Wire - Chairs Missing

Happy birthday Cherd !

To say the last three years of the 70s were an important time for rock music would be an understatement. Before the punk movement’s crescendo had even started to ebb, a group of forward-thinking bands began breaking it apart and re-arranging its components into forms with far-reaching implications for what would come to be called alternative rock, and eventually indie rock. In quick succession, ‘77, ‘78, and ‘79 saw the release of post-punk classics like Television’s Marquee Moon, Talking Heads’ 77, More Songs About Buildings and Food, and Fear of Music, Wire’s Pink Flag, Chairs Missing, and 154, and Joy Division’s Unknown Pleasures. Of these records, none marked a more dramatic evolution in form and content than Wire’s 1978 masterpiece Chairs Missing.

The second most important release of the year—behind my own debut on April 30th, 1978—Chairs Missing was a shocking departure from Wire’s debut, Pink Flag. If one’s familiarity with the band begins with Pink Flag’s stripped-down-to-essentials punk rock, Chairs Missing would sound like a different band entirely. The songs are choppy and repetitive, but also lush and well-produced. There’s blatant experimentation from track to track, drawing from sub-genres available at the time while inventing others along the way. That said, if one were to become familiar with Chairs Missing and work backwards to Pink Flag, the clues are all there. Even with more straightforward song structures, Wire were creatively restless. The songs on Pink Flag are, as a whole, just smarter than the punk at the time.

Drilling down into Chairs Missing on a song-to-song level shows a band able to not just approximate, but master disparate offshoots of rock music. Berlin-Era Bowie would eventually become a fixture on much later Wire records, but the influence is already evident in the cold formalism of opener “Practice Makes Perfect.” Synths are employed to great effect on multiple songs, adding new wave jauntiness to “Another the Letter,” or, more often, a sense of foreboding to cuts like “Marooned,” drawing from early Pink Floyd. Easily the most memorable song, “I Am the Fly,” unfolds like some sort of post-modern pub sing-along or chanty, bawdy fun in sound, but disturbing in lyrical content: “I am the fly in the ointment, I can spread more disease than the fleas, Which nibble away at your window display, Yes, I am the fly in the ointment, I shake you down to say please, As you accept the next dose of disease.” Elsewhere, with the song “Mercy,” Wire practically invent the post-rock style reliant on huge cathartic releases that bands like Mogwai would make their bread and butter. This is followed immediately by the easy jangle pop of “Outdoor Miner,” which almost made the band a radio staple. Finally, showing that songs like “Ex Lion Tamer” from their debut were no fluke, Wire proved they could write a perfect punk song any time they wanted with “Sand in My Joints” and closer “Too Late.”

Talking Heads may have found much wider recognition, and Joy Division would be latched onto by every “angsty but smart” wannabe counterculture kid from the 80s onward, but Wire were the band that contributed the most measurable impact to post-punk and the subsequent musical movements it spawned. Chairs Missing is their defining statement. When considering favorite albums from my birth year, Stained Class by Judas Priest and Willie Nelson’s Stardust were in the running, but Chairs Missing is objectively more important.