Working against the normal: Biba Kopf in conversation with Evan Parker, The Wire 27, May 1986

Having previously muddied the jazz-rich waters of mid-1980s Wire with pieces on Boyd Rice and Einstürzende Neubauten (“Blixa Bargeld: a pair of bulging eyes on a stalk”), Biba Kopf steps out of his industrial (dis)comfort zone to interview seasoned improvisor Evan Parker. As a self professed newbie to the realm of free music arising from jazz traditions, Kopf is unafraid to ask the same basic, yet essential questions that readers might have – What is it for? How does it change? Where is left to go? – while giving Parker the chance to expound upon his fearsomely disciplined yet expansive approach to the saxophone. For all the knowledge that Wire writers bring to the page, the pair’s dialogue is a heartening reminder that you don’t always need to be an expert, just a listener.

Saturday night and Sunday morning: David Toop interviews Robert Wyatt and Alfreda Benge, The Wire 284, October 2007

One famously open-eared musician is Robert Wyatt: “I love pop music to death,” he says when Toop visits him at his Lincolnshire home to chat about the Comicopera album, before also expressing gratitude for how his parents instilled in him an appreciation of the kind of heavyweight culture that requires “a woolly and a handkerchief and a change of underwear”.

But the references to all the musicians, writers and painters whose art filters through Wyatt’s singularly pluralistic approach to record-making are only half the story here. What sets this encounter apart from other Wyatt interviews in The Wire’s archives is the presence of Benge, lyricist for many of his songs yet too rarely heard in her own voice. Her openness about their fraught relationship during the album’s making and Wyatt’s newfound sobriety add vital perspective to a record that tackles global stories on an intimate human scale.

Yankee Doodle Dandies: David Toop interviews Matmos, The Wire 235, September 2003

No doubt this was an easier assignment for Toop as it’s near impossible to get a bad quote out of Matmos. On top of Drew Daniel and MC Schmidt being witty, sharp, passionate yet self-deprecating interviewees, whichever project they’re currently promoting always has an interesting concept to yak around.

Here, as well as vastly increasing the number of neck ruffs to be found in The Wire, the pair discuss their 2003 album The Civil War, whose sample palette of pedal steel, psalteries and hurdy-gurdy offered anachronistic provocation to listeners who discovered them via 2001’s surgical-tooled A Chance To Cut Is A Chance To Cure. While the interview duly hits all the tried and tested Matmos buttons (rabbit pelts, backing Björk, the duo’s preference for rationing titbits of context) it also covers fascinating ground around nostalgia, American identity in the George W Bush era and how an object-first approach translates to actual acoustic instruments.

Nighttime world: Erik Davis interviews Pauline Anna Strom, The Wire 405, November 2017

Coming off the back of Trans-Millenia Music, the 2017 RVNG Intl compilation that introduced Strom’s visionary music to a wider audience, Erik Davis’s feature proved to be the Bay Area composer and synthesist’s first and last interview with The Wire before her death in 2020. Fiercely independent and deeply spiritual yet distancing herself from the Californian new age scene, Strom shares how the light and darkness of her music arises from detailed imaginings that are surprisingly visual given her blindness, before anticipating a reconnection with music making that would produce the posthumously released Angel Tears In Sunlight.

Ivy League days: Lucy O’Brien on the women of the UK’s dance band era, The Wire 114, August 1993

The early 1990s were a time when every magazine editor felt obliged to tackle the ‘issue’ of women in music, and The Wire duly tackled the topic in March 1992 with features on Laurie Anderson, Diamanda Galás and Barbara Thompson – albeit written by men. Then seemingly blindsided by the rise of Riot Grrrl, Björk and En Vogue, it rounded up some female writers and had another stab in August 1993. Björk may have rightly graced the cover, but Lucy O’Brien’s piece interviewing former members of Ivy Benson’s big band is a valuable record of another time when women stepped into the spotlight.

Britain’s all-female bands flourished in the 1940s while men were away fighting, but by the 1960s faced the challenge of changing tastes, having to perform Beatles songs alongside the standards. Leeds born Benson herself had died in May 1993 and O’Brien’s interviews with remaining players who learned their trade in her ranks preserves now lost voices from another era when women musicians had to transcend novelty status to prove their worth.

