The Wire

The Wire is a British avant garde music magazine, founded in 1982 by jazz promoter Anthony Wood and journalist Chrissie Murray. The magazine initially concentrated on contemporary jazz and improvised music, but branched out in the early 1990s to various types of experimental music. Since then it has covered "post-rock" (a term coined by Simon Reynolds in the pages of The Wire), hip hop, modern classical, free improvisation, and various forms of electronic music.

Richard Cook succeeded Anthony Wood as editor, and was himself succeeded in June 1992 by Mark Sinker. After Sinker was sacked in early 1994 (though he continued as a contributor for some years), the magazine has been edited successively by Tony Herrington, Rob Young and Chris Bohn, who also writes under the name Biba Kopf.

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 numerous 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.