Wire: Change Becomes Us

In spring 2012, Wire's plan had been to convene at Rockfield Studios in Wales to review the rudimentary blueprints of songs that had never made it beyond a few live performances in 1979 and 1980 - a time when the band-members were in creative overdrive yet the band itself was disintegrating. The objective was to approach that unrealized work as an oblique strategy, a potential springboard for Wire's contemporary, forward-looking processes - a possible point of departure for new compositions.

This took place with Wire firing on all cylinders, as a four-piece studio entity again, the core line-up of Newman, Graham Lewis and Robert Grey now enhanced by guitarist Matthew Simms. Out of the exploratory Rockfield session and subsequent development at Newman's Swim Studio, the ostensible source material became, in the classic Wire tradition, something quite other than what it may have once been - or what it might have become if it had been pursued in 1980.

Change Becomes Us encapsulates the paradoxical essence of Wire's creativity. The tendency of these new songs to refuse a single, settled identity is emblematic of the band's ever-evolving aesthetic - one that's always hinged on sustained tensions and oppositions: between the familiar and the unfamiliar, the comfortable and the unsettling, the melodic and the brutal, the cerebral and the visceral, the smart and the moronic, the obvious and the inscrutable, the rational and the absurd. This intrinsic, core ambivalence generates the essential otherness that has characterized Wire's most memorable, distinctive work - from the epochal innovations of Chairs Missing and 154 to the electronic-pop deconstructions of A Bell Is A Cup to Send's postmodern-punk expressionism and the widescreen lyricism of Red Barked Tree. Change Becomes Us is an undeniable part of that illustrious lineage. Definitely more than just a good idea at the time. - Wilson Neate (Author of Read & Burn: A Book About Wire)