Rip It Up and Start Again (27 page)

The conflict extended to the fraught questions of writing credits and royalties. Song publishing traditionally assigns copyright to the composer of the top line melody and lyrics, but this was obviously inadequate for the radically decentered music on
Remain
. Eno, understandably, wanted appropriate credit for his role and pressed for double billing: Talking Heads and Brian Eno. The band refused, but when the artwork came back Weymouth, Frantz, and Harrison were horrified to find the songs credited to Byrne and Eno. In the end, the back cover declared, “All Songs by David Byrne, Brian Eno, Talking Heads,” a compromise that satisfied nobody. Weymouth, Frantz, Harrison, and eventually Byrne, too, began to suspect that Eno was trying, consciously or unconsciously, to turn Talking Heads into his backing band—a new Roxy Music, but with Byrne far more amenable to Eno’s ideas than Bryan Ferry. “It wasn’t really a problem while we were making
Remain,
but when we were considering what to do next,” says Byrne. “By this point the others were fed up with me and Brian and our ideas. And I probably thought, ‘Okay, I won’t push it down their throats anymore.’”

For his part, Eno felt
Remain
could have gone so much further if he’d had carte blanche. He was also irritated that the album had effectively stolen
Bush of Ghosts
’s thunder. The Byrne and Eno album was originally meant to come out before
Remain,
but got delayed, partly because of legal wrangles over the use of one evangelist’s voice, partly because the
Remain
sessions gave the duo loads of new ideas for where to take
Ghosts
. Released in January 1981—four months after the massively acclaimed
Remain—Bush of Ghosts
felt like an afterthought, not the ambush of new ideas Eno had planned. It also caught a critical backlash. Some characterized Byrne and Eno as bloodless eggheads working in sterile laboratory conditions, while others chastised them as sonic neocolonialists appropriating Third World exotica.

Despite the doubters,
Ghosts
was a career peak for both men. Even more than
Remain,
the record’s panoply of tactile rhythms, disjointed pulse grooves, and eerily pitch-smeared arabesques of melody looked ahead to the innovations of sampladelic genres like hip-hop, house, and jungle.
Ghosts
both preempted and influenced albums as diverse as Public Enemy’s
Fear of a Black Planet,
DJ Shadow’s
Endtroducing,
A Guy Called Gerald’s
Black Secret Technology,
and Moby’s
Play
. According to Byrne, the record was obliquely affected by hip-hop, but not rap music as much as
breakdancing
. While working on the record in Los Angeles, the duo met dancer Toni Basil (who would later do the choreography in the video for “Once in a Lifetime”). Basil was working with body-popping troupes like the Electric Boogaloos and the Lockers. According to Byrne, “She was going to do a whole program of choreography based on these street dancers. Brian and I thought it was the most amazing dancing we’d ever seen and in some way the music we were doing was intended for her to use in some television program with these dancers. But it never panned out.”

Remain
did well in Britain, where “Once in a Lifetime” was a hit single, but in America, the album was Talking Heads’ worst seller. “It was perceived as too funky for the rock stations, while the R&B stations, of course, didn’t want to know either,” says Byrne. “Once in a Lifetime” was never even released as a single in America (although the video did get heavy play on the fledgling MTV channel a year or so later). In pointed contrast with the uncommercial
Remain,
Tina Weymouth and Chris Frantz’s delightfully poppy side project the Tom Tom Club was unexpectedly successful, scoring a big U.K. hit with “Wordy Rappinghood” and a ton of radio play in the United States with “Genius of Love.” The latter was especially popular on black radio stations, whose listeners assumed the group was African American because the track was so damn funky.

All this added further impetus to the idea of ending the relationship with Eno. For the sake of unity, Byrne went along with the general feeling that the band needed to rediscover the “charm and tightness” of its earliest music. Call it vanguard fatigue. Weymouth talked of how the group “spent so many years trying to be original that we don’t know what original is anymore.” Byrne decided to strategically divide his energies, channeling his more experimental impulses into the plethora of side projects that were opening up for him (like
The Catherine Wheel
album, music he composed for a ballet by avant-garde choreographer Twyla Tharp) while making Talking Heads the outlet for his pure pop instincts. After dissolving rock into an oceanic swirl of ethnofunkadelia, Talking Heads did the least-expected thing and enjoyed a second act as a pop group.