The missing link: Louise Gray interviews Annea Lockwood, The Wire 474, August 2023

A conversation that might have been focused upon individual grief at the ending through death of a relationship spanning nearly half a century, instead turns out to be filled with warmth and the possibilities of connection. Surveying the New Zealand born composer’s long career upon the release of Tête-À-Tête, an album of pieces created by, with and for her late partner Ruth Anderson, Gray moves from the intimacy of Anderson’s 1974 tape piece Conversations, capturing the early days of her and Lockwood’s love through phone calls, to Lockwood’s pivotal experiences at Darmstadt and her landmark glass and piano works, then towards an uncertain future, where listening is enmeshed with the fate of the planet. “It’s wonderful that sound does not have to be tied up with semantics to convey meaning,” Lockwood says, “its meanings seem to me to go deeper than words often do.”

Getting it together in the country: Matthew Ingram visits Hacker Farm HQ, The Wire 346, December 2012

Included in part as it’s so unusual to find any representation in the music press of the (approximate) spot in South West England where I grew up, beyond the occasional visit to PJ Harvey’s home patch. Like those pieces, Ingram has to avoid stumbling into cowpat-splattered Deepest West Country tropes when meeting DIY electronic collective Hacker Farm at their rural base outside Yeovil, but it’s a tough task when faced with milk churn sound systems, homebrewed scrumpy and tales of local witch covens. With further afield comrades IX Tab and Kemper Norton also featured, what emerges is a more nuanced picture of how being on the periphery – IX Tab’s Loki recalls trying to make acid house records when younger, having barely heard any – fosters the kind of resourcefulness and imagination found in the most vital scenes of any size.

The mask of sorrow: Hua Hsu interviews MF DOOM, The Wire 253, March 2005

Another cliche skilfully swerved. Where so many profiles promise to uncloak the man or woman behind the celebrity mask, for his profile of an artist infamous for hiding behind a literal mask Hua Hsu avoids the big reveal, instead presenting us first with Daniel Dumile, who mingles anonymously in crowds while his metal faced alter ego rests. Through Dumile’s origin story as half of hiphop trio KMD, the music industry damage and personal loss that prompted his years in obscurity and re-emergence as wisecracking pop culture surrealist MF DOOM, Hua Hsu contextualises the genesis of the unstable cast of characters – King Geedorah, Viktor Vaughn and DOOM himself – who shared that impassive mouthpiece. After Dumile’s tragically early death in 2020 and with the 20th anniversary of his and Madlib’s joint masterpiece Madvillainy imminent, there’s no better time to revisit this portrait of finding freedom and fluidity behind cast metal.

A stranger in the architecture: Brian Morton interviews Iannis Xenakis, The Wire 55, September 1988

Primal Architect: Ben Watson interviews Iannis Xenakis, The Wire 136, June 1995

Another reminder of how reputations can grow after death, these two interviews with one of the key figures of 20th century composition both come with a sense on the part of the authors that Xenakis was misunderstood and underappreciated within his lifetime. Deeply serious about his work yet more than willing to explain his creative philosophy, in these two encounters the former architect is frustrated by the acoustic inadequacies of concert halls, reflects upon the sonic lessons of his traumatic wartime experiences and faces the perennial question of whether you need to understand the maths to appreciate the music – the answer, reassuringly, is no.

Fables of reconstruction: Emily Bick interviews Laurie Anderson, The Wire 412, June 2018

Meeting The Wire to discuss a career retrospective book, it’s perhaps inevitable that this wide-roaming feature with Laurie Anderson touches upon the artist and musician’s longrunning fascinations: the power of storytelling, how technology shapes memory and the US’s self-appointed role as world Mom and Dad. But there’s as much looking forward as back: while the talk of cross border and remote performance is a portent of the Covid era, Anderson is also embracing virtual reality. With Trump in the White House and technology proving a false saviour, readers may feel a creeping dread of history repeating. Yet as always, Anderson is so full of energy and ideas – from the improvised text that accompanied her Kronos Quartet commission Landfall to virtual Japanese pots formed from users’ vocal sounds – that you’re left feeling there are few better guides to document our end days.

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