Perfect Sound Forever

COLIN NEWMAN


2013 Interview by David Gavan, Part 2
(June 2019)


(If you came here from elsewhere online, here's Part 1 of the interview)


Q: I want to ask you about the push and pull in the way Wire influence popular culture (bands such as the Cure, Joy Division, Siouxsie and the Banshees and Blur rated Wire highly), while simultaneously being influenced by that very culture. For instance the song, "Ahead," on The Ideal Copy sounds like New Order, (and appears to be referencing Wire's influence upon that band and Joy Division); while "Silk Skin Paws," from A Bell is a Cup..., evokes self- proclaimed Wire admirers Siouxsie and the Banshees. Meanwhile, the magnificent "Two Minutes" from Red Barked Tree suggests a 'late capitalism' wasteland take on Blur's Parklife; one with trouncingly genuine working class vocals).

CN: Wire is a distorting mirror of the culture it finds itself in. The reason it always has been and always will be a contemporary band is because we are only concerned with contemporary culture. We have no real interest in the past per se. But now, you find yourself asking: 'How do we reflect contemporary culture when there is no dominant culture?' There isn't really anything you can point to and say 'this is the music of now.’ And it's been that way for a while.

In the nineties, it was really easy: the latest street style was a reflection of the dominant musical style, but that's not really true anymore, and everything's come around and gone. We're even back to classic drum 'n' bass now- with LTJ Bukem relaunching his label, and releasing stuff that sounds like nineties drum 'n' bass, only machine- tooled for the 21st century. Sounds fantastic! But everything is like that now.

Trance music was light and fluffy in the nineties, now it's excessively machine-tooled, and a couple of years ago everyone was doing it. All the divas were singing on trance tunes, the music that nobody wanted! I find that fascinating, but at the same time, how do we define Americans with beards with group names with animals in them? Not really era-defining, is it?


Q: In Wilson Neate's Pink Flag book, Graham Coxon from Blur says that "Wire were unashamedly English and brought the baggage with them onto the records." But you weren't English in a jingoistic, Britpop 'let's wear a Fred Perry shirt and a Harrington jacket, then go down the dogs and be counterfeit cockneys’ sort of way. That patronising, postmodern rehashing of English working class culture came later (and Blur epitomized it boorishly).

CN: I think I agree with you. If Wire saw itself in the seventies in terms of coming from a place, it was probably Europe. I think we saw ourselves as being European. Being British was a strange thing to be. And what do I think now? I think I've latterly come to the conclusion that probably the thing that the British gave to the world in music-certainly in the sixties-was psychedelic pop, and I think that Wire is a psychedelic pop group. We certainly have very strong links with that idea. The way that psychedelic pop came almost directly after mod or soul. Or the blues. The bands that were earnestly working in those genres suddenly had long hair and beads and were trying to be experimental.

These people hadn't being doing it for years; they weren't hoary old experimentalists. It was people who were basically coming from somewhere else, just thinking: 'Oh yeah, what if we did that? That's interesting!' I see Wire very much in that vein. I think it's very wrong for people to perceive us as being long-term avant- gardists.

(NOTE: Newman is keen on the Move and the Small Faces, and had an epiphany of the "a working class lad like me can be an artist" variety when Brian Eno taught at his art college as a visiting lecturer.)
I'd say we're very experimental, but in a very pop way. We take something quite basic and fiddle around with it in the interested way of a curious person.
(NOTE: I like the way that CN says this. I've always liked his talking and singing voices a lot. Here, he sounds like a working class bloke who enjoys tinkering in his shed. He suggests a more sociable version of Aston from Pinter's The Caretaker. Graham Lewis's more received pronunciation means that both British class polarities seem to be embodied in Wire.)

Q: In "On Returning" (1979), you wrote:
'Never lacked a sense of theatre;
On returning with the tan you've gained,
Ahead of world service,
The best of your culture,
An evening of fun in the metropolis of your dreams.'
This appears to be about pasty English people going to warmer climes and gorging on "exotic" cultures, as though they're consumer products. Nowadays, this seems like a prescient critique of the commodification of foreign cultures.

CN: That was exactly the point that I was making. I'd just come back from holiday in the south of France, so that lyric was just the things that were going through my head; that obsession with foreign cultures; I could see that around me. It was probably just something that was in the air: I won't take too much credit for that lyric. I mean, we were travelling: I'd gone from being someone who was a working class kid who went to art school to becoming- by the working class definition- a bit classless. (Laughing) I mispronounced The Nouvelle Observateur, didn't I? Then I suddenly got into a situation where I had money and was travelling-both for work and enjoyment. And travel is an amazing drug. That was a world that was opening up for me, but I was obviously critical of the way that people related to that. It was just everyday analysis, really; I have no idea where it came from. I'm just writing about a holiday, really, you know.




