If Colin Newman had a dollar for every critic who misunderstood Wire, he could probably buy EMI and fire everyone retroactively. Not out of malice — just for the principle.
“There’s too many people giving opinions,” he says early in the conversation, before correcting himself. “Too many people giving opinions that aren’t relevant to anything apart from themselves.”
The sentiment could double as a thesis statement for Wire’s career — a band allergic to consensus, impervious to nostalgia, and perpetually ten years ahead of everyone else. They’ve been called everything from post-punk pioneers to art-rock ghosts. But what they’ve never been is comfortable.
Newman joined me to walk through the 40th anniversary of 154, the difficult birth of It’s Beginning to And Back Again, and how Wire became the most famous cult band nobody’s ever heard of. Also: sock puppets, bourbon, and why The 15th made a girl in Rome cry.
Let’s start at the top. 154 was their White Album — a record bloated with ambition, internal tension, and just enough arrogance to make it brilliant. “We were convinced we were going to make an absolutely brilliant record,” Newman says, not flinching. “We had the arrogance. We were, in our own estimation, the best band of our generation. Without a doubt.”
But even Lennon-McCartney knew when the roof was leaking.
“Everybody’s ambition was taking a different form,” he admits. “Which could be — not always, but could be — a recipe for disaster.”
Wire had momentum going into 154, sure. Chairs Missing had aged into a critics’ darling, the kind of record everyone pretended to love at the time but only actually discovered two decades later. But the making of 154 was… complicated.
“It was a more difficult start,” he says. “The Roxy tour that year — that was a disaster. Roxy’s audience hated us. It was costing us money to be there. EMI was changing. Mike [Thorne] was a double bubble — producer and EMI staffer — and he came in saying we needed to make albums of singles. That was… not the direction.”
Not that Wire ever had a direction. Or rather, they had dozens.
“We were driven by the material,” Newman says. “It wasn’t like we were sitting around saying, ‘Let’s be post-punk visionaries.’ We had songs. We honed them on the road. We could actually play now — unlike during Pink Flag. Paul Hardiman, our engineer, said that when we showed up.”
And then there’s The 15th. A song Newman wrote himself. “It’s got an odd set of chord changes — not an obvious single. But somehow it became one. When we first played it again, in Rome, this girl in the front just… her mouth dropped open. She looked at me like she never thought she’d hear it live. I nearly cried.”
Which, for a band that once made the most difficult record of their career in absolute silence, is a lot of emotion.
“That was The Ideal Copy,” he says. “There was blood on the walls. I left the sessions at one point. It was absolutely horrible. Nobody was laughing anymore.”
The band, never big on therapy, needed a new direction. Bruce Gilbert suggested they rebuild from the wreckage — strip down a live performance, remove everything but drums and vocals, and rebuild the album in post like a remix project. Thus: It’s Beginning To And Back Again, affectionately known as IBTABA, and confusing to vinyl bin flippers everywhere.
“It was a simple idea,” Newman shrugs. “And it had to be. I’d just become a dad. We had to work around that.”
Even that record didn’t feel like a proper comeback — not to Newman. The real turning point came a few years later with Immersion, the duo project with his wife Malka Spigel. It was a release valve for Wire’s unspoken tensions and an excuse to make electronic music again without the expectations of an old band with a legacy to protect.
“We didn’t think anyone would even remember Immersion,” he says. “And then we went on tour last year and drove coast to coast in America. It was one of the most amazing experiences I’ve had. You can’t do that with Wire — Wire doesn’t want to be on the road for eight weeks.”
Still, Wire soldiers on. In fact, there’s a new album due in January.
“My gut feeling is it might be the best one in 20 years,” he says, daring the quote to exist. “Strong songs. Stepped up production. We believe in this one.”
Not bad for a band that’s never quite been successful and never quite been not.
“We’ve got the status David Bowie always wanted,” he jokes. “Underground and cool. But not poor.”
As for the role Newman plays in all of it? He downplays it, as always. “I’ve just got the ability to finish things,” he says. “Most musicians don’t know how to do that. I do.”
And that may be Wire’s great secret. Not reinvention. Not mystery. Not the sock puppet video they made for “Kidney Bingos.” Just a guy who knows how to finish the job — and a band that knows when to disappear.
Listen to the interview above and then check out the videos below.
