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The recording history of Colin Newman and celebrated art-rock band Wire is one that mirrors the entire arc of studio technology over the past four decades, as DAVID DAVIES discovers

In popular music, it’s relatively rare for a band or artist to experience a truly memorable ‘second act’. By most estimates, however, legendary UK art-rock band Wire is now well into its third act, still recording brilliantly innovative new albums and — pandemic conditions notwithstanding — continuing to tour successfully worldwide.

As anyone who has read Wilson Neate’s superb biography of the band, Read & Burn: A Book About Wire, will be aware, this was far from being a predictable outcome. Founded in 1976, the original line-up — guitarist/vocalist

Colin Newman, guitarist Bruce Gilbert, bassist/ vocalist Graham Lewis and drummer Robert

Grey — made three spectacular albums for EMI imprint Harvest (Pink Flag, Chairs Missing and 154) before creative differences led to a split just three years later.

Slowly realising that despite their disparate outlooks they did have a unique creative chemistry, the band resumed for a further run of albums from 1985 to 1991 before grounding to a halt once more. However, after reactivating again in 1999 Wire settled into a more consistent routine of touring and recording, with even the departure of Gilbert in 2004 — to be replaced briefly by Margaret Fiedler

McGinnis and, permanently since 2010,

Matthew Simms — failing to derail the band’s remarkable third act. Indeed, they have now produced eight new albums since 2008.

This heightened productivity is thanks in no small part due to Wire taking ever-greater control of the means of production since

Newman acquired a Digidesign (now Avid) Digi 001 soon after the groundbreaking DAW was launched in September 1999. Always fascinated with the recording process since the early days of Wire, Newman has been the producer and chief engineer of their music since the turn of the millennium. Much of the recording has taken place at his own studio, with Simms, Lewis (based for many years in Sweden) and Grey (who also runs a farm in Wales) visiting for shorter periods to record their parts.

More recently, Wire has got into a cycle of capturing the basic tracks for each album at Rockfield Studios in Monmouth, before returning to Newman’s studio for more recording and mixing. Several of the albums made with this approach — 2013’s Change Becomes Us, 2015’s Wire and 2020’s Mind Hive — have been among the most well-received of their entire career.

Newman’s interview with Resolution took place during the first UK national lockdown in 2020, shortly after Wire had been forced to cut short a US tour due to the worsening pandemic. The conversation took in the evolution of home-based recording, the band’s remarkable gift for reinvention, and Newman’s enduring love of studio technology.

It actually started earlier than that. As a musician from a generation who came through in the 1970s, I never recorded [with Wire in the ‘70s] in anything lower grade than a 24-track studio. Apart from demos, everything was done in high-end studios, which tended to cost an arm and a leg.

Then, in the ‘80s, the MIDI revolution started to take place. I also began a relationship with Malka [Spigel], my long-term partner, who is a bass player, so together we bought an 8-track machine and mixing board — they were the first purchases we made. My previous wife had been a photographer, so if you had money it wasn’t spent on music equipment!

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Copy in 1987, it was possible to recreate in a slightly more home studio way the kind of conditions that we had when recording the album at Hansa Studios [in Berlin]: we had a Fostex 8-track that could support SMPTE timecode and run a sequencer on an Atari. A few years later, as we moved into the ‘90s, [the home set-up also included] Cubase on an Atari, a Yamaha DX7 and a Casio synth.

The idea that you could have your own space and work on something over time without it costing a fortune [in a high-end studio] was very exciting for anyone who worked with sound. It was the beginning of the dance music revolution, too, and even if there weren’t many people making finished records [at home], there were plenty who would start work at home and then finish in big studios.

Malka and I had moved [back to the UK] from Brussels in 1992 and took the decision that we wanted to find a house with a room that could be converted into a studio [called Swim]. Ultimately, we found a property with a garage that we soundproofed and equipped with a

large Allen & Heath desk and an AKAI S3000 for high-end sampling. I used to mix onto DAT and then record stereo from DAT into the sampler. We did not have a digital interface between the computer and DAT at that point — it was all analogue.

In a way, it was all kinds of basic, but we started to do quite a bit of production at that point. The first full album made using this studio would have been Malka’s solo album Rosh Ballata, which was released in 1993.

The other thing that had happened by then was that [Mute records founder] Daniel Miller had spent a few hours telling me how to set up a label, so I felt duty-bound to do it after that. We had dinner with some Israeli licensees and they licensed a record from us, so we got a fee from that. The record was released and we made money then too.

It was a revelation and opened up a whole new world to us. Around that time we also became a part of the whole techno/ambient night thing in London and started doing remixes through our own label. We were doing the music, mixing, mastering and releasing — it was almost a Marxist, ‘means of production’ kind of thing!