BACK IN THE EARLY SEVENTIES,
long before his fateful meeting with the Talking Heads in London, Brian Eno was a regular visitor to Watford Art College, where his friend Peter Schmidt was one of the main tutors. Schmidt painted the watercolor artwork for several Eno albums, but he is most known as the cocreator, with Eno, of Oblique Strategies, an I Ching–like set of cards with instructions and hints designed to help artists break through creative impasses. Oblique Strategies’ subtitle is “Over one hundred worthwhile dilemmas” and its most famous maxim is “Honor thy error as a hidden intention.” Other Oblique advice included “don’t be afraid of things because they’re easy to do,” “retrace your steps,” “turn it upside down,” and “is it finished?” Fluxus in a box, Oblique Strategies essentially distilled the anything-goes sensibility that pervaded the more progressive British art schools (such as Watford) during the sixties and seventies. Recalling their spirit of mixed-media playfulness and boundary-smashing impudence, Eno hailed the fine-art schools of this era as “one of the most highly evolved forms of liberal education available on the planet…. Really something quite extraordinary.”

When Eno came to Watford to help with projects, he and Schmidt would often get a lift back to London from another tutor, Hansjörg Mayer. Sometimes there would be another passenger in the car, a young student of Mayer’s named Colin Newman, who in a few years would become a founding member of Wire. “In my view humans are inherently creative,” says Newman, “but there is a process by which a particular individual becomes an artist, meaning that they can say they are an artist without being pretentious. If that happened at any given point to me it was during those car journeys. As soon as I stepped in that car I was no longer just a rather poor student but a friend and an equal, an artist sitting in a car with other artists. I could babble on about my ideas.”

With the exception of drummer Robert Gotobed, the members of Wire all came with an art school pedigree. Bassist Graham Lewis was a fashion graduate doing freelance design for London boutiques. Guitarist Bruce Gilbert, old for a punk at thirty-one in 1977, was an abstract painter who worked as an audiovisual-aids technician at Watford, which is where he met Newman. Seven years younger than Gilbert, Newman was studying illustration, but had gravitated toward the sound studio’s facilities for experimenting with tape. “Bruce and me specifically always brought a fine-arts mentality to Wire,” says Newman.

Wire had a meteoric rise. In February 1977, six months after forming, the group made their live debut at the Roxy, London’s equivalent to CBGB. Four months later they made their vinyl debut on the live compilation
The Roxy London WC2,
and by year’s end they’d released their debut album,
Pink Flag
. Like Talking Heads, Wire were right at the heart of the punk scene, yet never quite belonged there
.
They were misfits whose distanced artiness made them distinctive but also rubbed some people the wrong way.

Two words crystallize what Wire derived from art school: “method” and “design.” They approached making music with a
method
ical objectivity, thinking of their songs not as outpourings from their hearts and souls but as “pieces”—meaning “art works” but also lumps of sound-matter to be chipped away at, like marble for a sculpture. Like Eno, they approached creation with a what if/why not? curiosity, setting up processes and embracing artificial constraints just to see what would transpire.

Wire’s design sensibility encompassed the striking cover art on their records (the concept invariably devised, if not executed, by Gilbert and Lewis) and their highly contoured and geometric music. Even at its most punklike, there was a brutal elegance to the power chords and riffs. One could almost visualize their music as clean lines, deliberate spacings, and blocks of texture. The name Wire itself was chosen as much for “its graphic quality,” says Lewis, as for its connotations (thin and metallic, electrical power lines). “It was short and stark and would look big on a poster even if we were bottom of the bill!” Onstage, Wire looked equally styled and monochrome, favoring clothes in shades of black, gray, and white, and lighting that avoided rock ’n’ roll clichés in favor of harsh, glaring white spots. The band projected a glacial aloofness. Newman stood stock-still with eyes staring straight ahead, or struck stylized and frozen “rock star” poses.

