Vangro, you're right. I scan-read the first one of those new wiki entries where I saw a vertical column with "Lewis" in almost every entry and didn't notice the second column where the music credit is now separated by a wide space. The term 'song' seems a bit misleading on wiki pages, 'melody' or 'tune' would be much clearer. It's sad when this happens. Even the most egalitarian bands seem to end up in song-writing disputes. I loved the fact that Robert Wyatt would give whole song credits to other band members (at least to Hopper) in the early Soft Machine so that they would at least get some money.
Yes, but how many of those are examples of the songwriting lead singer not writing his lyrics? Elton John, but he's not exactly coming out of a rock band context.
To be fair, I think you were describing main song-writers not writing their own lyrics. You did not mention singers. Elton. Yes he was not a good choice on my part. I think it is down to the rock genre as you suggest. It's been noted before by song-book lovers that song-writing is not what it was. I surmised that for many rock bands the lyric is considered secondary to the music. So, often the band will not even have a writer who comes from a lyric/word-writing background performing lyric duties. Perhaps Newman sensibly recognised that Lewis/Gilbert were better at it than he, or perhaps he was not interested in that side of things at the time. Also, I seem to remember in one of Neate's two Wire books that Newman was assigned singer-duties as the band felt that he was better suited to it than they.
Newman has often spoken of his disinterest in lyrics - he called lyrics just noises you make with your mouth - no explanation though for why his lyrics are often so good!
Read & Burn 03 (Pinkflag, Nov. 2007) 1. 23 Years Too Late 2. Our Time 3. No Warning Given 4. Desert Driving Written and performed by Wire, recorded and mixed by Colin Newman
I didn't hear Read & Burn 3 until a while after it was released because I'd basically broken up with then-current Wire over the Send material. This is far from the greatest thing they ever did, but it's definitely a step up from the first two Read & Burns, and a step in the right direction. I like "23 Years Too Late" the most, even though it's way too long. Just a cool song with a cool atmosphere. I think it was years later when I read Neate's book and discovered Gilbert was on the way out and had no interest (and little to no input) with this release.
That was quite good: Today I found "The A List" and "The Black Session" for a fiver each. The last one, not easy to find thesedays. (OK, excluding Discogs, etc)
Read & Burn 03 is deserving of a more unique title/identity, but I get the reasoning for continuing the series. Since Gilbert had some involvement in creating these songs, they wanted to clear the deck before pressing on. Aside from the chorus on "23 Years Too Late," I'm not hearing a lot that reminds me of Send. Initially this EP (and even Object 47) didn't leave a deep impression on me. It wasn't until Red Barked Tree was released that I started having second thoughts and wondered if I hadn't paid them a necessary amount of attention. I realized I hadn't. With R&B 03 Wire began a prolific and, more importantly, consistent flow of material. I sense a comfort and a balance with all of their post-Send recordings. It was while recently playing R&B 03 one night that I started to think about how glad I am to be along for the ride and it was also when I first considered doing a thread like this. One of the more surprising revelations in Neate's book was learning just how close the group came to splitting up again in the years between Send and R&B 03. What a loss that would have been.
I really marveled at "23 Years Too Late," which felt like Wire getting back to its artiness after a few years of their streamlined Pink Flag worship. (The back and forth between Graham and Colin and the slightly more electronic sound immediately feels akin to The First Letter.) And while I find the other tracks to be somewhat alluring, they aren't particularly textured or catchy in an immediate way - you have to listen several times to get their charms. I do like Read and Burn 03 but I find it conceptually a bit too far removed from the other EPs to share the name and not as strong on its own. It does play well as a bonus 12" with the Object 47 LP.
Read and Burn 3 shows the first tentative steps towards another excellent Wire, but apart from a handful of songs, I feel like they don't really hit their stride for several years. When I was compiling their non-album material last year I bundled it with the Strays EP (and a live 'Moreover' released on a charity compilation). There's not much else in the way of loose ends to mop up over the last twenty years, once you take Send Ultimate into account. Third Day and It's All in the Brochure fit together on a CD, and the "faster, louder mix" of 'Spent' I used as a bonus track for PF456REDUX. We should probably also mention Recycling Sherwood Forest (released as part of the band's Legal Bootleg series) among the studio recordings. It was a live recording that didn't turn out very well, so there was a lot of studio post-production to bring it up to scratch. Kind of like a latter day IBTABA.
Listen closely, especially during the "breakdowns." All the layers of sound weaving in and out. No Warning Given:
Same here, that's the best one I think. Everything on it is fantastic whereas some of the others are up and down; even Change Becomes Us has its longeurs. The new one is very consistent too, but also a bit monochromatic.
