Chairs Missing

Wire’s first three albums need no introduction. They are the three classic albums on which Wire’s reputation is based. Moreover, they are the recordings that minted the post-punk form. This was adopted by other bands, but Wire were there first.

1978’s Chairs Missing represented perhaps the biggest conceptual leap made during this period of Wire and was widely misunderstood at the time yet it remains, to the band and production crew Wire’s favorite ’70s album. If Pink Flag proposed an almost cut and paste approach to deconstructing rock history, Chairs Missing proposed something more radical, a definite futurism with much less influence from it’s antecedents. Chairs Missing was at once more stark and more lush than it’s predecessor and has exerted it’s own influence on the course of cultural history, having laid down one of the earliest (if not the earliest) blueprints for the genuinely post-punk aesthetic.