The Wire (magazine)
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- For other uses, see Wire (disambiguation).
The Wire is a British avant garde music magazine. It was founded in 1982 by jazz promoter Anthony Wood and journalist Chrissie Murray, and concentrated on contemporary jazz and improvised music. From about 1990 it branched out into covering left-field rock and "post-rock" (a term coined in the pages of The Wire), hip hop, modern classical, free improvisation and various forms of electronic music. It continues to cover all of these and other forms of experimental music.
A series of new music compilation CDs called The Wire Tapper has been given away with the magazine since 1997. The magazine has used the strapline "Adventures in Modern Music" since 1994. In addition to the Tapper CDs subscribers also receive label, country and festival samplers.
Apart from the hundreds of album reviews every month the magazine is known for features such as The Invisible Jukebox, an interview conducted by way of unknown tracks being played to an artist and The Primer, an indepth article on a genre or act. It also features the avant music scene of a particular city every issue. In addition to its musical focus, the magazine also likes to investigate cover art and mixed media artistic works.
Owned for many years by Naim Attallah's Namara Group, it was bought out by its six full-time members of staff in 2001 and is now published independently.
Since January 2003 The Wire has been presenting a weekly radio programme on the London community radio station Resonance FM which uses the magazine's strapline as its title and is hosted in turns by members of The Wire's staff.
