One week at number one on 18th April 1987
Where do I even begin with Wire? Getting the chance to write about one of my favourite bands is both a blessing and a curse; a blessing because I want less enlightened readers to understand just why they’re so special (of course). Also a curse because groups you have spent most of your lifetime admiring become strangely hard to pin down. You know you love them, but describing why feels like resting on a therapist’s couch and being asked to remember where those feelings began. You scribbled the details down in a notebook somewhere decades ago, but now it just feels like second nature. You want me to explain?
The feelings certainly didn’t begin in the logical place for me – the place most Wire fans entered. The first track I heard was the chiming, beautiful but oblique 1988 single “Kidney Bingos” on a compilation I owned, which remains one of my favourite Wire singles (and one I’m sure we’ll get to in due course). From there, I found a cheap second-hand copy of “Outdoor Miner” (minus its picture sleeve) in Gumby Records in Southend, and played it about forty times the night I bought it, utterly obsessively. It became my favourite single of all-time and remains such. You could ask me why, but if you did, I’d just get distracted and this entire entry would be about that record.
You’re probably expecting me to say that I then tracked back to their first three albums, but I don’t recall seeing many of them on record store racks at that point. This may or may not be the reason I bought “The Ideal Copy” first, their fourth album, their first in eight years, and their debut for Mute Records.
This is another reason why having to write about this single is a curse. “The Ideal Copy” was strange enough and strong enough to hold my attention and establish me as a fan, but clearly imperfect and vaguely chilly. It has moments of bright, faintly broken pop (“Madman’s Honey”, “The Point Of Collapse”) and the usual shattered, jagged melodies which sound in danger of breaking down but always hold their steely nerve (“Ambitious”) and in that sense, offered us what Wire always did.
Where the output differed was the precision of the approach. The group emerged having embraced electronics and feeling determined that they needed to undertake the work with a “modern” mindset. Out went Robert Gotobed’s live percussion, which was replaced by painstakingly created loops and programmed rhythm tracks, with anything that approximated cymbals or hi-hats also thrown by the wayside. Eccentric, rubbery, rapidfire yet “non-funky” (their words) basslines were laid on top, a unique approach the group referred to as “dugga”.
Gotobed has gone on record as being unimpressed by this, stating in Paul Lester’s book “Lowdown” that he felt sidelined and unable to offer much towards the creative process. While the group beavered away in Hansa studios in Berlin, he instead whiled his time going for walks around the city, occasionally popping back to grapple reluctantly with the technology. Other members were also going through challenging changes in their personal lives, ego battles commenced in the studio, and singer Colin Newman briefly walked away from it all; he was only coaxed back when he realised that it wasn’t a major label’s money he would be draining by quitting, but that of Mute boss Daniel Miller – a friend with limited resources. By moving to an independent label, Wire’s future was possibly saved.
“Ahead” was the first single from the album and unveils itself confidently – those slow, loud bass notes at the start act as a fanfare, and almost immediately afterwards the group jitter and judder into view, oblique as ever. “Lips growing for service/ Eyes steady for peeling” Newman begins, before enthusiastically declaring, like a market stall holder, “Bring on the special guest!/ A monkey caught stealing” (which remains one of my favourite Wire lyrics for its pure absurdity and the joyful acidity of Newman’s delivery). I’ve never fully understood what Wire were on about with this one, and you can find a variety of fans online who are absolutely, unshakeably certain what it means, but all give different accounts – so it’s either definitely about oral sex, or animal vivisection, or corruption, or being used in a relationship. In common with many Wire records, establishing the facts is almost futile, and you’re instead swept along by the melody and the intention, which in this case is urgent and irritated, yet somehow sunlit too. Blue Monday-esque monk chants drone in the background while bright synths beam dramatic hooks and Newman gibbers discontentedly “I remember/ I remember/ making the body search”.
This doesn’t make “Ahead” sound like anything close to pop music, but miraculously, it’s closer than most of the contents of the indie charts in this particular week. The group display their usual knack for taking mis-shapen lumps of ideas and convincingly presenting them as shining jewels – the urgency becomes compelling, the sentiments somehow jolly, and the synths heavenly. I don’t agree with fans who hold it up as one of their finest singles – they’ve released better work in the last fifteen years alone – but its shine and gleam definitely have a captivating effect. Only a strange, stuffy rigidity and a determination not to edge one micro-second away from the click-track prevents it from truly realising its potential.
Critics at the time were mostly delighted to have the group back, but some were quick to point out the group’s sudden similarities to New Order, and in particular the track “Temptation”. Trouser Press later commented that “For the first time, Wire no longer sounded ahead of its time: New Order had already done this sort of thing better.” I would politely disagree with this assessment. Bernard Sumner was never known for his lyrical mystery (or even mastery), and nor were New Order as a whole known for inventing strict, taut new musical languages, which both “Ahead” and “The Ideal Copy” provide (also – try dancing to this). If New Order were twisting existing pop ideas into new shapes, Wire were usually melding and building them from scratch under mechanical lathes.
