England’s Wire: ‘We Don’t Format Well’

When the seminal English punk-era band Wire re-emerged in 1986 following a several-year hiatus, it wasn’t really Wire.

It was, in fact, confessed singer-guitarist Colin Newman, a group named the Beat Combo.

The group consisted of the same four people who made up the original Wire. But they viewed what they were doing as so distinct from what they had done a decade earlier that they half-jokingly gave it a name of its own.

“When we resurfaced, we decided on a strategy, which was to play live once and take it from there,” Newman, 35, said recently, sitting in a Hollywood hotel room.

This experiment was in keeping with the band’s legacy, which began when Newman, Graham Lewis, Robert Gotobed and Bruce Gilbert decided to see if they could become a rock group despite the fact that none of them could play an instrument.

The result of the latest experiment was that Wire found itself winning fans of techno-pop bands like New Order and the Cure--the very groups that it had inspired. One notable appearance had the group opening for Depeche Mode last summer at the Rose Bowl, playing for thousands of teens who were likely unaware of how much the headliner owed Wire.

The irony is not lost on Newman, who explained that Wire was never actually intended to fit into a genre, but to reflect it.

“We’re a kind of funny distorting mirror of the times we live in,” he said. “That’s why we don’t format well.”

With its latest album, “It Begins to and Back Again,” Wire has turned the mirror on itself. In an effort to sum up this period of the band in a unique way, the group modified tapes of live performances from last year, turning old songs into new pieces.

“We didn’t want to do a straight live album,” Newman said. “We wanted to revise the idea of what we’re doing and move on from the Beat Combo.”

With the Beat Combo laid to rest, a new experiment is about to begin.

“The way we’re going to physically deal with that situation is go into a room full of machines in September with entirely new material that we haven’t played even in rehearsal,” he said. “When that is done we will figure out how we can do it live.”

But, Newman insisted, Wire’s goal remains the same: “The search for the perfect pop song continues.”