Lowdown: The Story of Wire

Book excerpt: The first major book on the post-punk legends! Wire were the seventies band who perhaps did more than any other to usher in the post-punk age. Author Paul Lester has interviewed the four original members of Wire - Colin Newman, Graham Lewis, Robert Gotobed and Bruce Gilbert - as well as many of their producers and collaborators. Charts the band's history from their days at Watford Art College through their abrasive encounters with punk audiences hostile to their groundbreaking material on albums like Pink Flag, Chairs Missing and 154. and their 2008 release Object 47. Those albums were to exert an enormous influence on subsequent generations of alternative rock musicians. To bands as diverse as Black Flag, Blur, R.E.M. and My Bloody Valentine, Wire's expansion of the sonic possibilities of rock proved highly significant. Lester has also followed the band's story as it expanded into a melee of break-ups, reformations, parallel projects and solo forays, culminating in their current status as a sort of British Velvet Underground: cultish and modest-selling but uncompromising and immeasurably influential.