The story
The Wire is a monthly magazine that specialises in a diverse spectrum of avant-garde and experimental music. A 1999 subscription flyer for the magazine advertised its subject matter as "non-mainstream" music. In the late 1980s and early 1990s The Wire transitioned from exclusive coverage of jazz to coverage of contemporary music in general, maintaining its prioritisation of the avant-garde. Since its founding in 1982, its monthly circulation has reportedly ranged from about 7,000 to about 20,000.
Within the American and British music journalism markets, The Wire was among a generation of music magazines launched in the 1980s. That decade also saw the debuts of The Face (1980), Kerrang! (1981), Maximumrocknroll (1982), Mixmag (1983), Alternative Press (1985), Spin (1985), Q (1986), Hip Hop Connection (1988) and The Source (1988), among others. According to writer Simon Warner, The Wire took on a level of "influence disproportionate to its niche readership" compared to other music magazines born in the 1980s, because "not only listeners but music makers and producers were drawn to its columns."
Most of these magazines, The Wire included, differentiated themselves by targeting a narrow segment of readers based on demographics and taste. This was commonly done, for example, by devoting coverage to specific musical subcultures as Kerrang! did with heavy metal or The Source with hip hop. Another industry trend was polarisation between two styles of writing: popular criticism for mass-market consumers versus intellectual criticism for underground music connoisseurs. The Wire was certainly positioned at the "highbrow" end of the industry—even if, as editor Tony Herrington said, the magazine preferred "intelligence to intellectualism". Its embrace of high-minded, literate criticism aligned it with publications such as New Statesman, a politics and culture magazine that started to publish pieces by rock journalists, and Melody Maker, which had hired a group of academically oriented new writers like Simon Reynolds who were influenced by post-structuralism. The Wire contrasted most sharply in approach with Q, which emphasised celebrity personalities and the classic-rock canon.
The Wire was among the major British music magazines of the 1990s, a decade that represented an overall peak for the print magazine industry before the next two decades brought the rise of digital journalism and a general decline in print readership. However, The Wire has held a steady circulation and remained in print even as other magazines that once sported much larger circulations have folded or become online-only titles. NME once sold 300,000 weekly copies at its peak in the 1970s, but by 2016 it only sold 20,000—the same number The Wire sold at that time—and in March 2018 NME ended its print edition altogether. The Wire was considered one of the most significant independently owned publications covering the musical underground in the 2000s, alongside Fact, Rock-A-Rolla, Dusted and innumerable blogs.
1982: Founding as a jazz magazine
The Wire debuted as a quarterly jazz magazine in the summer of 1982. The magazine was co-founded by jazz promoter Anthony Wood and journalist Chrissie Murray. Lacking office space, Wood and Murray prepared the first issues of the magazine from an Italian restaurant on St Martin's Lane. The staff sold copies of the first issue to concert-goers at a jazz festival in Knebworth and at the Camden Jazz Festival.
At that time, Germany was considered the cultural centre of jazz in Europe—especially European free jazz. There was greater cultural appreciation for jazz in Germany than in Britain and a greater volume of dedicated press coverage, even though the British jazz scene was actually larger. In an introductory essay explaining the magazine's editorial policy and scope, Wood wrote that The Wire intended to target the demographic of listeners under the age of 25, who he felt were poorly served by the state of jazz writing in Britain. The only other British jazz magazine in print at the time was Jazz Journal, which Wood criticised for its conservative approach: "the reverend gentlemen at Jazz Journal continue, at best, to admit only grudgingly that jazz has got beyond 1948; at worst, deny its current development." In addition, Wood noted, the British weekly magazine Melody Maker had by 1982 virtually abandoned jazz coverage.
The Wire would emphasise boundary-pushing musicians; at the outset, Wood declared that free jazz and free improvisation would "be given a loud enough voice to be heard above the dissenters who are still questioning the music's validity." The magazine was named after "The Wire", a composition by American jazz saxophonist Steve Lacy, whose "musical farsightedness" the magazine hoped to emulate. Twenty years later, Lacy's composition was used as the opening track of the box set The Wire 20 Years 1982–2002.
1983–84: Acquisition by the Namara Group
In 1984, Wood sold The Wire to Naim Attallah and it became part of the Namara Group. Attallah's other properties included Literary Review and Quartet Books. Wood announced the new owner, along with a switch from quarterly to monthly publishing, in the October 1984 issue.