AFTERTHOUGHTS

Post-Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan, many working class people tried to become upwardly mobile and more "cosmopolitan." Prole "creatives" were merely the first through the gentrification portal. It's also worth factoring in the relationship between Thatcherism/Reaganism and punk; how punk represented the last stand of mass left-wing militancy before the working class chose consumer durables over political solidarity. More philosophically, punk was the final hurrah of straight-ahead history and simple truths before postmodern irony, accelerationism and today's cultural collage loop was locked into place. This retro-loop suggests cultural depletion.

It works best to address the final point first – do the philosophy before the politics. Punk was the vortex anteroom between modernity and postmodernity; the moment when history stopped being a vinyl album played in chronological order and became an entropic ipod jammed on shuffle. As the cultural reenactment pick 'n' mix came into being, aided and abetted by the digital info flood, we fugue- walked into our Baudrillardian world of perma- now.

Wire presaged the slipperiness of meaning and the irony that postmodernism brought with it- the shift from Debord's Situationist subversion to Baudrillard's hyperreal "how-can-you make-radical-gestures amongst-funhouse-mirrors?" resignation. Radical behaviour is still possible, but, as Penny Arcade argues, it is less likely since the Reagan/Thatcher watershed.

After punk's interregnum, came Thatcher and Reagan's deregulation/ privatisation wonderland, which shunted us off towards a neoliberal Po-Mo purgatory. Also, punk cleared the way for the subsequent demise of liberalism that Chris Hedges describes in Death of the Liberal Class.

During the early days of Thatcherism, many latter-day Leonard Basts manicured their accents and tried to drag themselves up in the world, but the plum jobs tended to elude people from "culturally-deprived" backgrounds. Still do. And many a social clamberer ends up wondering whether it was worth bartering their class identity in order that they can mince around the Barbican of a weekend.

As for the England's relationship with the Continent, there's still a smudged schism between Empire-mourning jingoists, who bulldogishly barrack Europeans, and middle-class Francophiles who quite fancy Sartre- accessorized sex on the Left Bank. The extreme contingents of both camps nauseate in their own way. In "On Returning," Newman cannily highlights this social fault line. Not to mention the understandable working class anxiety he may have felt that his grabbing an education could be seen as affectation. Wire have always stayed the right side of pretentious.

There have been times in British history when social mobility has increased. Think of the rise of actors like Michael Cain and Terence Stamp in the sixties. But, despite punk's guttersnipe demeanour, its documenters were mostly middle-class people. Some of them saw punk as the triumph of the Dionysian over the Apollonian. Melody Maker was liberally sprinkled with this eyewash in the early eighties. Hardly a surprising stance, given that Nietzsche is the next stop along from Sartre on the intellectual shuttle train from Philosophical Eunuch Junction to Pseud City Central. Hopelessly sold as they are on soixante-huitard rebellion, it hardly occurs to surrogate Situationists that Guy Debord might find their self-frotting vanity terminally naff.

Often, these are privileged kids who feel divorced from their corporeality; a problem not shared by their less sheltered counterparts, whose days were/are spent dodging witless violence. This is why writers from the former background tend to filter pop culture through Continental philosophy and the Frankfurt School: working class people have often colluded too much in their own cultural deprivation to have much truck with complex ideas. Remember all those geezers who hated "art school wank" during the early eighties? It's all in Pierre Bourdieu's Cultural Reproduction and Social Reproduction (1977).

More anti-effeteness measures for sheltered intellectual manque types include a tendency to maunder on about "authenticity" in the existentialist "let's avoid bad faith" sense. These same cosseted souls often outsource their physicality to tediously macho, materialistic rappers (not the only sort of rapper, I know) whose calls to "keep it real" echo their own middle class search for "reality" ('Finds it more physical/that's an important word’: "106 Beats That," 1977). This blanket fetishization of authenticity is doubtless a symptom of the dissolution of truth in the postmodern digital age. This also explains the latter-day glut of books with titles like The Death of Truth, Truth Decay and Post-Truth.

On the subject of veracity, I'm interested in Colin Newman's use of High Rising Intonation (or uptalk) in recent years; an unassertive speech-pattern that surely results from the "everything is relative" uncertainty of the postmodern epoch (the recent vogue for beginning sentences with the word "so- as if one were adding to an ongoing blog- is evidence of the permanent present tense that incarcerates us).

Such undignified modishness-hearing Newman uptalk is akin to receiving an e-mail from Howard Devoto that features the "LOL" abbreviation- hardly suggests a culturally copped-on individual. Newman is an astute enough cove, but while many musicians are cerebrally dyslexic, they often have sensitive poetic antenna. That's why they make music. But, when you consider how inarticulate many original punks were and are, Eno's notion of "scenius"- the idea of an inspired community, as opposed to human islands of genius- can seem persuasive.