What made Wire punk was their minimalism, their reductionist disdain for extraneous decoration. Initially, they arrived at their sound through removals and refusals. “It was a process of elimination, all the things we don’t do,” recalls Newman. “At the end of the process, the list of things we actually
did
do was quite short!” Solos were shed first. In their earliest days, Wire included another Watford student on lead guitar, but when he was hospitalized for six weeks, the group noticed that the music dramatically improved in the absence of his solos. “All the fat, all the meander, suddenly disappeared,” says Newman. “Everything was edited down drastically, the songs came down to one and a half minutes long.”

Brevity and severity became Wire’s hallmark, as heard on
Pink Flag,
which crams twenty-one compressed bursts of abstract fury into just thirty-five minutes. On an idle listen, Newman’s uncouthly enunciated mock Cockney could pass for standard-issue punk singing. But for all their aggression, the songs are as exquisitely etched as a finely honed haiku, and the absurdist song titles such as “Three Girl Rhumba” suggest that this isn’t mere ruckus for the Roxy rabble, but a conceptual enterprise. Many of the songs were written as acts of speculation. What would happen if you rewrote “Johnny B. Goode” using only one chord? (Answer:
Pink Flag
’s title track.) Newman composed “106 Beats That” on an agonizingly delayed train journey between Watford and London, during which he devised a complicated system of correspondences between the names of railway stations and guitar chords.

Wire’s lyrics, mostly written by Graham Lewis, were no less process oriented. His words for “106 Beats” came out of a failed attempt to write a lyric that only had one hundred syllables in it. “It turns out it’s got one hundred six, but that doesn’t matter because you’ve created a process.” He and Bruce Gilbert would play absurdist games with sense and nonsense, narrative and fragmentation. Because making statements or self-expression wasn’t the point, nobody was precious about the words. They were simply material to be messed around with. For instance, Newman wrote a lyric about a lion tamer, which Lewis mostly didn’t care for, so he went through replacing all the bits he didn’t like. Hence the song’s eventual title, “Ex Lion Tamer.” Dismembering sequential narrative was a favorite Lewis tactic. The kaleidoscopic perceptions in Wire songs often managed to be closer to the fractured way we actually experience reality.

Lewis once talked of Wire’s quest for what he called the X Factor, “a kind of fear…something that you don’t understand.” The idea is close to Eno’s belief that art’s biological function is to expose the listener to disorientation. “What art does for you is that it constantly rehearses you for uncertainty,” Eno argued. Most reviewers, though, compared Wire’s enigmatic lyrics and nonlinear dream logic to Syd Barrett–era Pink Floyd rather than Eno’s solo albums. This was an easy link to make since Wire were signed to Harvest, EMI’s psychedelic/progressive imprint, whose founder Nick Mobbs had originally signed Floyd. “EMI thought Wire were gonna be part of a new psychedelia, the next Pink Floyd,” Newman says. “EMI saw us as the progressive element coming out of punk, with longevity and a more artistic approach, doing slower pieces with more depth and space in the sound, and different noises that weren’t just thrash, thrash, thrash.”

Wire really started living up to those expectations with their second album,
Chairs Missing.
The record saw Wire’s relationship with producer Mike Thorne (the EMI A&R man who’d originally recommended them to Harvest) deepen to the point where he became their very own Eno, shaping the overall sound by helping the group create unusual textures and effects.
Chairs Missing
reinvents psychedelia while preserving the group’s signature quality of monochrome minimalism. The guitars have an ultravivid gloss that almost feels wet to the ear’s touch. “French Film Blurred” is a vitreous shimmer. On “Being Sucked in Again” even the bass emits an unnatural glow, like fluorescent marble. Thorne had brought back a whole load of state-of-the-art effects units from the United States: MXR distortion, flangers, and new sound effects operating in what Thorne calls “the time domain, like delays and chorus pedals. The combination of delays with distortion sounded very exciting and different, so we just went full-tilt into that.” Says Newman, “The MXR unit provided this very clean and un-heavy-metal distortion. ‘I Am The Fly’ is literally that sound, like glass. On
Chairs Missing
we were just
streets
ahead when it came to guitar sounds.”