Wire
Wednesday, May 10, 2000
Metro, Chicago

By Deena Dasein

It was only right to have Wire kick off the Chicago installment of the Noise Pop Festival. These long-in-the-tooth Brits, like the fest's name, embrace musical extremes, but unlike their opening band, Seam, who played an integrated set of pretty post-rock melodic noise, Wire doesn't grasp their two extremes simultaneously.

Wire began within the British punk movement that energized critics and fans on both sides of the Atlantic in the latter part of the 1970s. Punk's myth was that it was a prole movement in opposition to pretentious bourgeois art rock. With their first album, 1977's Pink Flag, Wire found a fervent following; they were punks with a difference, with more artistic than working class intentions. Within a few years the band self-deconstructed, morphing into avant-garde art rockers closer to the likes of Big Black than Emerson, Lake, & Palmer. Influential upon a host of '80s indie and Brit-pop bands, some of whom have covered or ripped off their songs, Wire had achieved cult rather than mass status when they broke up in the early '80s.

Reuniting in 1986, Wire would have none of their punk juvenalia, refusing to play it on tour. But given its popularity with their fans, they turned their tour into a work of conceptual art. They had a Wire tribute band, the Ex-Lion Tamers, who played the whole of their best-loved album Pink Flag, open for them.

Fast forward a decade-and-a-half, after a second dissolution of the band, and Wire has revised their view of their past. The newly reunited foursome presented a career-spanning set to the crowd of thirty-somethings filling the Metro on last Wednesday night. I was privileged to sit next to the Ex-Lion Tamers' drummer, now a rock critic for the Sun-Times, who generously provided me with a personal play-by-play.

Singer-guitarist Colin Newman and bassist Graham Lewis are Wire's center, but my attention was drawn to their more interesting periphery. Drummer Robert Gotobed was a serene-faced, well-oiled rhythm machine, not your typical arm-flailing skin-pounder but a wrist-action-only precision instrument. Lead guitarist Bruce Gilbert, playing with his role as much as with his instrument, deconstructed the melody with his calculatedly quirky plonking.

Without ingratiating words or gestures to the audience, and without any interaction on the stage, Wire's playing was tight, too well-rehearsed perhaps. Rather than segregating their two pasts into discrete parts, a less-jarring solution, they interspersed both extremes throughout their 11-song set. They started with the title track from the punk Pink Flag and followed it with two second-era songs ("Silk Skin Paws" and "Boiling Boy") before returning to "Lowdown" from that first album. The audience, myself included, was politely appreciative of Wire's later work, but was thrilled by the work from their initial incarnation.