The first major book on the post-punk legends! Wire were the seventies band who perhaps did more than any other to usher in the post-punk age. Author Paul Lester has interviewed the four original members of Wire - Colin Newman, Graham Lewis, Robert Gotobed and Bruce Gilbert - as well as many of their producers and collaborators. Charts the band's history from their days at Watford Art College through their abrasive encounters with punk audiences hostile to their groundbreaking material on albums like Pink Flag, Chairs Missing and 154. and their 2008 release Object 47. Those albums were to exert an enormous influence on subsequent generations of alternative rock musicians. To bands as diverse as Black Flag, Blur, R.E.M. and My Bloody Valentine, Wire's expansion of the sonic possibilities of rock proved highly significant. Lester has also followed the band's story as it expanded into a melee of break-ups, reformations, parallel projects and solo forays, culminating in their current status as a sort of British Velvet Underground: cultish and modest-selling but uncompromising and immeasurably influential.

Read & Burn is the first serious, in-depth appraisal of Wire, one of the most influential British bands to emerge during the punk era. If Wire were briefly a punk band, however, it was largely by historical accident. Despite the fact that they had complicated and transformed that category almost before they'd begun, they seem never to have quite escaped the label. Be it punk, post-punk, or art-punk, critics have clung onto the p-word in an attempt to capture the essence of Wire's innovative uniqueness. But their story - which honours punk's original yet quickly forgotten commitment to the new - is one of constant remaking and remodelling, one that stubbornly resists reduction to a single identity. As a result, the group's projects have always balanced uneasily between artistic endeavour and the need for commercial sustainability, played out against the backdrop of the musicians' perennially complex creative relationships. Tracing Wire's diverse output from 1977 up until the present, Read & Burn seeks to do justice to their highly influential and restlessly inventive body of work.

This study connects the idiosyncratic modernism of Wyndham Lewis, co-founder of the Vorticist art movement, with works of several artists from the British art rock tradition, among them Bryan Ferry, David Bowie, art-punk pioneers Wire and electronic pop musician John Foxx. By taking a transdisciplinary and intermedial approach to texts from two fields normally studied in isolation and staking out the elements of a shared modernist ethos, the book presents a new perspective on both fields relevant to scholars of literature, popular culture, and the visual arts alike. While the book rests on sound research from the fields of literary criticism, art history, and pop theory, the structure and writing of the book is fundamentally designed to be accessible and comprehensible to non-scholarly readers.

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