Wire In Manchester

If change became Wire, then perhaps in reworking and recording songs that would very likely have appeared on a 1980 follow up to "154" they switched to a parallel dimension where their eponymous album was not their fifth album of the 21st century but their fifth album. It would then have been followed by all the other 21st century albums (Red Barked Trees, Object 47 and Send) and then their eighties/nineties albums. In some ways this sounds a more logical progression than except that the album titles "Send" and "Object 47" wouldn't make sense and in 1981 the whole lyric of "Blogging" would be prediction. Then again maybe in the dimension of CHANGE the internet developed earlier. Only in Manchester did I realise the song "Blogging" had been reminding me of "Echo Beach" by Martha and the Muffins so maybe in dimension CHANGE this was Wire's one big hit and that lots of people heard without ever hearing much else they recorded. The internet has however made any idea of linear progression in music old hat as almost any recorded music is easily available online and anyone can grab anything from anywhere. They could have done this before the internet was flooded with music, but it is a lot easier now. The way that Wire have taken a look at their past music and recycled and redeveloped past ideas has focused more on their earlier years and this has left much of the eighties music sounding more advanced and complex, perhaps overly so. This would reveal why "Silk Skin Paws" and "Drill" sound more ahead than anything else in their current set, as if these were not from the late eighties but were actually new songs for a future album. Of course they have almost certainly played these two songs more at gigs than any other songs in the current set, and both are played faster than the eighties recordings. Support band Pins wouldn't sound out of place in 1981, but I prefered singing along to Guided By Voices in Big Hands to listening to them again. In Manchester Wire played exactly the same set as in Leeds and Hebden Bridge but it was louder and had extra noodling between songs. "Harpooned" almost hit the overload of their prevoius Manchester gig at Gorilla, but the sound seemed to break up as if they soundman couldn't keep it together that far into the red. Colin Newman played a twelve string guitar on "Shifting" but not on any other songs. The old/new arrangement of "Used To" didn't sound so much like a song off "Pink Flag" than the little brother of "Pink Flag" itself. The highlights of this tour's set for me were Drill, Silk Skin Paws, Stealth of a Stork, Harpooned, Blessed State, Adore Your Island and Sleep-Walking. I enjoyed the previous tour more because I mostly liked the previous album's songs more and the soundman did a much better job.