For Record Store Day 2025, Wire will release a special double LP edition of Nine Sevens, a collection of their 7” singles first released in 2018, alongside WIR’s Vien +, an updated version of their 1996 release that has never been available on vinyl until now. These limited-edition releases brings together Wire’s early singles with more obscure later tracks, offering a comprehensive look at the band’s remarkable depth and evolution. Combining the run of early singles with more obscure later period tracks underlines the strength in depth that Wire had. This is pop art as art/pop and an exploration of the blank canvas of pop culture and how far that canvas can be stretched going from three minute constructs to ambient washes. The 7” single was always the ultimate artefact and statement with the A side being the band momentarily paused in time and distilled and freeze-framed into the forever with less than three minutes of electric sound. Perhaps the greatest pop band that you may never have heard of, Wire understood this implicitly. They somehow found the sweetest of spots between the post-punk’s short sharp shock shapeshifting, art prog’s defiant experimental and a disciplined pop touch that pushed the parameters of what a song could be. These “sevens” released from 1977 to the end of that decade signpost the band’s remarkable development from their brilliantly monochromatic early phase to the textured complexity of the almost psychedelic unzipping of their sound and vision. ‘In some ways the compilation of Nine Sevens onto a double album makes for quite a weird documentation of the band in this period. The first disc, to some extent, follows the script of a singles / greatest hits collection but the second one goes wildly off-piste and ends up somewhere quite far from where the collection started. A conventional Greatest Hits collection, besides being conceptually a bit tasteless would, if strictly based on charting singles, consist of only one song! A Best Of is subjective and somewhat pointless in the age of the Spotify playlist that anyone can make. The only thing really that these tracks have in common (besides being by Wire) is that they were released or destined to be released on 7” by Wire in the period 1977-1980. – Nine Sevens is both title & elevator pitch!’ Apart from giving the vital frontline of record stores a spring boost, the best thing about the annual Record Store Day is the chance to pick up beautifully packaged collections of key tracks and deep cuts from bands like Wire – and the abbreviated end of the band’s second chapter under the name of WIR. WIR had risen phoenix like from the ashes of the acclaimed UK post-punk band after drummer Robert Grey left in 1990 and were created to fulfil the final phase of Wire’s Mute Records contract. With a more sequence based sound, WIR saw the band breaking all their own rules by creating a new sparse electronic music with Graham Lewis singing most of the vocals and even cannibalising their own catalogue by sometimes sampling their own older material. WIR was, however, not a long-term project and besides completing their only album, The First Letter, their only other activities were a very small number of gigs and two multi-artist “conceptual happenings” under the name I Saw You. One of these was in Clapham in April 1992 on election night and the other in Vienna in Feb 1993. On tha Vienna trip, in addition to playing the gig, the band recorded a radio session for the Austrian nationa broadcaster ORF which was organised by Peter Rehberg – later the person behind MEGO & sadly no longer with us. This was released in 1996 by Touch on CD and consisted of two long tracks with a running time of almost 25 minutes. Once the short run of CDs had sold out, the rights technically fell to the band, and pinkflag released it – digital only – in 2007. It has never been released on vinyl before now. The remastered 2025 vinyl / CD / digital edition adds a newly recorded, Taylor Swift style re-recording of what is undoubtedly WIR’s most pop moment, the dark brooding shadows of “So and Slow.” The version released here is based on how the band played it live, so, in spite of being instantly recognizable, it does not follow the arrangement of any previously released version. Wire always understood the language of pop and also the artfulness of playing with it, deconstructing it and reassembling it into new and thrilling shapes. Decades later, these adventures into sound are like slices of delicious, perfect pop/noise and hits from a parallel universe.
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