Certainly, two minutes of conversation with many a "punk wars" veteran alerts you to their tenuous grasp of punk's cultural implications. But Eno isn't completely right: intellectual stockbrokers such as Malcolm McLaren and Richard Boon are sensitive to trends, and often influence the investment of artistic currency during cultural booms. Then, figures like Walter Benjamin introduce new intellectual currencies. Scenius and memes have long been relatively unbranded social forces in our culture; they have just been massively accelerated by digitized connection.

Incidentally, the extreme individuality of Eno's work, to say nothing of template-scrambling artists in his ambit like Bowie, Fripp, Television, Robert Quine and Wire would seem to undermine his scenius theory.

And, if the notion of individual genius came with the change from feudalism to capitalism-as copyright sprang from artists' need to have a unique "product" to sell, then perhaps Eno's theory merely reflects the rise of ersatz community that the digital revolution has brought with it. Perhaps "groupthink" is a way to process vast information overload. What's more, cyber tribalism looks very like a flail towards communal feeling amid the atomization of society. The fact that the crowd was the star during acid house/rave's Bakhtinian bacchanalia suggests a communal jacking in of individuality. A Huxleyan ten hours of narcotized love.

Gone are the days where we would discuss the same TV programme on the train to work. And it's notable that, the more that technology has desychronized our cultural experiences- we listen to music and watch films at different times, and even use different devices while sitting in the same room- the more conformist we've become. The privatisation of affect that comes with a profusion of choice has eroded creativity. Heidegger was right: technology has reduced us to mere human resources, and deleted opportunities for shared numinosity.

But, in expressing their concern with contemporary culture, how far do art makers such as Wire reflect and how far do they dissect their cultuture? Obviously, we're all distorting mirrors of the culture in which we live. Cultural tics such as uptalk- or the "moronic interrogative"-confront ordinary people, and we choose whether or not to adopt or reject these mutations. If we're all mobile palimpsests, how do we decide which aspects of our culture to attach to ourselves?

Is my seventies/eighties-moulded character distorted if I gradually adopt antipodean/Valley Girl speech patterns? How "real" was that '70’s/’80’s-formed persona to begin with? I like bands which consider such topics. Sometimes, Wire do this well.

Currently, Newman and Wire's are indeed making "achingly beautiful" music. But their recent gigs (featuring songs like "Blogging") point to their peddling a temporally blank nostalgo-futurism; work that describes an eternal holding pattern, like the plane in Tom McCarthy's novel Remainder; an aircraft doomed to describe a figure eight until it runs out of fuel. Perhaps Wire's most recent live work- which sounds like a subfusc indie mulch- should be playing on that aircraft's PA (and the passengers should be reading David Shields' Reality Hunger). I quite like this music: it's the best distorted mirror image that the times allow Wire to project.

The joltingly lucid lyric in the Pink Flag (1977) tune "It's So Obvious" runs:

Well it's alright, listen:
Can't wait for seventy-eight.
God those RPM, can't wait for them...
Don't just watch; hours happen-
get in there kid and SNAP THEM!
Yeah, snap those hours, and neck the marrowbone of the now. But, as Burroughs wrote:"When you cut into the present, the future leaks out." Surely, rather than ceasing to be spectators of our own lives, the future that punk ushered in was today's endless epoch shuffle. Obviously, Francis Fukuyama- who knew his Hegel-was picking up on this sort of thing when he wrote about"the end of history."

Many punk bands were historically self-conscious, but few had apprehended their era as astutely as Wire. Or as sardonically. Wire were too sussed for Situationism, it seemed. If you trace punk's intellectual genealogy through the Renaissance, the Enlightenment, on to Dada, the Surrealists, the Lettrists, the Situationists, taking in post-structuralism, things get interesting. Especially if you interprete the punk deluge as an historical wave that had been gathering force over hundreds of years. This perspective makes the "I was there" posturing of rich kid Arthur Rimbaud’s seem quite silly.

Seen in this light, punk resembles a liberal humanist suicide powered by two recent World Wars, the Holocaust and the melting away of grand narratives. It's the Enlightenment's Freudian death wish enacted to a bar chord discord. "Death Disco," indeed.

So, here's punk as a killing jar for modernism. The reason that the constant harking back to "year zero" by many punk doyens was/is a self-erasing regression is that the movement was born during a Jim Jones-style mass (media) suicide. The post-punk world's very birth spelt inanition; only postmodern half-life could follow. Philip K. Dick depicted this animated expiry in Ubik (1969).

What if Eno's scenius is more evidence of the communal zombification described by Curtis White in books like The Middle Mind and We Robots?

I wonder if Change Becomes Us, and the less astonishing Wire music that I'm hearing in its wake, signal the "Time Lock Fog" of postmodern entropy and its effect on Wire. It may also be a question of the band losing their creative charge, especially now that Bruce Gilbert is no longer a component*. From now on, perhaps Wire will begin to cannibalize their past sonic glories; echoing the cultural reenactment loop that they deconstructed so well in their heyday. Music writing hacks haven't mentioned any of this, so it musn't be happening.


(* ED NOTE: agree to disagree)


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