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Wire

Not About To Die

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Released as an illegal bootleg back in the early 1980s, Not About To Die were recordings made for EMI as demos for the 1978 and 1979 albums Chairs Missing and 154. Now Wire have decided to redress the balance and give the album its first official release on their own Pinkflag imprint. Get it at your local record store on Saturday, April 23rd and remember—every day is a record store day!

Wire

Pf456 Redux

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The Wire album Send (PF6) originally released in 2003 was in fact a compilation of material contained on the releases Read & Burn 01 (PF4), Read & Burn 02 (PF5) and new tracks. The original plan had in fact been to simply compile the two planned Read & Burns but the unforeseen runaway success of Read & Burn 01 meant that in spite of the “band merch only” status of Read & Burn 02 there would be too much duplication if that plan was to go ahead, so an extra four tracks were made and some Read & Burn material was dropped in order to come up with an acceptable track list for Send. Of course these releases were all CDs—no one thought too much about vinyl at that point. However, there did need to be a vinyl release and as none of those tracks had ever been released on LP a creative solution was sought that would accommodate all of the tracks contained in those three releases (which unhelpfully equals 1.5 standard 12-inch vinyl records). While 2021’s solution was 2x10-inches, 2003’s solution was a set of fairly brutal edits and the resulting release became PF456 Redux— “does what it says on the tin” title which basically lists the catalogue numbers and the process by which they were squashed into a single 12-inch. There was a limited run in 2003 and then the title was never re-pressed, living on as a digital product only.  The item remains, nonetheless a...

Wire

Pf456 Deluxe

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Following their 1990s hiatus, Wire reformed in 1999, and, after setting up their own Pinkflag imprint, between 2001–2003 released five distinct Wire items: Twelve Times You (PF3; 7-inch vinyl), Read & Burn 01 (PF4; CD EP), Read & Burn 02 (PF5; CD EP), Send (PF6; CD album) and PF456 Redux (PF456 Redux; 12-inch vinyl album. Following the two Read & Burn CD EPs, Wire released the full length album Send, combining some tracks from both Read & Burn EPs and four unreleased pieces. Since none of the tracks had previously been issued on vinyl, a creative solution was sought to include all of the tracks from Send and the two Read & Burn EPs. This was achieved by some quite brutal edits! Thus the title PF456 Redux is both catalog number and descriptor of the process. However, none of the tracks on PF4, PF5 and PF6 were ever put out on vinyl at full length—hence PF456 Deluxe, which includes everything from those three releases and Twelve Times You, for good measure. As in many things with Wire, form follows function. This limited edition version for Record Store Day 2021 comes with a hard -bound book containing text about these recordings and photos from the period.

Wire

154

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***BACK IN STOCK!!!  Wire’s first three albums need no introduction. They are the three classic albums on which Wire’s reputation is based. Moreover, they are the recordings that minted the post-punk form. This was adopted by other bands, but Wire were there first. It has been a number of years since these albums were readily available. The aim with these new vinyl and CD releases is to approximate the original statements as closely as possible, but with remastered audio. The vinyl releases have the same covers and inners as the originals (minus the Harvest logo). The digipack CDs have identical track listings to their vinyl counterparts. These versions should be considered Wire’s classic 1970s albums, pure and undiluted.1979’s 154 represented the final tableau in Wire’s Harvest released ’70s triptych and was the first Wire album to be released to a universal set of five star reviews from the British rock weeklies, thus it represented the point when the British “pop culture establishment” publicly recognized Wire’s primacy. “154 makes 95 percent of the competition look feeble” wrote Nick Kent in the NME, “Wire are achieving a lot of things other—and more recognized—names have been striving for” wrote Chris Westwood in Record Mirror (a paper that had slagged off Pink Flag). “The album is a musical tour de force” wrote Jon Savage in Melody Maker. Many said it was the album that Bowie and Eno had failed to make with Lodger (as hinted in the RM review), it was on John...

Wire

Chairs Missing

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***BACK IN STOCK!!!  Wire’s first three albums need no introduction. They are the three classic albums on which Wire’s reputation is based. Moreover, they are the recordings that minted the post-punk form. This was adopted by other bands, but Wire were there first. It has been a number of years since these albums were readily available. The aim with these new vinyl and CD releases is to approximate the original statements as closely as possible, but with remastered audio. The vinyl releases have the same covers and inners as the originals (minus the Harvest logo). The digipack CDs have identical track listings to their vinyl counterparts. These versions should be considered Wire’s classic 1970s albums, pure and undiluted.1978’s Chairs Missing represented perhaps the biggest conceptual leap made during this period of Wire and was widely misunderstood at the time yet it remains, to the band and production crew Wire’s favorite ’70s album. If Pink Flag proposed an almost cut and paste approach to deconstructing rock history, Chairs Missing proposed something more radical, a definite futurism with much less influence from it’s antecedents. Chairs Missing was at once more stark and more lush than it’s predecessor and has exerted it’s own influence on the course of cultural history, having laid down one of the earliest (if not the earliest) blueprints for the genuinely post-punk aesthetic.

