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To Wire's 2001 concert review in the New York Times

Click to download Wire historical memorabilia, text or hi-res graphic.
All are encoded as zip files.
Thorne's commentary on making four albums with Wire (24K Word file)
The Roxy, London WC2, (Jan-Apr 77), hi-res cover art 648K jpg
Pink Flag, hi-res cover art 568K jpg
Chairs Missing, hi-res cover art 556K jpg
154, hi-res cover art 188K jpg
Bruce Gilbert's mid-80s letter to Thorne, 176K jpg
Concert poster, Notre Dame Hall, London, 1979 796K jpg

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You say "amusingly," but half of the music-making business or half of the people who are making music are functioning with remixes and transmutations of material.

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In the broader sense.  We are halfway to questions about the collaborative arts and collaborations between people taking somebody else's material and transmuting it.

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You always use the word, "activity," and also, "music and art," almost to be interchangeable.

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Whether in the fine arts, to use the unfashionable phrase, or in music, there was always a popular access.  It was always possible to start and to do it yourself, which was the essence of the punk era, and this is something you used as a springboard.  Do you think that's possible at all, twenty years later? Do you think this is a constant of the society we are in?

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There is a long tradition starting in the sixties with the art school graduate who became a musician.  Do you think there is a parallel of the same thing happening today?

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You are very optimistic about the new experimentation that's possible at the grass roots level, so to speak, but in practice what's happening with commercial art is that it is moving into larger and larger mass-market exercises resulting in acts like The Spice Girls and the obsession with them.

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The punk era was the prime example, possibly the best example, of a simple technology assisting a very simple expression but a very freshened new expression.  You are talking about other simple technologies also coming out and enabling people.  Do you think that a simple technique is an easier way to a simple, clear expression of an idea?

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Often, what comes out of this new technology, is a priesthood of people who are the so-called professionals and the so-called experts, and rejecting the priesthood was an important facet of punk in the seventies just as it was an important component of other artistic movements and rebellions in earlier times.  Do you think this is a cyclical process?  Could we expect one today?  It seems a little quiet at the moment.

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The paradox often became, though, that having integrity meant it was worn like a haircut, and people became more concerned with integrity than, perhaps, what it was actually lying on.

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Do you think the pretense of integrity or the imitation of integrity undermines the impact of the real thing on the audience and the possibility of the real thing being recognized by the audience?

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Don't you think the twelve-year-old girl ideal music business target is a relatively recent ideal?

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But, what happens to old codgers like us who still want a little intensity from what they are seeing around them, but don't go into record stores and, typically, as "baby boomers," have an awful lot of discretionary income?  What happens to their musical and artistic consumption?

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What might be popular among people thirty years old and up?  Should it be any different from the rest?  Do you expect a growth of understanding or perception as the audience ages?

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You talk about graduating to much more subtle forms.  So, did you start with the Spice Girls equivalent listening to popular music?

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It looks like a very short step though to the chain saw guitar sound.

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So things got simpler and simpler with the Blues and with the chain saw guitar drone.  Why is it that the lyrics still provoke arguments among the fans about the actual 'meaning' of the oblique collision of a very simple sound with often very abstract images?

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Of the Wire recordings of the last twenty-two years, which ones persist for you and which come closest to the ideals you have just talked about?

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Do you ever get intimidated by what you did and hearing the distillation of hours, days of effort whizzing by in two and a half minutes?

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The idea has always been the essence of what you've done.  At one point though you became dangerously close to being pop stars.  Would that have been a contradiction?

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As an artist whose job is communication, would you have valued the additional, broader platform that a single would have given you to propagate your ideas?

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As you said, different members of Wire might have had different approaches to the larger platform that a hit would have given.   There were tensions within the group, everybody hating everybody at some point.  Do you think that was part of the dynamo that drove the group?  Do you think that was part of the reason the recordings came out so successfully?

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Well, people still bought the records, and continue to do so.  In fact, at one time Wire were labeled the "Pink Floyd of the New Wave."  This seemed such a huge accolade, and all four of you seemed to appreciate it at the time.

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Thinking of the time before Robert (Gotobed) left, when you settled into being Wire, what, in retrospect, do you think the roles were?  Was there a clear dynamic of who did what and to whom?

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We were talking about the roles and why.  How did it change when you became a three piece?

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Is Wire in the past tense now or are you going to work together again?

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So many people have taken Wire's example now, and there are so many people who have gain some knowledge and influence from Wire, do you think they would dislike being called the Wire of the late nineties?

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To Wire discography
To Wire discography
To radio sessions log
To Wire songs covered by other artists
To Bruce Gilbert discography
To Bruce Gilbert/Graham Lewis discography
To Robert Gotobed discography
To Graham Lewis discography
To Colin Newman discography
To Swim discography

To Wire's 2001 concert review in the New York Times

Click to download Wire historical memorabilia, text or hi-res graphic.
All are encoded as zip files.
Thorne's commentary on making four albums with Wire (24K Word file)
The Roxy, London WC2, (Jan-Apr 77), hi-res cover art 648K jpg
Pink Flag, hi-res cover art 568K jpg
Chairs Missing, hi-res cover art 556K jpg
154, hi-res cover art 188K jpg
Bruce Gilbert's mid-80s letter to Thorne, 176K jpg
Concert poster, Notre Dame Hall, London, 1979 796K jpg

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