Wire, WIRE On The Box: 1979

Despite their habit of extensive touring — their third album, 154, was named after the number of gigs they'd played in their brief existence — Wire's early records leaned very heavily on producer Mike Thorne's studio expertise and on arrangements that had little to do with the way they played their songs on stage. So this hour-long live performance from Valentine's Day, 1979, recorded for the German TV show Rockpalast and repeatedly bootlegged over the years, is a valuable addition to the band's discography.

In the late '70s, Wire's music was evolving so quickly that their albums couldn't capture every stylistic shift they made — only Pink Flag remains in the set here from their first album, and they're already playing eight songs from the not-yet-recorded 154. Without the keyboards and unsettling treatments of Thorne's production, some of their songs sound radically different, especially "Former Airline," a wobbling loop in its studio incarnation and a three-chord blitzkrieg here. The non-album single "A Question of Degree" hews closely to its roots in garage-rock (its title's similarity to the Balloon Farm's garage classic "A Question of Temperature" isn't accidental). It's also clear how dramatically different the four musicians 'aesthetics were: Colin Newman is the headlong punk rocker (he rockets through the show's opening number, "Another the Letter," in barely a minute, so fast that the audience takes a few seconds to react after it's ended), bassist Graham Lewis is his looming pop counter-force (crooning "Blessed State" as insouciantly as he can manage), Bruce Gilbert lobs in textural blurts of guitar as if they were grenades, and Robert Gotobed, as always, drums with a minimal, metronomic array of ticks and cracks. The band would fall apart for the first time barely a year later, but the internal stresses audible here are what kept them in motion.