Wire

Pink Flag

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***Wire’s first three albums need no introduction. They are the three classic albums on which Wire’s reputation is based. Moreover, they are the recordings that minted the post-punk form. This was adopted by other bands, but Wire were there first. It has been a number of years since these albums were readily available. The aim with these new vinyl and CD releases is to approximate the original statements as closely as possible, but with remastered audio. The vinyl releases have the same covers and inners as the originals (minus the Harvest logo). The digipack CDs have identical track listings to their vinyl counterparts. These versions should be considered Wire’s classic 1970s albums, pure and undiluted.Usually contextualized against a backdrop of two years of the growing cultural importance of punk rock—Wire’s debut Pink Flag, released in December 1977 on EMI’s progressive label Harvest was in fact was something “other.” To the keen cultural commentator, the timing and label of it’s release will register two essential facts about it. Firstly, too late (a year after the Pistol’s debut release) to be part of UK punk’s first flush and secondly that the band were signaling something beyond punk by their choice of label. Further investigation would reveal twenty-one tracks, some of them clocking in at well under a minute and covering a range of tempi well beyond the buzzsaw rockabilly that had become, even by the second half of 1977, punk’s staple.

Wire

Pink Flag (deluxe)

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Wire’s first three albums need no introduction. They are the three classic albums on which Wire’s reputation is based. Moreover, they are the recordings that minted the post-punk form. This was adopted by other bands, but Wire were there first. These are the definitive re-releases. Each album is presented as an 80-page hardback book – the size of a 7-inch, but obviously much thicker. After a special introduction by Jon Savage, Graham Duff provides insight into each track. These texts include recording details, brand-new interviews with band members, and lyrics.  The original album is presented on its own CD, accompanied by discs that feature relevant extra tracks: singles; B-sides; demos; and many previously unreleased songs. Pink Flag is a two-CD set; Chairs Missing and 154 have three CDs each. All audio has been painstakingly remastered (or, in some cases, mastered for the first time).  This stunning set of presentations also includes a range of images from the archive of Annette Green. Wire’s official photographer during this period, Green also shot the covers for Pink Flag and Chairs Missing. Promotional and informal imagery – in colour and black and white – is featured throughout the books. Most of the photographs have not been seen for 40 years – and many have never been published anywhere before.  These special editions are something every Wire fan will want to own. It has been a number of years since these albums were readily available. The aim with these new vinyl and...

Wire

Object 47

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In the five years since the May 2003 release of their last ful-length album, Send, Wire has expounded, reviewed, contracted, lain dormant, recovered, expanded, and shed an old skin and grown a new one. Wire is not the same as it was before--but then Wire is never the same as it was before...  Object 47 (the 47th object in their discography) is nonetheless only Wire's eleventh studio album. It is the second product of an arc of work that began in 2006 and has so far yielded the rather well-received EP Read And Burn 03 (from which no tracks appear on Object 47), and stands as a confident statement of where Wire is in 2008--as ever, looking forward! While retaining Wire's idiosyncratic mix of an avant-garde mindset with classic pop timing, this album boasts "tunes with zoom," a unique formula that somehow manages to sound wholly Wire (in a classic sense) and wholly contemporary.  Object 47 is available on CD and vinyl through conventional distribution and in a special vinyl edition via mail-order only. A full press campaign is planned in the USA and UK, augmented with college radio promotion in the USA. Additionally, Pink Flag is making available, well ahead of the album release, a free download of the track "One of Us" exclusively through pinkflag.com. Wire will play festivals throughout Europe and tour USA in October. Check pinkflag.com for details.  "The time is right for Wire, right now. Welcome them again, they've come back to...

Wire

Read & Burn 03

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Read & Burn 03 is the first Wire release featuring entirely new material since 2003’s Send. Along with the re-launch of Wire’s official website, www.pinkflag.com, this 26-minute mini-album signals the stage-by-stage re-activation of the legendary and influential band as a recording and live entity.  Read & Burn is the R&D series representing the state of Wire’s art right now. Wire continues to evolve and offers here the fresh fruits of its latest development. It should be noted that tracks from Read & Burn 03 will not be included on the next album to follow in the later half of 2008.

