More Duchamp than Pistols

gorse‘s David Gavan interviews Colin Newman from Wire.

Wire is a distorting mirror of the culture it finds itself in. The reason why it always has been and always will be a contemporary band is because we are only concerned with contemporary culture. We have no real interest in the past per se. But now you find yourself asking, ‘How do we reflect when there is no dominant culture?’ There isn’t really anything you can point to and say this is the music of now. And it’s been that way for a while. In the nineties it was really easy: whatever the latest street style was reflecting a dominant musical style, but that’s not really true any more, and everything’s come around and gone. We’re even back to classic drum ‘n’ bass now, with LTJ Bukem relaunching his label, and releasing stuff that sounds like nineties drum ‘n’ bass, only machine-tooled for the twenty first century. Sounds fantastic! But everything is like that, now. Trance music was light and fluffy in the nineties, now it’s excessively machine-tooled, and a couple of years ago, everyone was doing it. All the divas were singing on trance tunes, the music that nobody wanted! I find that fascinating, but at the same time, how do we define Americans with beards with group names with animals in them? Not really era-defining, is it?