The making of Wire's Chairs Missing

Additional Credits:
All tracks arranged by:
Gilbert/Gotobed/Lewis/Newman/Thorne
Engineer: Paul Hardiman
Asst. Engineer: Ken Thomas

Flutes on Heartbeat: Kate Lukas
Keyboards & Synthesizers: Mike Thorne
Sleeve Concept: Gilbert & Lewis
Photgraphy: Annette Green
Art Direction: Brian Palmer

Practice Makes Perfect (Gilbert/Newman)
French Film Blurred (Lewis/Newman)
Another The Letter (Gilbert/Newman)
Men 2nd (Lewis)
Marooned (Gilbert/Lewis/Newman)
Sand In My Joints (Lewis)
Being Sucked In Again (Newman)
Heartbeat (Newman)
Mercy (Lewis/Newman)
Outdoor Miner (Lewis/Newman)
I Am The Fly (Lewis/Newman)
I Feel Mysterious Today (Lewis/Newman)
From The Nursery (Lewis/Newman)
Used To (Gilbert/Lewis)
Too Late (Gilbert)
Go Ahead (Gilbert/Lewis/Newman/Gotobed)
Former Airline (Gilbert)
Question of Degree (Lewis/Newman)

All tracks published by Carlin Music Corp.

Practice makes perfect
Yes, I can prove it

Mercy, nurse, tonight

On the release of their second album, Wire were dubbed 'the Pink Floyd of the New Wave'. It could have been the ultimately flattering phrase but it made everybody jumpy. Pink Floyd were establishment, potentially self-satisfied and complacent dinosaurs, and Wire didn't want to be anywhere near that. Even so, a generation apart, the two groups have much in common: their albums all persist over time, were made with an experimental mindset, and are rediscovered by people who weren't even born when they were recorded. Even so, that intended compliment caused real queasiness.

Wire had been a hit, although without selling large numbers of LPs. Their attitude and the support of EMI gave them considerable reach. They found themselves bearing the torch of a reborn progressive music fired with the spirit of punk and do-it-yourself-without-the-self-serving-experts, experimenting and exploring far beyond the contemporary pastiche of Sham 69 ('Urry up 'Arry, we're going down the pub'). Punk had quickly started to imitate itself, but change was the only constant for Wire. The 'new wave' was evolving from the punk revolution.

As pop intellectuals will observe, 'pop will eat itself,' a saying memorable enough for a group to use it for their name. People who were the real article, who lived what they were presenting and who took the genuine personal risks, tend to be swamped by the predictable flood of musical, stylistic and lifestyle imitators. Style is easier to adopt than substance, and this period was one of several where the originals provoked a trendy stampede (remember 'love and peace', anyone?). Around this time I bumped into an old acquaintance at a club who had been a thoughtful, slightly ethereal artist using a classic Moog IIIc synthesizer as his er 'axe' and drawing other-worldly graphic music scores. Now, he wore a black leather biker jacket. He and his mate jostled me by way of making a strong conversation point. Er, 'scuse me.

Chairs Missing has persisted as my personal favorite of the three Wire albums that I was involved with. It doesn't have the rough clarity of Pink Flag, or the polish and arrangement coherence of 154, but there's a spirit of newness and discovery about every moment which takes you on a journey perhaps closely related to the one we made at the time. Courtesy of new, basic electronics, completely fresh sound effects units were making it to market. You could buy relatively cheap ($100 or so) effects pedals, typically from MXR and Electroharmonix (both of whom eventually went bust). These sounds promised a whole new world for us, so off we went. A gesture could come from a simple chord, non-virtuoso playing, and an inspired setting of some mysteriously-named knobs. For me too, that was liberation, since I can't move my keyboard fingers fast enough to impress.

The strength of the lyrics on the album went up a level, although the vocals are sometimes hard to hear. The punk style of having the voice riding just on top of the supporting cataclysm was still with us, and it wasn't until 154 that arrangement and mixing complemented each other. There are several very direct, open statements, such as Marooned and the first overt love song Heartbeat (Fragile, on Pink Flag counts as the first of all). My favorite line is in Too Late, a sentence that comes from a planet that I have never visited. 'She pisses icy water on poetic mornings.' Wire lyrics were capable of pretension, but this is the opposite, putting you immediately in a curious emotional space with words that are inexplicable but somehow connect.

I had played keyboards on a few tracks on Pink Flag, but didn't think that my contribution warranted disturbing the rock-solid coherence of the group's sound. There is piano under Reuters as basic coloring, and more forward noises in Options R, although I listened to that track recently and couldn't hear anything I'd done (most of it was intended to color Bruce's or Colin's guitars anyway) except the harmony to the bass on the descending line at the very end. So what if I was playing a cranky old RMI Electrapiano whose pedal would fall off onstage and require a short, discreet technical session with sticky tape. Wire said I should play synthesizers on the next album. I said, as ever, 'I can't move my fingers fast enough.' They said, 'If you don't do it, we'll get that Brian Eno in.' I said, 'OK.'

