Newsletter August 1999

This month, we spotlight a three-year relationship in Mike Thorne's early production progress. Thorne produced the seminal punk album, The Roxy London WC2 (Jan-Apr 77). At the time, this was the only club in London open to punk bands, the other more 'respectable' managements having banned the genre. Out of this unusual Top-20 chart visitor came a three-album stint working with Wire, delivering three extraordinary and ground-breaking albums which still generate interest and passion over 20 years later. In four long, revealing essays, Thorne describes the background to the making of these New Wave landmarks.

The Roxy London WC2 (Jan-Apr 77)
Pink Flag
Chairs Missing
154

You can listen to the complete Wire tracks from the Roxy in RealAudio and Liquid Audio. The original is not available on CD, but for copyright reasons we can't offer these for download.

All these four album covers are available in carefully processed print-quality resolution on the Downloads page.

Bruce Gilbert was the George Harrison of Wire. B.C. Gilbert, always the reserved and quiet presence, was often the glue that kept the group together. While Bruce has released six CDs of his own outside Wire (as well as the Dome collaborations with Graham Lewis, and the three-piece Wir created when Robert Gotobed the drummer left), he has pursued a wider-ranging course embracing installations and performance art. Mike Thorne interviewed him in his favorite London pub, the Golden Hart in Spitalfields. In the audio version, you can also hear them fixing the door and the landlady apologizing for the mess (we didn't mind).

For the benefit of all you scribes out there, we have assembled a Press Corner of high-resolution photos suitable for printing, accessible from our Downloads page. We continue to add to the Downloads page, and you will find all Thorne's essays on the Wire albums collected in one Word 6.0 file there, for your convenience if you wish to save and print in your own word processor. Also new to Downloads is the print-resolution set of seven Roxy Club color Xerox flyers, by Barry Jones from 1977. They're a little faded now, and probably too fragile to come out of the frames, but remain classic.

We also keep adding to the Radio page. Click on the playlist of your choice and you can kick back and hear ten tracks play continuously in RealAudio.