• I first heard WIRE around the time of the mid-era Ahead and I was super into it. I didn't know anything about their origins and/or influence, just as I couldn't begin to comprehend their context or influence - it was just a really cool and danceable new wave record that sounded somehow....different.
• I saw WIRE only once, roughly thirty years after A Bell Is A Cup...Until It Is Struck was released. They played at Slim's in SF and I was pleasantly floored at how much they did not give a fukk at all about their hits or the songs that most attendees likely wanted to hear. I think they mostly played stuff from Nocturnal Koreans and Send but I can't really be sure, I just know that people were filing out and I was enthralled.
• I am low-key obsessed with solo Bruce Gilbert material, particularly Insiding and The Shivering Man, this information is interesting perhaps only to me and does not in any way relate to Document And Eye Witness by WIRE. I also was a big fan of HE SAID when Hail was released. I still am.
• These recordings are incredible, capturing the band at the very onset of not giving a fukk. I read somewhere that this Rough Trade release represented the end of "the first era" of WIRE but I almost feel like this was WIRE intentionally killing external perceptions of that era. Listen to what they did to 12XU and think about a band wanting to defy and destroy convention in real time. This wasn't "art punk," this was "punk" in its purest form. Sound without rules.
• This 1981 release compiles songs performed and recorded in 1979 and 1980. Songs performed and recorded by a band who were clearly exhausted by punk conventions just a few years after punk's inception. I think all rational and reasonable listeners of punk are grateful for their disdain and /or disillusion because how fukkn boring would it be if we just listened to DAMNED and UK SUBS all the time, you know?
• DAMNED and UK SUBS are both great bands....WIRE is, was and will always be more interesting than either.
