Wire are set to reissue their 1981 live album Document And Witness on August 18 via the band’s Pink Flag label. The record, which marked the end of the band’s first period, famously took a notorious 1980 concert at London’s Electric Ballroom, which saw the band going in for some Dadaist onstage experimentation in front of a hostile audience, as its main source material. As the album’s annotated track listing explains, the show, which had developed from the band’s residency at the Jeannetta Cochrane Theatre four months earlier, involved, "an individual beating a gas cooker with a hammer, a woman pulling two bound men across the stage, an illuminated goose and massed percussionists sporting newspaper headdresses. One band member donned an exaggerated beekeeper’s veil, while others wore morris-dancing bells. Veering back and forth between the playful and the unsettling, this was a combination of performance art and absurdist farce, in more or less equal measure."
As well as the Electric Ballroom gig, Document And Witness also added some material from a standard set, recorded at the Notre Dame Hall in July 1979, as well as one track from a show in March of that year, when the band were supporting Roxy Music in Montreux. Now, all three of those gig recordings will be released as individual albums as part of Pink Flag’s ‘Legal Bootleg’ series, alongside an expanded version of Document And Witness, which includes singles, B-sides and previously unheard rehearsal recordings on double CD and vinyl. To whet appetites, listen ’12XU (Fragment)’ from the album below:
