Continuing with our spotlight on Wire this week, today we’re serving up this remarkably dense performance of “A Touching Display” from 1979 at Rockpalast, which finds the band at arguably their artistic and creative late-70s peak. Granted, if you associate their “artistic and creative peak” with the notably foreboding sound that characterizes “A Touching Display”, you may find this performance particularly compelling. For this writer, “A Touching Display” has always represented the proverbial “bottom” of the journey into progressively darker and moodier territory Wire were exploring at the time, a sound they leaned into heavily on Chairs Missing, but almost entirely immersed themselves in on the equally brilliant 154. Wire had already practically invented post-punk at the time, but they also really flex their gothy noise-rock muscles here as well, and the results are delightfully unpleasant. Dig it:
