Artist: Wire
Label: Mute Records
Release: 1980
Document And Eyewitness is a live portrait of a band that was going through plenty of inner and outer turmoil at the time, and with it the convulsive bursts of creativity that had previously taken shape so successfully on three hugely respected studio records: Pink Flag (1977), Chairs Missing (1978) and 154 (1979). Even though Document doesn’t get the kind of praise the aforementioned trio does, its controversial content, which split Wire fans into two camps – those who dug (or still dig) this kind of sonic and visual manipulation and those who didn’t – makes it a cult item in its own way.
Wire were always on the other side of whatever it was. Right at the peak of punk’s boom, they outgrew it extremely fast, and soon got stuck with the post-punk label, which dropped them into an atmosphere ruled by Television and Pere Ubu. But even there, Wire loyally raced off in their own direction and stuck to it to the end. Just how radical that direction was might be best shown by the gig at the Electric Ballroom in 1980, where the so-called Dadaist cabaret pushed the boundaries of what counts as pleasant into entirely new territory. An escape into the absurd.
The original idea behind the show was to inspire the audience, but instead they ended up unsettled, irritated, even angry. The performance was so intense that the band stopped playing live and even recording for almost six years afterward. It’s a real shame none of these theatrical flashes of inspiration was captured on film, because over the years the importance of such material would no doubt have won over plenty of fans of rare and, in their own way, shocking footage of a rock & roll circus. An undeniable milestone for a band. A milestone of a tense period.
After all that, the gig recorded half a year earlier at Notre Dame Hall feels almost serene. With emphasis on almost serene. The only song included on Document from their Montreux appearance, when they supported Roxy Music (March 1979), Heartbeat, is also played in a similarly mellow manner.
After all this time, Document And Eyewitness remains, like most of Wire’s body of work, a pretty eclectic collection of music. Various genre labels and comparisons with other bands do try hard to make it look like a more marketable product, but Wire stay on the margins of mainstream taste. In the shadow of other, brighter, more polished, musically similar offshoots, Document sticks out like a sore thumb.
The songs Our Swimmer and Midnight Bahnhof Cafe, the only two studio tracks (recorded at Magritte studio) tacked onto the end of the album, try to some extent to steer this derailed train back onto the tracks of a softer sound, but after everything you can hear on the two main live parts, they don’t come anywhere near smoothing out those sharp edges.
Lineup
Colin Newman – Vocals, guitar
Graham Lewis – Bass, vocals
Robert Gotobed – Drums
Bruce Gilbert – Guitar
Production
Wire
Tracklist
NOTRE DAME HALL
1. Go Ahead
2. Ally in Exile
3. Relationship
4. Underwater Experiences
5. Witness to the Fact
6. 2 People in a Room
7. Our Swimmer
MONTREUX
8. Heartbeat
ELECTRIC BALLROOM
9. 5/10
10. 12XU (Fragment)
11. Underwater Experiences
12. Everythings Going To Be Nice
13. Piano Tuner (Keep Strumming Those Guitars)
14. We Meet Under Tables
15. Zegk Hoqp
16. Eastern Standard
17. Instrumental (thrown bottle)
18. Eels Sang Lino
19. Revealing Trade Secrets
20. And Then… Coda
MAGRITTE STUDIO
21. Our Swimmer
22. Midnight Bahnhof Cafe
Album length: 76:57
