the Geoffrey Welchman Music Website

Wire: Interviews with Colin Newman and Graham Lewis.

Brief interviews with two personal heroes, founding members of the ultimate British 'postpunk' band, Wire. Excerpts from these transcripts appeared in "The Road" article I wrote for RayGun.

Colin Newman (singer/guitarist/keyboardist)

"Wire is a room you can walk into at any time”

When we started we were getting good reviews. We were quite well regarded in London, but once you get outside of London that doesn’t mean anything. You’re just like the Friday night entertainment, and they’ll just throw at you whatever they want. If they (could) poke you with sharp sticks to make you go faster, they would do that.

It was the punk period. There was always that slightly hostile vibe, also, because we weren’t really a punk group. We were doing stuff which was slightly weird for punk people. They were very aggressive towards us, or just didn’t understand.

One of the earliest things I remember is playing to an audience in Liverpool where they were literally standing in a semi-circle against the wall—the audience had crowded as far away from us as they could, like they were petrified of us.

On the other hand, I guess we must have given out a fairly heavy vibe. You had to, because the vibe you were getting from the audience was that they hated you for not being a proper punk group.

It sounds snobby, but the brighter ones would come to us and say, “Bloody hell, that was amazing.”

The vibe at the time was that you had to play very badly on purpose. We couldn’t play very well ‘cos we couldn’t play very well, but it wasn’t on purpose. We got better because we practiced.

You have this house where you really have to find something, and you have to do that out of nothing, because your day is spent going between one place and another place, and also doing quite a lot of interviews. It can become very wearing.

I remember we played in Newcastle, and it was a sellout. There were three other bands, we were headlining. There were, like, 600 Geordies crammed into this place, and the person who had organized the event had made the fatal mistake of letting the beer run out about an hour before we went onto the stage.

There were a few extremely large and violent skinheads there, and a very, very low stage—about 2 or 3 feet high. I seem to remember most of the set (when) I was singing, Colin was watching for the bottles which were flying in my direction, and when he was singing, I was watching for the bottles coming out of the crowd for him.