POP

Wire
Chairs Missing
EMI 1978

Most musicians, like scientists, I suspect, aspire to stand on the shoulders of giants. And the middling hordes would probably be more than happy just to dangle from the giants' coattails. Not Wire though, they refused to pay homage to rock 'n roll's heroes. They had no interest in evolution, only revolution would do. And not since the Beatles has a group so thoroughly reinvented the 'beat combo' — two guitars, bass and drums. Their sound was stripped of all excess. The songs were short, angular, combining seemingly incompatible dreaminess and ferocity.

Chairs Missing is Wire's second album, preceded by the caustic Pink Flag and followed by the cerebral 154. The album title slyly refers both to the austere-looking photo of a table on the sleeve and the British slang for being mentally disturbed: "to have a few chairs missing from one's front room."

Some standout tracks include tense psychedelic "I Feel Mysterious Today" and forlorn droning "Used to" and the immortal "Outdoor Miner."

"Outdoor Miner" was the album's single and one of the weirdest songs ever to scrape the lower-reaches of the UK charts, it relates the travails of a common English garden pest — from the bug's perspective, erecting a wall of brittle guitars, and martial rhythms offset by a jaunty melody and vocal harmonies. The song is vastly influential, spawning the entire subgenre of 'dreampop.' And last year a compilation entitled Houseguest's Wish (Words-on-Music Records) featured 20 different groups' varied interpretations of that single 1:44 song.

— Abe Konigsberg

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BOOK

PERSUASION
Jane Austen
Penguin, 1998 (first published in 1818)

Persuasion, Jane Austen's last completed novel (published a year after her death), is considered by many to be her most mature. Compared to the lightness of her earlier novels, Persuasion is certainly a more subdued affair. The main character, Anne Elliot, is older and wiser than either Elizabeth Bennett or Emma Woodhouse, and unmarried at 29, she's considered on the shelf by the standards of the time.

Eight years before, she and a young sailor named Frederick Wentworth were in love. Frederick had nothing to recommend him but his ambition, and for Anne's rank-obsessed family, that just wasn't good enough. Anne was persuaded by her mother-figure Lady Russell to end the engagement. When we meet her she's living an unhappy existence en famille. When Captain Wentworth reappears on the scene, rich from his naval exploits and looking for a wife, it's clear the old wounds are far from healed.

Ms Austen uses the book's maturity to deliver some wise reflections on many subjects, including women's lack of liberty — many of Persuasion's female characters languish in melancholy, silliness, illness or hypochondria as a result. Speaking to Captain Wentworth's friend Captain Harville about fidelity, Anne opines:

"We certainly do not forget you as soon as you forget us. It is, perhaps, our fate rather than our merit. We cannot help ourselves. We live at home, quiet, confined, and our feelings prey upon us. You are forced on exertion. You have always a profession, pursuits, business of some sort or other, to take you back into the world immediately..."

Living in a small cottage with her mother and sister on the grounds of her rich brother's estate, Ms Austen, 40 and dying of Addison's disease, seems to be writing from the heart.

— Toss Taylor

You might also like: Jane Austen's Sense and Sensibility

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