It gave me a lot of confidence and helped to take away the disconnect that had existed between being in a studio making music and the audience receiving it.

We had this studio set up and it made sense to offer it to Wire. Then suddenly Digidesign was offering the Digi 001, which was effectively a Rolls Royce for the cost of a Mini. The entry level into the platform was less than £1000, which was a massive [step forward]. I had already tried out Pro Tools and realised that what they had was something that was straightforward to anyone who understood a mixing board and tape recorder. We bought the interface and initially intended to use it with Cubase audio, but we soon dropped that idea and used Pro Tools. And that was the set-up with which we started to make the next run of Wire albums, beginning with Send [released in 2003].

Working with Malka [in the ‘80s] was the point at which I started to get involved in engineering. After that it was a case of gaining knowledge over time. You would make mistakes along the way but learn quickly from them. I had always been interested in the technical side of recording and physically doing it — I never really liked the idea of having new technology and then someone else to use it.

So it’s been a gradual thing with lots of steps, but one person who has always been really encouraging is Denis Blackham [acclaimed mastering engineer who now runs his own Skye Mastering facility]. I have worked with him for many years and he has always offered advice and encouragement. Then there was a point at which he said I was sending him mixes that could have come from a high-end studio, and that I was the only one with this kind of set-up who was doing that. I was like, ‘blimey’! It gave me a lot of confidence.

It’s definitely been a learning curve. With Send, we used drum loops [based on Grey’s playing] and the whole record was basically made at our studio. The next album, Object 47 [2007], was done in the same way except that we recorded the drums in a nice room. By the time of Red Barked Tree [2011], though, I thought we have to dump the hip hop loops, as I refer to them. If you have a group, why not just play? So we found Resident in London and paid for recording sessions for the first time.

Our [touring] front of house engineer around 2011 has said it was possible to get into Rockfield for a reasonable amount, and he put us in touch with Lisa [Ward, Rockfield studio manager]. It became clear that for a reasonable cost we could stay in accommodation there, record in a classic studio, and get the sound of really nice sounding rooms. The pure quality of the audio that can be captured there is not something you can easily get out of a box in your own studio.

The other good thing about Rockfield is that no one is going to be having their social life — there really isn’t a lot to do in Monmouth!

Yes, I think it does help bring the band together. In terms of its sound, we never want our work to feel like a virtual record. Everyone should know that they have contributed to it and that

they have had a strong influence over the character [of the end result]. Then, with rough mixes, there is plenty of opportunity for people to say what they like or don’t like. Rob might overdub [some more drums] and the keyboard parts might get revamped. There are lots of ways in which the whole thing can be made to work together.

Over the last 3-4 years, Immersion has been a parallel project for Malka and I. That is fundamentally an electronic project, so we have bought a few synths. I had been inclined to hold off on the modular thing because of the whole ‘craft ale and beards’ aspect, but I did end up buying a Matriarch [Moog semi-modular analogue synth], which is amazing.

I tend to have a price in my mind of what I am willing to pay for any one item, and there is only so much space anyway. [But among the other recent purchases], we have got an RME Fireface audio interface, which has made the mixes sound better, and a Sontronics Aria. The Aria is a really great vocal mic and all of my vocals on [last year’s] Mind Hive were recorded with it.

It’s an odd record, really, in that it ended up being way better than I think anyone could have justifiably expected — which is always pleasing! [Around 2017] there were a number of older songs that had become live staples, and which in many ways were sounding better than the original studio recordings. So we recorded some of those and they were included on the Special Edition of [2017 studio album] Silver/Lead.

So what you have with 10:20 are a set of new versions and various other ‘stray’ tracks. It’s a new/old record — something that the fans will really like and a perfect Record Store Day release.

There is going to be a full-length documentary, People In A Film [directed by Malcolm Boyle and Graham Duff]. The starting point for that was watching the BBC documentary about The Fall, The Wonderful and Frightening World of…, after Mark E. Smith died and realising that no one was going to do a documentary for Wire [unless we initiated it]. We put in a lump sum to get it going and do some recording of the band at Rockfield, then did a crowdfunder to enable filming to take place in America. The project did go on pause because of the lockdown, but a lot of the filming had already taken place and so Malcolm has been working on the editing.

When we did the launch event for the funding, we had all five of us — the current band plus Bruce — together and that was quite an interesting moment of understanding. There was a fantastic point where Graham Duff asked Bruce a question and it pierced through to the whole relationship between the members and the ex-member. Everyone laughed and [it underlined the fact that] whatever happened years ago is irrelevant now. These are the people and this is their story.

I suppose we got lucky, but then Wire always had a sense of foreboding in its music. It’s a very strange period we are going through now, although I doubt that anyone needs me to point that out!