At the Crossing Border festival I mentioned on Friday, we also saw Wire play in the Melkweg. It was the first time I'd seen them, and I only knew a bit of their late eighties material, which is quite restrained and almost poppy. So I was surprised to witness the middle-aged men pumping out agit-punk and jumping up and down (to be fair only one was jumping: I think it might have been Colin Newman, but couldn't be sure).
After the performance, Tim went to the bar, where the gent next to him started to tell him how great Wire had been. Tim nodded and concurred, but the gent wasn't stopping there. On and on he went about how Wire had been such a big part of his youth, how their importance and influence was not fully recognised. Gradually the penny began to drop that he thought Tim was in Wire. To be fair, he did at the time bear a resemblance to at least one of them (though I have to mention that he's younger — marginally).
A month or two later, Tim gave me this CD for Christmas, telling me how important and influential it was. Allmusic gives it 5 out of 5, and Pitchfork 10 out of 10. Those two reviews refer respectively to Eno-esque atmospherics and to Eno-inspired ambient experiments — but I'm just not hearing them. Hmmm. Perhaps you just had to be there in 1978.
The track I like most is Outdoor Miner because it's more melodic and poppy, and reminds me of one of their songs from a decade later, while, if you close your eyes, Used To could be a song on one of the albums the Beta Band did two decades later.
MusicBrainz entry for this album
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