, “Kidney Bingos,” they’re all fantastic songs ... but the production just sort of fucks it over. Which makes it sound like ... 1985.
CN: Yeah, absolutely—well, A Bell Is A Cup, certainly from a commercial point of view, would be a very, very good one to have a go at. But from the band’s perspective—not my perspective—they don’t think that A Bell Is A Cup is such a huge, great statement. But from my perspective, I think that and The Drill are my two favorite 80s Wire albums. I don’t like The Ideal Copy. The Ideal Copy ... really really really was an absolute fucking mess. I actually ... there was just way too much shit. Wire is very intense. And when people get together, we have this very intense kind of energy—we are best in small doses. There is something within the way that the people interact — I don’t know really, I don’t really want to overanalyze it or whatever, but some people always said that it was positive tension, but I don’t really think that it’s really true, and we’ve proved that with the new material—it’s been produced in a very ... untense way. Very relaxed atmosphere, it’s mainly just Bruce and I working together. I don’t think any of that creative tension is really helping us at all, I think it is just ... and I think one of the intelligent ways that Wire can be curated for the future, or that we can get the best out of anything, is by not just sticking everybody in a room all the time. I don’t think that necessarily produces the best results. There were just too many opinions going on about how it’s supposed to be—and I don’t think that it’s a very creative thing. If the opinions of the input could be somehow mediated, and there’s a kind of a discussion going on about it, a sort of curation of the item, then the whole thing can be very, very positive. Wire can be so intense as to be unbearable—in a way, you hear it in the music, but what you hear in the music is a very positive way about it. Not very negative, then.
Stylus: But wouldn’t that eventually peter out over time, and become more negative—I mean, you’re the one who’s in there mixing it, and so it’s your way ... but what about if Graham wants it his way? Don’t you think that over time, you’ll sort of have arguments, and that will lead to—
CN: —I’ll allow you to figure that one out for yourselves.
Stylus: All right. [Newman laughs] . Well, I mean, when did you figure that, then, after The Ideal Copy and your 80s material, then, that—
CN: —I’m not, you know; I think the working mess that we’ve got us evolved into over a period of time, whether or not everybody in the band is continuing to be happy with that, I don’t know. To be quite honest, I’ve picked up enough of it to be all disaster. Literally, one thing which does help the band be corrective is poverty. You know, there’s no way anybody—the band is not going to invest in putting itself into a recording studio with a producer, that’s bullshit, why would it do that. You know, to produce an item in which everyone plays on one at the same time, and that’s really a big advantage, that is just something we could not do. I mean—I don’t know really, a lot of that stuff is hard to find out. Certainly ... I don’t know. I don’t know a simple answer to that question. But, I think if you believe—which I do—enough that something is worth preserving, then it shouldn’t be destroyed for the sake of like, making a point. Then, finding a way to get that to work is the important point, rather than saying, ‘oh, look how genius I am,’ which is so not the way to do anything creative.
Stylus: What about a time when [drummer] Robert [Grey] left Wire, and you became Wir? I mean, what were you thinking at that point?
CN: It was a very difficult period, very, very difficult, and I think everything was wrong about it. I don’t think the Wir was necessarily that bad—I think it had some really very good material on it, I think it was poorly mixed—that’s when the band themselves should have started mixing. And I think the project itself wasn’t misguided, I just think Robert himself leaving was very indicative of the internal politicking within the band. You know, him feeling like he had no reason to reason to be here, like he had to leave—there was no one around the band who could, like somebody like Paul does, see that situation coming, and say something—
Stylus: —you were just on your own at that point.
CN: Yeah, and I think that one of the great things about this version of Wire is just that Robert is so back, he’s absolutely in the center of the band. Robert’s the one who needs to have a high level of confidence—he needs to feel that he has to have a reason to get onstage and be absolutely essential to those people. You know, not everybody thinks in that way about Rob, but I know I do—everybody needs to have the courage to stand onstage and do it, you know, to be the drummer in Wire. To be that person that they’re all depending on for that … sonic pulse … you’ve got to believe 100 percent that they want that, and if for one second, he stops believing that, then how can you do that job? Feeling that he wasn’t needed at one time—that was the wrong perception on his part, because it was not really the right thing. The reason Wir didn’t really continue is because there was no glue to hold the band together.
Stylus: Well, how did you defend that? I’m sure you had discussions with him about that, but looking back on it now, what do you feel could have happened, or should have happened?
CN: I feel that one of the reasons that this happened within the band was there was this sort of ... pointing ... so, you know, I feel quite bad, that it was the wrong thing to happen. In the end, it didn’t achieve anything—Wir didn’t achieve as a unit, and it didn’t have a long-term future, simply because it wasn’t the same chemistry. And you can’t—the thing is, what you accept about Wire is, you love or hate the people who are in it, and these are the people that make it up. So you need some level of contribution from every member to make it all work together. Robert isn’t an intellectual, and he will be upset in me saying that—but Robert is … stoic. He has a background in performance and theatre, but you know, for him, it’s really important, more than anything else, and ... as the kids say, ‘represent,’ to get out there and represent in the people. And absolutely, that’s what he’s doing. He’s really proud to be onstage in Wire—there is absolutely no doubt in my mind, and we’re very, very pleased with that. So, when it was said, “oh, well, Robert is being replaced by a drum machine,” it’s kind of a convenient lie. Again, this band is a very explosive mixture of people, and it needs to be carefully considered to maintain a relationship and friendship between the band. We do need somebody to sort of stop us, like Paul, to do the worst to ourselves—it’s a dynamically created outfit. People have strong opinions. That’s just the way it goes.