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Reflecting on the early years as part of the Namara Group, Tony Herrington said:
I think they thought it would be good to have a magazine to support Quartet's jazz titles. We were in this horrible little office off Oxford Street and it was weird because you'd run into Richard Ingrams, Auberon Waugh and Joan Bakewell chatting on the stairs. There were always debs flitting about, Simon Ward's kids, Susannah York's kids. There was no money about, but the great thing was [Attallah] just let us get on with it.
Attallah's laissez-faire attitude and the magazine's editorial freedom contrasted with the state of other UK music magazines in the 1980s. Competition among weeklies like NME, Melody Maker and Sounds heightened in the 1980s, and these publications began to prioritise circulation, advertising and commercial appeal, which resulted in editorial constraint. The Wire did not impose significant editorial demands or stylistic revisions on its writers and, as such, it became an attractive publication for freelancers who had started their careers at UK weeklies during the post-punk era.
1985–1992: Expanding beyond jazz
Former NME staffer Richard Cook took over as editor in July 1985; by September, Wood's name was gone altogether from the masthead. Around this time there was a resurgence of interest in jazz among white British "hipsters"—a trend that lasted until the 1987 "Black Monday" market crash. As editor, Cook refurbished The Wire so it would seem stylish and appealing to the new wave of British jazz hipsters, but he increasingly steered the magazine toward a pluralistic, multi-genre approach. The Wire also began to develop a house style that tended toward the philosophical and cerebral, printing "articles peppered with references to Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, or Jacques Attali's monograph Noise."
Under Cook's editorial oversight, The Wire significantly broadened its coverage of music in genres other than jazz. He hired a new graphic design team and promoted longtime contributor Mark Sinker to assistant editor. The formerly jazz-focused magazine's covers in this period featured decidedly non-jazz artists like Michael Jackson, Prince, Philip Glass, John Lee Hooker and Van Morrison; meanwhile, articles published inside the magazine profiled a broad range of musicians, including Elvis Costello, Stravinsky, Mozart, Frank Zappa, Prokofiev, Bob Marley and Haydn.
Cook told Jazz Forum in 1991 that The Wire was "going into overdrive" with ambitions to expand its domestic and international sales. Estimating the magazine's monthly circulation at 15,000–20,000 copies, Cook said he hoped to reach 25,000. But his efforts to expand the magazine's circulation had mixed results. Chris Parker, the magazine's publisher between 1984 and 1989, said the changes did not make an "appreciable" increase in sales; in Parker's view, "for every would-be hip young thing we recruited to the readership, we lost a diehard jazz fan who just wished to know if Howard Riley or Stan Tracey had made another album and what it was like."
Regardless of Cook's impact on sales figures, several of his contemporaries acknowledged that he had made The Wire a more accessible publication. Scottish writer Brian Morton said "[u]nder Cook's editorship, The Wire evolved from a small, coterie magazine into a more broadly based music journal that covered mainstream jazz as well as the avant-garde, but one that also began moving into other areas of music: pop, soul, reggae, classical." John Fordham, the jazz critic for The Guardian, credited Cook with "transforming [The Wire's] content and design and opening out a specialised, sometimes uninviting publication" to a broader audience. British-Ghanaian writer Kodwo Eshun pointed to "Black Science Fiction", an essay by Sinker from the February 1992 issue, as a major influence on Afrofuturism, a term that was coined the following year.
1992–1994: Mark Sinker's editorship
In June 1992, Cook left The Wire for a position at PolyGram UK and was succeeded by Sinker. Cook's departure coincided with the magazine's 100th issue, an unannounced move that caught Sinker by surprise. Though he only served as editor for 18 months, Sinker took a bold editorial approach. During his brief tenure, few covers featured portraits of musicians, and instead often featured abstract photos of isolated objects, like a sofa or a toy robot. Sinker devoted issues to broad themes such as "Music and Censorship", "Music in the Realm of Bodily Desire" and "Music and the American Dream", and for these issues he commissioned multiple argumentative essays on those topics. In retrospect, he characterised his attitude as editor thusly:
Losing money? Threatened with closure? Ignore all that. Old punky rule-of-thumb (just now made up): the contradiction is the hook—don't bury it, flaunt it. NO FUTURE NO FUTURE NO FUTURE: treat every issue as if it's the last, and go for broke with the material you have. I wanted (he writes with ten-year hindsight) an alert, funny journal which cruised its readers, chafed and teased and englamoured and thrilled and hurt and baffled and fucked with them—a space for speculative playful malicious unfrightened imagination which when it vanished (any moment, we all thought) left a questing shadow behind the heart.
