Wire

United Kingdom, 1976–now

English band formed in 1976 who treated punk as a constraint to compose against rather than a style to adopt. Pink Flag runs twenty-one songs in thirty-five minutes; by Chairs Missing they had abandoned the method entirely.

MusicRoots documents 6 artists who influenced Wire and 2 artists Wire influenced in turn. Every connection cites a published source.

Who influenced Wire?

• Ramones — Newman: 'You could list the Ramones as one of our influences, but we were never interested in just doing that genre.' Pink Flag takes the speed and the brevity and throws away the style.
• The Velvet Underground — What the band had been listening to before punk arrived, and what kept them from ever quite belonging to it.
• The Stooges — The other half of the 1976 listening — the noise, before it had been given a name and a uniform.
• Kraftwerk — What turned Pink Flag into Chairs Missing and 154 — the decision to build a song out of a pulse and a texture instead of a riff.
• Brian Eno — The studio as the instrument, and the idea that a treatment can be the point of a track rather than a coat of paint on it.
• Neu! — The motorik pulse Graham Lewis found at art college, running underneath the band's second and third albums.

Which artists did Wire influence?

• Franz Ferdinand — The angular half of the lineage — post-punk written as short, hard, deliberately shaped songs.
• Josef K — The other British half: short, hard, deliberately shaped songs played fast, with nothing left in that does not need to be there.