Stylus: How about when you practice these songs to do them live, because as you said, you basically chop ‘em up and put them together, how does rehearsal go?
CN: Well, rehearsal is fantastic. It went really well, it was just amazing. There was a big perceptual jump, but everybody said that together, it was one of the most gratifying moments in the history of Wire. Everybody was very excited about the Read and Burn material—the band thought it sounded fantastic. Then, the question was, how were we going to play that live? And, the person who was the right person to say, and it was Bruce—he said, ‘well, we could just play it.’ And it what was needed to be said, because then everybody went away and learned it. They learned their parts, and then came to rehearsal room, and in three days put it together. A fact. Again, nobody was underestimated with how powerful it was—it was a fantastic moment when it all came together. Anybody can see—well, not anybody—it is easy on one level to see, in the studio, to put stuff together, when you’ve got time to step away from it. To be focused about getting it right and those kinds of stuff—the production method is not about trying to project a certain notion of what the band should be. In a way, it is about ... projecting Wire.
I have to say that, my particular person has to make it all sound particularly good, instead of just going, ‘well, here’s my guitar, it should sound loud.’ I’m also just trusted to mix it, because ... well, they trust me to make it sound good. You know, it’s, um, it was very gratifying that it came together like that. I think it was put together for last year’s American tour, and we did, earlier, before it, one or two warm-up shows. We did All Tomorrow’s Parties last year, and then we did a gig at the ICA, then we did an American tour, then the European tour, and that set is quite a testament to the power of the band—that we were able to pull that off. We can play that set with some aplomb, considering the music was never put together in that way—but the thing is, in a way, what the recording and producing process is, it is kind of writing. It is sort of making a virtual band. It’s not that hard to play, because it’s guitar, bass, and drums. Which you’re thinking, you know, [laughs] how hard can it be? All the parts are pretty simple, just remember what you play.
Stylus: Well, you still play tracks from Pink Flag in your set, but what about others, like “Too Late” [from Chairs Missing]? I think of that great ending, I just say, ‘wow, that’s just like Send.’ You keep going on, and it adds more, and gets louder and more grating as the track ends—why wouldn’t you do a track like that?
CN: That’s very, very interesting. Nobody has ever suggested doing “Too Late,” fucking hell! Well, in the ‘70s, it was one of the ones that stayed in the set the longest, and it was like a big play-out number. I think the thing is that we’ve got “Pink Flag”—“Pink Flag” is just so much, that huge fucking ... it’s sort of developed, and then there’s something quite glorious about it, when it totally loses it. And “Too Late” can only be a big number, really, so then you’ve got two big numbers, and the audience is going, ‘well, how many big numbers do you have?’ I think there are technical reason why we probably haven’t done it, but certainly, the idea—the idea that we can pick and choose stuff that we’ve done in the past and play it live is a relatively new notion for the band. You know, it may be some members are a step too far; I would be uneasy about now putting any old songs in the actual set. I don’t mind doing them in the encore. But, you know, the idea of having them in your set like that ... it’s very trad rock—
Stylus: —so you’d never really have a more pop song, then, like “Map Reference 41N 93W,” [from 154] “Outdoor Miner,” or “Another The Letter” [both from Chairs Missing] in your set—
CN: —the thing is, Wire can’t really play those songs. I mean, “Outdoor Miner”—Bruce doesn’t actually play on the recording. Wire is not genius at doing that sort of stuff—if you notice, the one criticism of the newer version of Wire that people seem to have, they say, “yes, it’s really vibrant, and it’s really exciting ... but they don’t really do any pop tunes.” You know, and I think it’s because Wire, as a unit, especially live, is unable to put that across without any conviction.
It’s not that we’re being macho or it’s too girly, because that’s the one thing that Wire isn’t is it’s just Wire is not very good—it does 10 or up, but it doesn’t do 6 or 7. You know, it just doesn’t. I mean, especially live—but it’s not that I’m against doing any sort of pop, I think that’s what a few people pick up on in Read and Burn 02, and there’s “Trash/Treasure,” which is a pop song, of some kind—it’s sort of bastard pop, isn’t it? It’s never going to get in any chart, anywhere, of any kind. But still, it’s got a tune, it’s got a verse and a chorus, with proper singing, so without any shouting.
I’ve read tons of reviews—we’ve only had two bad reviews of it out of fifty reviews, and they both said that there were no pop songs on it. And they’re exactly right, there aren’t any tunes, really.
But I mean, there are also some things we obviously can’t do live, like “Nice Streets Above,” because it’s so obviously structured like a dance track. And, it’s been one of my concerns—though not for anyone else in the band, aside from Rob—that we have stuff within Read and Burn 03 that can be played live, and we can go on from that. We don’t just suddenly get to the point where nothing we do can be played live anymore. Because that will be a loss, I do think that we need—it works very well as a stand-up band, and I don’t think in any way it’s a conventional rock band. It’s a unique, remarkable thing in full flight, makes a fucking racket. And the way it looks is even more extraordinary—a bunch of old blokes shouting at you. You know, and fucking loud.
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By: Sam Bloch Published on: 2003-09-15 Comments (0) |