Wire's Unlistenable Break Up Concert

Wire: Everything's Going To Be Nice

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On February 29, 1980, after announcing the band and EMI were parting ways because of a "breakdown of communications", Wire performed a bizarre farewell show at London's Electric Ballroom. Apparently they weren't looking for a new record label because they played an all new set of under-rehearsed and virtually unlistenable songs while actors joined them on stage. 

During "Everything's Going To Be Nice", a woman dragged two men across the stage in an inflatable jet. For another song 12 people wearing newspapers as headdresses played percussion. One of the band members wore a beekeepers veil. Some members of the audience threw bottles at the stage, thus ending chapter one of this band's art-punk career. The show is captured on the album Document and Eyewitness.

Colin Newman told Rip It Up And Start Again author Simon Reynolds he expected more from EMI:

We assumed thus very rich record company would be excited by new ideas. We wanted to sell records, We were talking about video. We had an idea for "May Ref" --hugely expensive , but we could probably have been persuaded to so something a bit cheaper if there had been a budget. But EMI said "You can't sell music on television, we tried".

Producer Mike Thorne says EMI repeatedly turned down Wire side projects:

The head of EMI pit it quite succinctly. Something like "a record company is not an Arts Council." And to be fair , Wire had lost touch with the fact that  a large record company has to show a return on their investment.

Colin Newman would release a solo album later in the year but Wire wouldn't reform until 1985.