Sinker's vision—later characterised as "a thorny, quizzical, fanzine cum proto-Weblog"—clashed with then-publisher Adele Yaron's ideal of "a sleek and stylish urban music 'n' lifestyle monthly". Yaron fired Sinker when a potential buyer requested his removal as part of, in Sinker's words, the "bride price" for the deal.
While Sinker's stint as editor was brief and controversial, music writers have praised his editorial decisions in retrospect and highlighted his influence on the magazine's future directions. The French writer-musician Rubin Steiner considered the August 1993 issue with Björk on the cover to be a definitive turning point, signalling the start of constant changes in coverage that would follow, after which The Wire could no longer be considered a jazz magazine. The Guardian columnist Maggoty Lamb said Sinker's tenure was "visionary" and had laid the "foundation" for the magazine to become a "thriving institutional presence". At Pitchfork, Tom Ewing argued that the argumentative articles Sinker commissioned "weren't simply trying to shock or drive readers off—they achieved both—but were trying to build, as... Sinker put it, [a place] where people could 'have fun starting arguments,' ones that could co-exist within a comfort zone."
1994–1999: "Adventures in Modern Music"
After Sinker was sacked, Tony Herrington took over as editor starting with the March 1994 issue. Herrington had contributed to the magazine as a freelancer since the 1980s, but he had minimal experience as an editor and had only become a permanent staffer the year prior. Yaron left shortly afterward, and so Herrington assumed the position of publisher as well. By January 1995 the magazine adopted the new subtitle "Adventures in Modern Music", which it used continuously until 2012.
Two months after Herrington became editor, the magazine published an influential piece by Simon Reynolds in which he defined the parameters of the genre "post-rock". The genre and its associated artists became a focus for the magazine in the mid to late 1990s, along with electronica and nascent subgenres like illbient and glitch. Throughout the decade, Reynolds also contributed a series of essays on post-rave trends in UK dance music, covering jungle, drum 'n' bass, hardstep, neurofunk and 2-step garage. These essays culminated in his theorising of the "hardcore continuum": a diverse, ever-evolving tradition of electronic dance music that had diverged from American-born house and techno to become a distinctly British style.
The magazine launched its website, thewire.co.uk, in October 1997. By 1999, the magazine reportedly reached a monthly circulation of about 20,000 copies.
2000–present: Staff buyout and independent ownership
Rob Young became editor in March 2000. Later that year, the magazine's staff bought it from the Namara Group. When Herrington learned Naim Attallah was preparing for retirement and wanted to sell the magazine, he offered to buy it himself; Attallah replied "I know how much I pay you and you can't afford it." Herrington consulted with his fellow staffers, secured a loan and negotiated with Attallah for about six months. The six permanent members of the staff—Herrington, Young, Chris Bohn, Ben House, Anne Hilde Neset and Andy Tait—purchased the company on 21 December 2000 and announced the sale in the February 2001 issue. The magazine has been independently published since then.
In 2002, the magazine commemorated its 20th anniversary with a special issue, the publication of the book Undercurrents: The Hidden Wiring of Modern Music and a three-CD box set, The Wire 20 Years 1982–2002.
In the 2000s, The Wire devoted significant attention on the emerging genre of dubstep. Several musical genres were coined or first defined in the pages of The Wire in that decade, including microhouse, by Philip Sherburne, in 2001; New Weird America, by David Keenan, in 2003; and hypnagogic pop, also by Keenan, in 2009.
In 2007, The Wire reportedly sold about 17,500 copies per issue. A press release from the same year gave the magazine's monthly circulation as 20,000 copies, with 9,000 subscribers. In 2013, the magazine made available its entire archive—amounting to 25,000 pages at that time—to subscribers, via the site Exact Editions.
From Wikipedia’s article on The Wire (magazine), shared under CC BY-SA 4.0.4