High-wire act

How do you top 25 years of pushing the envelope of contemporary rock? If you're Wire, you get Jake and Dinos Chapman to design your stage set. Fiona Sturges reports

In 1977, Andy Czezowski, the Roxy club impresario and all-too-brief manager of Wire, had a brainwave. The band – guitarists Colin Newman and Bruce Gilbert, bassist Graham Lewis and drummer Robert "Gotobed" Grey – had just completed Pink Flag, an exhilarating album that would influence generations of guitar bands. Czezowski proposed that the band appear on stage in pink leather trousers. "That was the day we sacked him," says Newman. "We all knew it was wrong. This band is very good at self-preservation. It knows what's good for it, and pink trousers aren't."

When I meet Newman and Gilbert, it is apparent that Wire's views on how to present themselves are as rigid as ever. Like so many of their late-Seventies contemporaries (Television, The Heartbreakers, The Ramones), Wire are considered icons and have remained contemporary through the music of their acolytes, from Husker Du and Sonic Youth to Elastica and The Strokes. But they have always looked forward, pushing at the envelope of pop. And their decision to play Pink Flag, a classic album, in its entirety at the Barbican in London later this month has been an agonising one.

"There's never seemed to be a good time to do it until now," says Newman. "During the Eighties music was always changing and people were discovering new production methods, most of which weren't based around four blokes playing guitars in a room. Then in the Nineties there was this appropriation of Wire into Britpop, which was a very good reason not to be dealing with old material. You can see the picture – the fresh young things saying, 'Here are the heroes we've just discovered', and the bunch of wrinkly blokes next to them. Who wants to be the old bloke in the photo?"

"It's always a matter of striking a balance," says Gilbert. "It's great that we mean something to younger people. In the end you have to ask yourself, 'Why are you avoiding it? What's wrong with playing the songs that made you famous?'"

Still, the band have added something to the mix and asked the designer Es Devlin and the conceptual artists Jake and Dinos Chapman to create a set for the Barbican show. "It was such an absurd concept that we couldn't resist," Newman says. "We've always hated the idea of raking over old territory, but with the Chapmans involved it's become this huge leap into the unknown."

Newman and Gilbert won't divulge the workings of the show, although I get the feeling that they're not completely clear on this themselves. "They're going to do what they're going to do, and we're going to do what we're going to do, and somehow we'll meet in the middle," says Gilbert.

Wire got their break when they were offered two nights at the Roxy in London. Two tracks, "Lowdown" and "12XU", appeared on the EMI punk compilation Live at the Roxy. The Watford quartet signed to EMI's Harvest subsidiary the same year (1977) and released Pink Flag. They were a band who appealed to those who liked a good book as much as an ear-splitting riff. They were inspired by punk, but their sound was more ambiguous. "It was a deconstruction, a piss-take of rock music," Graham Lewis says in Jon Savage's England's Dreaming.

"We came up on people's radar very fast without every really becoming famous," says Newman. "But people always took us very seriously. All of us had a very keen idea of how we would fit into the order of things. We looked at all these other bands stuck in the quagmire of punk and we wanted to be the future. How much of that was belief in the longevity of one's art and how much was simply young boys bubbling over with arrogance, I'm not sure."

Pink Flag,Chairs Missing and 154 were recorded during a burst of creativity that spanned 1977 to 1979. In 1980, however, the band went their separate ways. Newman had begun work on his solo album AZ (1980), while Gilbert and Lewis embarked on a series of collaborations under such names as Dome, Duet Emmo and He Said. Four years later Wire reconvened for a performance piece. They continued playing live and produced the Snakedrill EP and The Ideal Copy album. But in 1991, Grey left to take up organic farming in Leicestershire. The remaining trio renamed themselves Wir and produced another album, The First Letter, before calling it a day in 1992.

In the Nineties, Wire underwent a renaissance in the guise of Britpop. Elastica's 1994 single "Connection" contained an audacious steal from Wire's "Three Girl Rhumba". "It's launched ad campaigns, it's still all over the television," says Newman, still piqued. "It's irritating because I hated Britpop. Anybody who was anybody was listening to drum'n'bass back then."

Now Wire are into phase three of their career. Having come together for a one-off show in 2000, they have since put out two EPs, Read & Burn 01 and Read & Burn 02. Now they're releasing a new album, Send, which echoes their early compound of abrasive riffs and insistent vocals. "It was a long period between phase two and phase three," says Newman. "It's been impossible to trade on just being Wire. I think that's been important. You're back on the lowest rung. I like the idea of being a bit hungry and having to prove we can do it."

Wire perform in the Only Connect festival at the Barbican, London EC2 (020-7638 8891) on 26 April. 'Send' is released on 28 April on Pink Flag