Throughout their career their insistence on operating outside usual spheres has sometimes been a recipe for disaster as well as success, and both “Ahead” and “The Ideal Copy” are somewhat unusual in that they land in neither one camp nor the other; they’re imperfect, sometimes ridiculous, occasionally over-reaching, but generally manage to dazzle with their ideas, albeit sometimes only briefly. As their stint on Mute continued, they slowly settled into their new style, and really began to produce exceptional work again after “Ideal Copy” was released.
In the meantime, the public got reacquainted with a band who weren’t even sure if they liked one another anymore, releasing work whose iciness seemed to underline that fact (critic Robert Christgau was on the money when he described it as “digital sound turned up too loud, a cold shower, a dash of aftershave”). Despite this, it reanimated a group most considered lost for good, and pushed them towards paths that eventually resulted in music as fantastic as they originally made. It also reintroduced carefully sculpted invention into an indie landscape which was often either messily and chaotically experimental or musically somewhat backwards-looking. The world will always be a better place with Wire in it, continually pushing ahead. Now where is that new album?
New Entries Elsewhere In The Charts
15. The Wolfhounds - Cruelty (Pink)
Peak position: 15
The Wolfhounds find their teeth on this 45, and start to snarl and shake their ideas around. “Cruelty” feels like a big rush of one lyrical and melodic exclamation mark after another, toppling and tumbling into a heap before you expect it.
17. Baby Amphetamine - Chernobyl Baby (Creation)
Peak position: 6
This week’s joke single courtesy of Alan McGee. The plan was fiendishly simple; the man would go to the local Virgin Megastore, pick three of the best looking female members of staff, and manufacture a group. He would be open and honest about his motivations with the press, who would admire his McLaren-esque gumption, and the group Baby Amphetamine would become 1987’s Bananarama (or perhaps Sigue Sigue Sputnik at worst). He would also feed them outrageous and provocative quotes to deliver in their interviews with the press. It couldn’t fail!
Of course, it did. For starters, “Chernobyl Baby” is probably the messiest and most charmless single Creation had issued since the days of The Legend, consisting of lumpen Casio hip-hop beats, charisma-free hollering of wooden catchphrases, and an arrangement and production that sounds like a Lloyds Marketing Executive’s idea of “that loud rhythmic modern music those young people like”. It’s not even close to a parody of Mel and Kim in 1987, falling so short of the mark that it lands in some weird, half-realised Legoland approximation of its own.
The members of the group were also not impressed with the whole affair, pointing out McGee’s misogyny in the press and also (possibly most insultingly of all to him) the datedness of his ideas. “If we did this interview like we were told to,” they informed Danny Kelly of the NME “we’d be saying things like ‘Simon le Bon should be given an acid bath’. But that’s so old, so dated. Alan lives in a time warp”.
“Manipulated?” they continued. “Not at all. All that’s happened is that someone’s thrown a bit of their money at us… what’s actually happened? We’ve made a record, and somebody has bought us a leather jacket each and been a complete wanker”.
The music press, and unsurprisingly Alan McGee, very quickly lost interest in the whole idea. Baby Amphetamine were never heard from again, and that should logically have been that, were it not for one interesting event – ex-Teardrop Explodes and Bunnymen manager Bill Drummond loved the single and turned up in Alan McGee’s offices raving about it and beaming all over, determined to deliver something similar himself. What emerged would be far more risky, contentious and long-lasting than Baby Amphetamine, to the extent that we’re still talking about it to this day.
23. Vicious Rumor Club - Whole Lotta Love (Music of Life)
Peak position: 23
New York Hip-hop duo consisting of William B-Nice Fukua and Dennis Double-D Johnson who had a couple of singles out in 1986, this and (appropriately enough) “Yeah Yeah That’s It”. “Whole Lotta Love” is making a belated indie chart appearance here, uneasily promoted on this side of the pond by the enthusiastic hip-hop independent Music of Life who apparently sent deliberately provocative and politically incorrect press releases out to get attention. Edgelords have always been with us.
That’s not Vicious Rumor Club’s fault, of course, and their stomping cover of Led Zeppelin’s “Whole Lotta Love” was easily a match for any of the other Def Jam crossovers doing the rounds at the time; sadly, the British public didn’t appreciate the genre mashing in this case, and it became a cult record rather than a hit single. Subsequently, trying to find out a damn thing about Mr Nice Fukua and Mr Double-D Johnson, beyond the fact that they existed and released a couple of records, is nigh-on impossible.
25. The Young Gods - Did You Miss Me? (Product Inc.)
Peak position: 25
“Innovative” cover of Gary Glitter’s “Hello, Hello, I’m Back Again”. The Young Gods were clearly aiming to take a crowd-pleasing moment here and turn into something chilling, but I doubt even they understood just how disturbing this one would later become. Enough said.
Number One In The Official National Chart
Ferry Aid: "Let It Be" (The Sun)
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