Wire

Live At The Roxy, London - April 1st & 2nd 1977 / Live At Cbgb Theatre, New York - July 18th 1978

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Very few deliberate live recordings of Wire exist from the '70s. Board recordings and bootlegs aside, only three full live sets were put to tape in the early years with any aim other than archival use. The first, Live At The Roxy was recorded over two consecutive nights at London's Roxy Club in early April, 1977. The CBGB set was captured at the New York club's auxiliary theater in '78 for a radio broadcast. These recordings were released only once before, on the limited WIRE: 1977-1979 boxset, available mailorder-only from the group's website. A third performance, taped at WDR's Studios in Germany in '79 for the Rockpalast TV show, can be heard as part of the CD+DVD package On The Box: 1979.   The '77 shows presented on disc one feature the "classic" four-piece lineup making their debut in front of the world -- or at least the half dozen or so who turned up to see the opening act of a "Punk Festival" in a club that held a hundred people max.   The '78 recording on the other hand depicts a band hardened from extensive touring to promote their first album Pink Flag and fresh from the studio, having just finished their second Chairs Missing. Recorded for the now defunct WPIX, the songs on disc two document one of the handful of gigs they played on their first and only trip to the US in 1978.

Wire

Scottish Play

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*** Honed to a fine performance edge from their live European forays early in 2004, Wire present their fierce, high-velocity set based around their successful album Send, their first album in over a decade, which marked a return to their trademark gimlet, shivved, short sharp shocked writing style. Filmed by visual artist Tom Gidley in forensic detail, this document shows the band’s complete visceral set at The Triptych Festival in Glasgow, April 30, 2004. The footage deliberately excludes the usual rock music celebration of place and time and instead concentrates on contact with a band often misrepresented as enigmatic, cold and distant. Also included only on the DVD is a bonus selection of four pieces (captured by Observation Camera #1) of the second half of Wire’s April 2003 Flag:Burning performance/installation at the Only Connect Festival at The Barbican, London. The set by avant stage designer Es Devlin was specifically commissioned by WIRE for this one-off performance. Based on the same body of work as the performance at Triptych, this is Wire seen from the other end of the telescope, willingly surrendering their personal performance to the service of the machinery of a unique, complex theatrical spectacle in a manner rarely allowed in the rock world.

Wire

On The Box: 1979

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***Beyond a few seconds of snatched performance, a micro-interview on Tony Wilson's precursor to So It Goes, and a couple of mime-alongs on Belgian TV, there is no footage of Wire from the '70s beyond one item. Luckily it has been preserved. British viewers never got to see a live performance of Wire on their tellies, but Alan Bangs, who had the late night show on British Forces radio in Germany, crossed over to German-speaking media and by early 1979 was a presenter on RockPalast, an hour-long studio concert slot on WDR, already established as German's most important "serious" rock music show. Wire were old sparring partners of Bangs, appearing on his radio show every time they were anywhere near Cologne.  Although 15th generation VHS copies of the screened parts of this performance have been making the rounds for many years, this DVD is the first time that the complete performance and the never-screened interview have been brought together. The combination of video digitally cloned from the broadcast master and freshly mastered audio eclipse the rogue dubs completely and permanently. You are now free to record over the nefarious bootlegs.  Track listing:  1. Introduction  2. Another the Letter  3. The 15th  4. Practice Makes Perfect 5. Two People in a Room 6. I Feel Mysterious Today 7. Being Sucked in Again  8. Once is Enough 9. Blessed State  10. A Question of Degree 11. Single KO  12. Mercy  13. 40...

Wire

Send

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***The number of groups surviving punk's first blast still able to ply their trade with heads aloft and consciences clear can be counted on the fingers of one hand, with three digits to spare. WIRE is one of them. Send is their first full length album of new music in over a decade, and contains eleven examples of their most caustic and brutally compelling output in twice that time. 2002 saw the four original members return to the shot-blasted immediacy and stylistic minimalism of their very first material with the release of the six-track Read & Burn Ø1 primer, a critically lauded set received with many effusive verdicts that continues to sell strongly. Roof-raising tours of the UK, Europe and the USA have won over a whole new audience, culminating in a series of strong showings in the end-of-year lists—a Top 25 record on CMJ radio chart; appearances in Mojo's 2002 Top 40, John Peel's Festive 50, The Wire, the L.A. Times Top 10; and a prestigious debut in Artforum (picked twice in music and once in fine art!).  Send contains four completely unheard new pieces, four taken from the mailorder-only Read & Burn Ø2, and three from Read & Burn Ø1. It will be supported in Europe by Wire's first large-scale performance in London in over three years, headlining the Barbican Art Centre's Only Connect Festival in April (where they plan to play consecutive sets of their seminal Pink Flag album in its entirety followed by Send in...