From the same issue of Uncut:
On forming Wire:
(Wire) weren’t a punk group. We didn’t join up for that… We weren’t interested in doing rock’n’roll – that was the ’50s.. We were interested in making a piece of art, and that was the group. Bruce talked about it being a living sculpture.
As a sidebar to a pretty great review of Wire’s excellent new Red Barked Tree, Uncut does a mini interview with Colin Newman. We quote:
You made a big break with your older material when you reformed in the 1980s, didn’t you?
Newman: It was about context. Pop historians talk about “post-punk” but there was no such thing. What there was was pop. People were bored to death with punk rock: if you were more adventurous, you were getting into music from different countries. Bruce’s decision to re-invent the band wasn’t conceptually a bad idea, but we were misunderstood.
Tulip Frenzy