My terror of playing came from the humiliation of taking much longer than accepted by the studio establishment to get some idea realized and recorded (and the group sometimes, in their impatience bred by the immediacy of the crash guitar chord you could get just by plugging in). The ability to set up a sound so that you just put two fingers down on the keyboard and have the electronics do the rest of the ear massage was something we all understood. But I wasn't battle hardened by Roxy gigs, hadn't absorbed the punter's advice from the floor ('that's better, now louder and faster') and I hadn't toured in support of an album. I didn't have a fraction of the front that the others had developed, and had never been on stage except to lecture or to read the morning lesson at secondary school assembly. At the end of this album recording, Wire were to play a major gig at the Lyceum in London. It was to be my Armageddon. Later, for the story of that embarrassment. On the album, I had the space to find genuinely new sounds and gestures, to think compositionally, as compared with the exercise of player chops which was most keyboard players' studio mindset.

The sound is the most startling thing for me on returning to listen after 21 years. Songs like Too Late are the final sting of the departing punk style. The crackle of the guitars is often underlaid and boosted by a similar sound from the RMI Electrapiano through a distortion pedal or overdriven amp. One thing we did achieve was an integrated electric sound, where the originating instrument is often difficult to figure out. What sounds like a keyboard is often an electric guitar, and vice versa. The put-down of my keyboards in the rock purist columns of Trouser Press magazine might have been because of the organ-like bits, where they probably loved the synth through the MXR Distortion+ pedal. Maybe they just hated the voice loops, bells, temple blocks, flutes, tubular bells (processed through a ring modulator in Marooned after Bruce had objected that he didn't want any bell tolling, too corny).

On this album, the instrumental layering and replacement began in earnest. Most of the initial recordings sounded like Sand In My Joints, a wall of punky guitar over Robert's beat which would sometimes be only slightly to the left of prescribed punk practice. The group's boredom threshold was very low. One time, I was already at my post when Colin, Bruce and Graham turned up late after lunchtime pub. This was routine consumption for us all and, in retrospect, adding in the leisurely dinners we would enjoy courtesy of EMI, makes me wonder how we got anything done at all. Colin announced that the whole album had to be recorded again. 'Really,' I said with the posed detachment which could drive them mad. They were, thankfully, talking about stripping the stylistically familiar out in favor of something new. Used To started as a track like that, but ended as the poignant sketch that anticipates 154.

As on Pink Flag, I always tried to get the guitar sounds to work at the amplifier itself, even when a quick turn of the equalizer in the control room would help. The equipment was stretched to the limit. Any equalizing was done in the studio itself, which affected the sound much more organically. On the first album, I had been utterly purist about recording the guitars practically flat, and putting in my own hard work to get the sound working in air. Chairs Missing relaxed the attitude, or we might have had an even harder time locking all those sounds together. There are some extremely non-purist moments. The guitar solo in Sand In My Joints is played by Colin and Bruce both through the ring modulator on the classic Synthi AKS. Unless there is a sound present at each of the two inputs to this device, nothing comes out. When there are, the single final sound is one modulated by the other. It was a very social occasion for the two of them.

It was still important to play the songs complete, to get the mood and the feeling down on tape before using that performance as bottled energy to draw on when we replaced crashing guitars with something stranger or more mysterious. Colin's vocals were especially convincing when the mood of a track like Mercy descended on him. His head would be solidly in the issues of the song, and it sounded like it, always convincing. On Mercy, we overdubbed a few vocal lines. I can hear them, such as 'raise the club', but overall they raise the intensity over the missteps that happened live.

It became almost a specific requirement to have at least one thing completely fresh and striking about a track. Any reference to style was totally taboo. A proposal to do a song in, for example, 'a kind of Motown groove', a common enough expression in New York studios, would cause horror. I Am The Fly, recorded for a single ahead of the album, was described by Colin before I heard it as 'a sort of disco thing.' I don't think Disco Fever was on his turntable too much.

One whole intense day was devoted to the 1:06 Another The Letter. We had cast around for all the first half of the session to find a satisfactory way to nail the song, initially presented with a heavy punk accent. Lots of crashing and bashing. The only unchanged personality was Robert, whose drums were thrown into a totally strange space by our laying the whole punky thing over a sequence playing out of my Oberheim analog synthesizer. The basic tempo did get faster and faster, easy when the tempo control is a small knob rather than a sweaty drummer. Later, though, I had to attempt to play the damn thing manually on stage, with the group as usual hammering away even faster than the recording. The sound man would normally be kind or disgusted, never sure which, and turn the keyboard sound down.

After the album was done, Wire had a gig to play at the Lyceum, to an audience of more than 1000. They invited me to play, which was terrifyingly wonderful (most people spend their life on stage and are only too keen to get into the green grass on the studio side……). We had one rehearsal the previous night. It was one thing for Colin to open his mouth and bang away at his still fabulous-looking white Ovation guitar. For the keyboards, all manner of primitive effects had to be reset between songs, so I diligently made a chart of the changes I had to make based on the set list. We got off to a rousing start, and my stage fright was just starting to abate when Colin's set list diverged from mine and he started announcing songs that might have been by Yes or Genesis for all I could do to fit in. It's a bit like those dreams when you're at school and you realize you don't have any clothes on. The sound man probably eliminated me altogether. Wire might have sometimes been guilty of preciousness, but they taught me immediately not to take things too seriously when you're up there. After pulling myself slightly together, I joined in the onstage laughs.

- MT June 2000

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