Hmm, I am perplexed. Not at the fact so many here dislike the Send-era material--fair enough--but a return to their earlier punk sound, "Pink Flag worship," etc.? The Read and Burn stuff doesn't sound even remotely like Pink Flag, or punk for that matter. It's got a kind of frenetic energy that is reminiscent of PF, but that's about it---it's a curiously inorganic mix of rock and roll energy and the digital composing/arranging techniques of the 80s. It rocks, but not in a way that to me sounds like a "return" to anything; it's a completely new phase in Wire's sound. I like the Send-era stuff, but it was a kind of dead end--the band had to find a new way forward, and this wasn't it. There's only so much of this kind of stuff you could do, so they were wise to do it and move on. Like Thoutah, I think they really hit a peak with 2015's Wire. The albums before that seem like warm-up stuff for that; much of it is good, but they were kind of groping around a little. Maybe putting the material together for Change Becomes Us showed them that they were developing a new and different aesthetic and inspired them to explore it to the fullest. (it would be nice for there to be some Newman material, but on the other hand there's nothing on Wire that should have been left off) Anyway I need to relisten to this stuff some more, this thread moves a little too quickly for me but I'll try to get up to date on all the Send stuff and perhaps comment some more. The short story is I like it and I think it's unique in their catalog and not in any sense a look back at Pink Flag.
That's how I prefer it as well. Vinyl brings out that nice phat low end of R&B03's sound and eliminates the harshness of the CD version.
Personally, I found Send inferior to the Read & Burn 01-2/456 Redux track listings, all of which are excellent, raw blasts, albeit improved by my edit extending "Agfers Of Kodack" to have 2 choruses instead of just one. Somehow the songs exclusive to Send weakened the overall impact.
I agree with this completely. Apart from often being fast, the music doesn't sound much like Pink Flag at all, or much like anything else the band had done. It's almost a synthesis of all the band's phases up to that point, turned up to eleven and delivered at a mile a minute. I love it (it kind of boggles my mind that a Wire fan wouldn't love the likes of 'Comet', 'I Don't Understand', 'The Art of Stopping', 'Trash / Treasure' or 'Spent') ,but it's very much a complete statement of what it is, with no real room for development as an aesthetic, even if the unique circumstances of its creation (Newman and Gilbert working together in that way) weren't unrepeatable. What the band has done since seems far more to me like a continuation of what they were doing at the end of their first two incarnations (i.e continuing on from 154 and from The First Letter), whereas Send was less about coherent development and more about applying a mixmaster to everything they'd done. Another thing I love about that album is how single-minded and thorough it is in pursuing its aesthetic. It's like the single version(s) of '12XU' were the proof of concept - how about this for a musical aesthetic? - and the band threw themselves into it wholeheartedly. Then stopped, and started again. It's all in the art, it's all in the art, it's all in the art of stopping.
Catching up: I always liked The First Letter for what it is, and it happens to use technology a lot more effectively than Manscape. Still miss Rob but it can't help but have Wire flavor with the other three in fine form. "Tailor Made" and "Big Glue Canal" stand out. I bypassed the first two Read & Burn EPs when they came out, and Send itself left me cold, but the Send Ultimate set really made me appreciate their rebirth - just hearing the volume and determination of that phase all in one place. "Trash/Treasure", "Nice Streets Above", "Spent"...lotta good stuff from those sessions. Read & Burn 03 is essential as both the last trace of Bruce's input and yet another band reset. "No Warning Given" is top drawer.
I can't speak for other people who made comparisons between the R&B/Send stuff and Pink Flag, but I wasn't trying to say they sounded identical; only that the R&B/Send stuff sounds very punk, and in that respect, seems like a return to their punk rock origins when they made Pink Flag. (And even though the music was written/arranged/recorded in a radically different way from Pink Flag, I don't think you'd necessarily know that with most tracks just by listening to them.) Of course, we could quibble about whether the R&B and Send stuff sounds punk, but that's going to be more subjective and probably isn't worth squabbling over. To me much of it sounds punk with an occasional dose of the thrash/punk/industrial hybrid of Ministry.
There's is an obvious and definite strong punk influence on the Read and Burn and Send material. I'm not sure why you can't hear it. I saw the band twice during this era (once before the album was out, and once after) and the only material they played beyond the new stuff was from Pink Flag. I mean, just look at the track listing for The Scottish Play: 10 tracks from the new era, and 4 from Pink Flag.
