The iconic London Calling cover shot-- Paul Simonon smashing his white bass-- stems from frustration. Not frustration at The Man or over crusty, narrow-minded punks accusing The Clash of selling out, but frustration over the audience response. Simonon was upset that a crowd at New York City's Palladium was made to remain seated, effectively eliminating the crowd/band synergy The Clash had worked so hard to perfect. Opening bands know this feeling well, and it must be incredibly difficult to play a great show if the audience is having no visible reaction to your music.
Watching the DVD portion of Wire's Wire on the Box, I was struck by the band's energy and passion in the face of a very nearly inert crowd. In an hour-long set filmed for (then-West) Germany's "Rockpalast" television program, the band are tight, focused, even demented in their intensity at times, but partly because of the rules in the television studio: the tiny audience scarcely budges, and only claps politely between numbers. The audience is only four rows deep, and they're sitting on benches. Some audience members even look confused when the camera pans their faces between songs, as if they weren't sure what to expect from a Wire show. Then again, perhaps you can't hold that against them; Wire were a notoriously unpredictable live act in their heyday, and nine of the songs they played in this set hadn't yet been released at the time.
Those songs that were new in February 1979 eventually became the bulk of Wire's third album, 154. But even as the band demoed them for live European audiences that spring (opening for Roxy Music, no less), they sounded fully formed, differing only from their studio versions in density and texture. That Wire were already hitting audiences with new material hot on the heels of their 1978 sophomore opus Chairs Missing is indicative of the kind of band they were and always have been, i.e. never dwelling on the past and constantly evolving. That unrelenting flux is also what makes Wire on the Box an odd release in the band's catalog. It's the second live recording to be released from Wire's original phase, but the first one, 1981's Document & Eyewitness felt like another step forward for the band (if at times an utterly confounding one), whereas this one is uncharacteristically retrospect, a sort of "Greatest Hits Live" album.
That said, if Wire felt the need to throw fans a traditional archival bone, they certainly could have done a lot worse. The performance here is spot-on and the sound is spectacularly clear, though I'd argue that the vocals are mixed a tad too high, which distances them somewhat from the guitars. And the packaging conceit is a brilliant one that should be employed more often: the hour-long show is available to watch on DVD (along with a mumbly but informative 20-minute interview with the band), but also appears in its entirety on a separate CD so that it can be listened to as an album, without the video feed. That makes it a more versatile release, allowing you to enjoy the music on its own terms or to take in the spectacle of late-70s German television with the goofy prog-rock "Rockpalast" logo and seemingly arbitrary camerawork that quickly cuts from shots of all four band members to close-ups of Colin Newman's facial pores.
Newman is in brilliant voice for the set, shouting, yelping, and singing with ecstatic abandon. He and bassist Graham Lewis occasionally acknowledge their meager audience or give the title of a new song, but otherwise, the lackluster assortment in front of them might as well be in another time zone-- you'd think they were playing Wembley the way they confidently range across material from their early output, dishing out a killer take on the Pink Flag title track and a stunning, breathtaking version of Chairs Missing's "Heartbeat". They're clearly most content with the new material, though, ripping through 154 gems like "The 15th" and "Two People in a Room", as well as giving the full apocalyptic treatment to the epic noise wall "A Touching Display", on which Bruce Gilbert's processed bass sears a quasi-melody that I'd previously imagined to have come from a guitar.
More than anything else, this set highlights how singular and amazing Wire were at their peak. They could be flattening and catchy at once, and they were a visual oddity, with skinny-tied Newman and Lewis swirling wildly between drummer Robert Gotobed, who looks almost robotic, and Gilbert, who I swear never looks away from his guitar for all 58 minutes. And what makes the quality and ferocity of the show all the more impressive is the circumstances: How they mustered this much energy and focus for such a wallflower crowd I'll never know, but the end result is an excellent document of an essential band at the height of their powers.
